Pump Priming

When Tennessee Athletic Director Mike Hamilton decided to hire a new men’s basketball coach this spring, one of his first calls was to Dana Pump, a red-haired hoops junkie from the San Fernando Valley whose career peaked as a 5-foot-10 high school forward.

Along with his twin brother and partner, David -- together they are known simply as the Pumps -- Dana Pump has become an unlikely power broker in college athletics.

Two weeks after hiring the Pumps’ new firm, Champ Search, for $25,000, Tennessee made its choice: Bruce Pearl, the coveted coach of the moment after leading unheralded Wisconsin Milwaukee into the Sweet 16 of the NCAA tournament.

A Wisconsin Milwaukee official soon placed a call to Champ Search -- not to complain, but to hire the firm to help find a replacement. Loyola Marymount and New Mexico State also consulted the brothers for smaller fees before hiring coaches this year.

The Pumps’ emergence as well-paid middlemen reflects some of the new ways business is done in college basketball, where revenue has exploded over the last two decades -- and the Pumps, once the ultimate outsiders, have repeatedly found ways to turn their carefully cultivated ties to coaches into profits.

With Champ Search, they are seeking a niche in an established field led by such executive-search firms as Texas-based Eastman & Beaudine, which typically charge $25,000 to $50,000 to hunt for a coach.

“I saw other people doing this and making it their livelihood, and I said, ‘Why can’t we do that?’ ” Dana Pump said. “My BlackBerry has hundreds of coaches’ phone numbers. While schools are looking for a coach, they can’t contact them during the NCAA tournament, but Dana and David Pump can.”

The brothers -- identical 38-year-olds -- got their start at 16 by running day camps in Northridge Park. In the years since, they have prospered with a series of lucrative and often controversial ventures that have drawn the watchful gaze of the NCAA, wary of the brothers’ activity in the Final Four ticket market, their involvement with recruits and ties to Adidas.

The Pumps also had been in the business of providing colleges with opponents for exhibitions at a typical fee of $10,000 a game -- grossing millions with teams of former college players and fringe professionals before the NCAA ruled last year that major-college teams could no longer face non-collegiate squads.

Their new venture is one of their boldest: They are being paid to act as go-betweens and provide such services as background checks, even enlisting former NCAA president Cedric Dempsey as a consultant on the Tennessee search.

“The Pumps had the knowledge of the basketball world with their contacts, and with Ced being involved, it lent national credibility,” Tennessee’s Hamilton said.

Champ Search, co-founded with former California athletic director John Kasser, also includes former USC, Los Angeles Ram and Nevada Las Vegas football coach John Robinson in anticipation of expanding into the market for football coaches and athletic directors.

Colleges have employed search firms for years.

“There’s nothing contained in our bylaws that governs which companies an institution may or may not hire to assist with its coaching searches,” NCAA spokesman Kent Barrett said.

Several NCAA officials, some of whom had been unaware of Dempsey’s involvement, declined to comment. But some coaches and others question whether colleges need such services, and the Pumps’ involvement has raised eyebrows.

“The word ‘interesting’ comes to mind,” Connecticut men’s basketball Coach Jim Calhoun said. “It’s nothing against Dana and David -- I get along with them very welI -- but it seems to me if I were in an athletic director’s position, I think I would have a much better feel for who would fit in my coaching world, my academic world, my social world, the whole culture you have at the institution.”

Thomas K. Hearn Jr., president of Wake Forest and chairman of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, said the brothers’ interrelated businesses raise issues.

“Whether or not a school should hire such a group would be a function of exactly what it is they think they’re buying,” Hearn said.

“If in fact they think they’re hiring a search firm to help with the search, it doesn’t raise questions. If in fact they are also getting additional payments or other things, like shoe contracts, that raises questions. It’s the kind of thing that ought to be looked at closely and carefully.”

Shoe companies such as Nike and Adidas sign sponsorship deals with colleges sometimes worth millions of dollars a year in cash and equipment -- and pay big-name basketball and football coaches at those schools hundreds of thousands a year to represent them.

Tennessee, Champ Search’s most prominent client so far, recently signed a five-year, $19.3-million extension of its sponsorship deal with Adidas -- the same company that pays the Pumps six figures annually as consultants and sponsors their youth teams.

Daren Kalish, Adidas sports marketing manager for college and grass-roots basketball, said the Pumps make recommendations on sponsorship arrangements, but Adidas makes the decisions.

