15-Year-Old Attempts To Be New Coach At Georgia Tech

If Ethan Peikes really wished to replace Paul Hewitt as head basketball coach at Georgia Tech, he probably blew his plan in the first sentence of his application letter. It was as if he revealed he owned a career record of 25-125 and had never even watched the NCAA Tournament on TV, let alone coached a team into the field.

“Mr. Radakovich,” he wrote, “my name is Ethan Peikes and I am 15 years old.”

Yep, that pretty much finished him.

If the goal merely was to get Georgia Tech athletics director Dan Radakovich to finish reading the letter, though, Ethan couldn’t have started it off any better. Because if a 15-year-old is writing to a major-college athletic director and insisting he ought to be a college basketball head coach -- now -- well, it’s impossible not to be interested in the reason.

-- “My school’s basketball team has just wrapped up its season,” Peikes wrote. Showing he was available.

-- “While I believe that Hewitt did an enormous amount of good for the program, I understand the decision to let him go, and I feel that I can help to take the program to even higher excellence.” Showing he and Radakovich were on the same page.

-- "Publicly, this move would be scrutinized and laughed at. However, it would gain national, perhaps even global interest in your program." Showing there was a method, even if hiring him might constitute madness.

-- “Financially, this hiring will benefit you in the long term. As a minor, if my understanding of the law is correct, I cannot receive any pay until I am 18 years old. Of course, I am not interested in this job because of the money, but more for my love of the game.” Showing he maybe doesn’t understand child labor laws, but indicating his willingness to help with budget problems.

It was curious that Peikes chose Georgia Tech out of all the Division I that changed coaches this spring, including a few much closer to his home in Stamford, Conn.

He could have applied at Providence. He could have gone for the Fairfield job. That would have been an easy commute. He chose Tech partly because he always has followed the ACC -- his father attended Maryland, although Ethan promised “all other allegiances would be thrown away” if he got the Tech job.

Ethan did not choose Tech because the Jackets were obviously looking for a coach on the cheap.

“I was sort of just joking around about it with a friend at school. I started to think, ‘What’s the worst that could happen if I actually did send it?’ ” Peikes told Sporting News. “I think it was just sort of a random thought. I saw on SportsCenter that they fired Paul Hewitt, and I just went on it.”

Peikes takes mostly honors classes at Westhill High and played on the freshman basketball team, although he says he was not a star. He has coached youth league basketball. He said it would be “a dream of mine” to be a college coach, though he hasn’t gotten far enough along to begin considering how he might make that happen.

So he doesn’t yet picture himself as the next Josh Pastner, who was running AAU teams and a scouting service while still in high school. He hasn’t yet figured if he wants to be John Calipari, working his way through the camp circuit into a launching-pad position in one of the better programs.

“The athletics director told me I’m going to need a college degree. That’s something to work on,” Peikes said. “I don’t know exactly what the qualifications are. I should probably look into that. I’ve got to study the game more, learn more about the game.

“He was very kind, sent me a brief little note saying to come visit Georgia Tech in a few years.”

“I sort of knew the likelihood of me getting the job -- it was not a big chance.”

For now, Peikes is playing in spring AAU tournaments, including one this past month that took him to the Bronx. He is finishing up his freshman year at Westhill and looking forward to summer.

“I’m not positive if I’m quite qualified to be coaching a D-I team,” he admitted. “I think if I gave it my best shot, I think I could get some wins.”

Hey, he got an e-mail back from Radakovich.

He got this story written about him.

Kid must be doing something right.