It was cut-down day for the USA Basketball Pan American Games team, which was about to be composed of 14 of the top college basketball players in the country. The obstacle was paring the list down from 32 players – with the roster eventually sinking to 12.

Gone was Tennessee guard Chris Lofton, the Southeastern Conference Player of the Year last season.

Kansas backcourt mates Mario Chalmers and Sherron Collins – perhaps the finest duo in the country – were sent packing.

So, too, was Syracuse guard Eric Devendorf, second on the team in scoring in 2006-07.

Standing in the background watching this unfold was Orange guard Jake Presutti.

You can read that sentence again – that’s not a mistake.

Presutti was in the company of college basketball’s best. He wasn’t trying out for the team. Instead, he was one of three members of the United States’ support staff at the Pan American Game trials in Haverford, Pa., in July.

This was just one blip on Presutti’s summer itinerary, one that included stops as an instructor at basketball camps at Marquette, Duke, Florida, Maryland and Syracuse.

For those keeping score, between those five programs there are nine Final Four appearances and five national championships in this decade alone. And then national team tryouts, too.

‘It was a long summer,’ Presutti said in perhaps the understatement of the semester. He did have some leisure, though.

‘I took three days off,’ Presutti offered matter-of-factly.

Three days. Some summer vacation.

The truth is Presutti’s summer itinerary was precisely what he wanted. Presutti is trying to become a coach. He’s a senior walk-on on SU’s basketball team, starting as a manager in his freshman season and spending the past two seasons on the roster.

Presutti is a decent player. The average fan doesn’t attend practice so all they see of him is the occasional mop-up duty when Syracuse is blowing an opponent out or getting blown out. No one will confuse him with Eric Devendorf anytime soon, although if he showed up to play pick-up at Archbold, he’d likely stand out.

Yet Presutti isn’t fooling himself. He knows his career is not in playing basketball, but he has no doubt his career will involve basketball. Presutti has made a deliberate effort to engage with some of the top basketball minds.

‘At some point, he’s going to compete with someone else for a job,’ said Sean Ford, the assistant executive director for USA Basketball men’s programs. ‘When you graduate from school, it’s one thing to have an SU education. It’s another thing to have six or seven basketball camps on your resume, working with coaches, working with USA Basketball.

‘Those don’t come to you. You create them. When a coach looks at that, they know you have the initiative to go get that.’

But it’s not just that. The connections are important, too.

‘I had time to sit down with a coaching staff, and that made all the difference,’ Presutti said. ‘(Marquette coach Tom) Crean, we talk about motivating guys, how he gets his guys to follow him. When I talked to (Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski), I talked to him about how he gets respect from everyone. … I took a lot of notes.’

Presutti rattled off a dean’s list of head coaches and assistant coaches from around the country, names on the forefront of a college basketball fan’s consciousness when discussing coaches, and cited conversations he conducted with them about coaching.

It’s no different than an aspiring investor talking stocks with Warren Buffett or a general-to-be discussing war strategy with Patton.

He got each gig through connections he’s made, whether through the Syracuse staff, camps he attended or people he met. This summer created even more. His contact list would be a college basketball reporter’s dream.

If it were up to Presutti, though, he’d just as soon not even tap into his growing Rolodex.

‘I’d like to stay here as long as I can,’ Presutti said. ‘I’d love to help out (Syracuse head coach Jim) Boeheim and (assistant coach Mike) Hopkins as long as I can. Those are my guys, my mentors. I’d do anything for them.’

But there is only so much he can gather from being around the same people and the same place. That’s why the summer helped. Presutti saw different coaching styles and personalities at the different stops. He pointed out the laid-back atmosphere of Florida’s program. He saw how Villanova coach Jay Wright, who coached the Pan American team, is young enough at 45 to relate to his players. He identified the attitude of Marquette trying to establish a stronghold in the Big East as an up-and-coming program.

‘My knowledge of the game has grown just seeing different coaching philosophies,’ Presutti said.

Although he emphasized he was not there to spy on rivals’ trade secrets, Presutti said he didn’t talk strategy with Wright – partly because Wright had other things on his mind.

‘All he wanted to talk about was Big East scheduling,’ Presutti said with a laugh.

There are different routes to becoming a coach, one of which is going to graduate school and becoming a graduate assistant. That’s the path Presutti said he’s most likely to take.

Then it’s about clawing his way up the ladder until he’s the one making the decisions. Decisions like determining whether a player like Lofton or Chalmers or Devendorf should make a team.

‘I can’t imagine being in that position,’ Presutti said.

He should be careful. At this pace, it might come quicker than he thinks.

Zach Berman is the sports columnist at The Daily Orange, where his columns appear every Wednesday and select days throughout the semester. E-mail him at [email protected].

Published on September 18, 2007 at 12:00 pm