Dana Pump dismissed the shoe-affiliation issue, noting that Wisconsin Milwaukee players, for instance, wear Nike.

“Who cares if it’s a Nike school? I’ll do any school,” he said.

However, Dan Wetzel, author of the book “Sole Influence: Basketball, Corporate Greed and the Corruption of America’s Youth,” questioned the appropriateness of Tennessee’s paying Champ Search $25,000, citing the Pumps’ relationship with recruits on their Adidas-affiliated traveling teams.

Thaddeus Young, a high school player from Memphis who has been recruited by North Carolina, Duke and Tennessee, plays for one of the Pumps’ traveling teams, Memphis Pump ‘N’ Run, a team coached by Young’s father that receives gear and travel expenses from Adidas.

Whether or not Young commits to Tennessee, the arrangement constitutes an “implication or appearance of impropriety [that] shouldn’t be allowed,” Wetzel said.

The Pumps deny steering recruits toward particular schools. “That’s not smart business, and that’s unethical,” Dana Pump said. “I can’t get involved in where kids go to school.”

Coaches who once worried mostly about the brothers’ influence with players now cite broader concerns.

If a school seeking advice on a hire “calls a league commissioner, a former [athletic director], former coaches, retired coaches, that makes sense,” said a Division I head coach, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “When it changes is when money gets involved. If a school goes out and pays money to hire a group that has certain interests, it’s like fixing a race. It’s not a fair deal.”

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For years, relationships with coaches -- from the obscure to the celebrated -- were the strength of Double Pump Inc., the twins’ basketball organization.

With Champ Search, they have moved closer to the centers of power.

When the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a list of the 50 most powerful figures in college basketball to coincide with the Final Four last month, the Pumps were ranked 27th -- ahead of Calhoun, Arizona’s Lute Olson, Louisville’s Rick Pitino and retired legends John Wooden and Dean Smith.

The Pumps’ lofty ranking would have been unimaginable in 1984, when they were players with what they laughingly call “zero game” at Bel-Air Prep in West Hollywood, a small private school later attended by Monica Lewinsky and now known as Pacific Hills School. Their limited coaching experience is highlighted by jobs as summer camp counselors at USC and Dana’s stint as an assistant at L.A. Valley College in the 1980s.

Later, as organizers of youth tournaments and traveling teams starring prominent recruits, they built relationships with college coaches, parlaying those endeavors into a rich contract as Adidas consultants, serving as liaisons to coaches, players and teams from high school to the pros.

Yet another of the brothers’ profitable endeavors has been buying and reselling tickets for major sporting events -- a source of concern for the NCAA, long troubled by coaches and athletic directors’ selling Final Four tickets to scalpers.

Although there is no NCAA rule against school employees’ reselling their tickets, ticket privileges are revocable, and the National Assn. of Basketball Coaches requires coaches to sign an ethics pledge not to resell them.

Dempsey, who sought to curb the practice as NCAA president, said he agreed to work for Champ Search on the Tennessee job as a favor to Kasser, his longtime friend, only after questioning the brothers about their activity.

“I had conversations with them, and they indicated to me they were out of the Final Four before I agreed to do that,” Dempsey said.

Dana Pump called Dempsey’s account “pretty accurate.”

“I’ve kind of moved away from the Final Four ticket business,” he said, though he did not acknowledge buying tickets from coaches or athletic directors, saying only that he is in the “corporate hospitality business,” and declined to name his clients.

“You say ticket scalping. That’s not what corporate hospitality is about,” he said. “Whether it’s Kentucky Derby tickets, hotels rooms or speakers, I provide them for my clients. If my client needs a ticket, I go to a broker and get a ticket.”

Skeptics question whether the Pumps’ past dealings might be a factor in the schools they work for, or the coaches they recommend.

Like others, Jim Haney, executive director of the National Assn. of Basketball Coaches, said the Pumps told him they would no longer buy tickets. “I would expect as they entered into this headhunting firm that they saw the wisdom of giving up the [Final Four] ticket business,” he said.

College administrators who hire search firms say the benefits include confidentiality in an era when few established coaches want to be seen as candidates until an offer is virtually certain, and administrative support.

“You get tons of phone calls, and we could say, ‘Send your resume to them,’ ” said Wisconsin Milwaukee spokesman Kevin O’Connor. “It was not for them to pick who we would talk to, but as a clearinghouse to take a load off us here, with a real small staff.”

The school hired one of its former assistant coaches, Rob Jeter.

Other athletic directors want a sounding board.

Loyola Marymount, which uses Adidas gear and rents facilities to the Pumps each year for their “Best of the Summer” tournament for high school players, consulted the Pumps before hiring Arizona assistant Rodney Tention -- a coach Athletic Director Bill Husak said was on his list from the beginning.

“I’d throw out names and they’d give me phone numbers or what the impression of the person is in the basketball world,” Husak said. “I’d say, ‘Who should I look at?’ and they’d give me 10 names. They would give me pros or cons but never really pushed. I thought they were very professional. They weren’t agents for anybody.”

It’s hardly unprecedented for shoe company consultants to seek to influence coaching hires, but athletic directors haven’t always had to pay for the information.

UCLA, an Adidas client, received a list of names from Adidas representative Sonny Vaccaro when it searched for a coach in 2003, Bruin Athletic Director Dan Guerrero said. The list included Pittsburgh’s Ben Howland, who eventually got the job.

“Some of them were affiliated with Adidas and some with Nike,” Guerrero said. “You get a lot of lists from a lot of people.”

Vaccaro, who mentored the Pumps at Adidas before they had a falling-out and now works for Reebok, contends that Tennessee’s paying a search firm to select a coach “is preposterous.”

“Don’t tell me Tennessee needed someone to tell them Bruce Pearl was a qualified coach after this guy was the darling of America on TV,” Vaccaro said. “Twenty-five thousand? It’s like a gift,” he added.

Howland -- who credits Vaccaro with helping him get his previous job at Pittsburgh -- said he believes the Pumps are well-suited to the coaching-search business.

“All the years, all the networking contacts. They’re real go-getters,” said Howland, adding that he has hired assistants on the recommendation of the Pumps, among them current Bruin assistant Kerry Keating, a former Tennessee assistant.

The focal point of the Pumps’ network is the annual coaches’ retreat they hold in Southern California, in conjunction with a golf tournament to raise money for cancer treatment in memory of their father. It has drawn Calhoun, Wooden, Larry Brown, John Calipari, Denny Crum, Chuck Daly, Mike Dunleavy, George Karl, Bob Knight, Eddie Sutton and Jerry Tarkanian, among other college and NBA coaching stars.

Among this year’s scheduled speakers is Pearl, the new Tennessee coach.

With a $300 entry fee for the golf tournament and a $300-a-plate celebrity dinner and auction, the Harold Pump Foundation has donated $850,000 to cancer programs at Northridge Hospital Medical Center in the last five years, said Brian Hammel, president of the Northridge Hospital Foundation.

(Hammel, a former coach at Northern Illinois who hired the Pumps to work at USC camps when he was an assistant to George Raveling, applied for the job at the urging of the Pumps, members of the foundation board.)

With the coaches’ conference and fundraising event already a huge success, the Pumps added an athletic directors’ conference three years ago, providing networking and professional development seminars -- with an offer of free airfare.

“They’re very politically astute,” Howland said.

Lew Perkins of Kansas, Damon Evans of Georgia, Terry Don Phillips of Clemson and two former chairmen of the NCAA tournament selection committee, Terry Holland and C.M. Newton, have attended in the past -- and among last year’s participants were two athletic directors who hired Champ Search this year, Tennessee’s Hamilton and Loyola Marymount’s Husak.

The Pumps declined to say which athletic directors have accepted free airfare. Hearn, the Wake Forest president, described it as a delicate issue -- acceptable if the purpose is a charity event, but questionable if the purpose is to be courted for business ventures.

UCLA’s Guerrero once helped arrange a speaker for the athletic directors’ seminar.

“Champ Search is just another enterprise, another vehicle for the Pumps,” he said. “It’s another byproduct of their ingenuity and creativity.”

But some coaches, speaking on the condition of anonymity, expressed concern that their relationship with the twins might be a factor in their ability to get their next job.

A Division I coach, debating whether to attend this year’s event in August, studied the Pumps’ “Collegiate Business Conference” brochure.

“It says, ‘Don’t be left out,’ ” he said, “ ‘Meet your next hire, meet your next boss, make your next deal.’

“Let’s face it, they’re strong. I don’t know if it can help you, but I’m sure in some way it can hurt you if you don’t participate in these things.”