“He hands out water bottles and towels, cleans up the bench after timeouts,” head manager Shamus McNulty explained. “He knows what to do. He’s a seasoned veteran.”
A guard, cleaning up the bench after timeouts?
“Some walk-ons already feel like, ‘Okay, I’m a walk-on, why the hell do I got to give guys water now?’” guard Travon Woodall said. “But he checks his ego. He’s a team player. So if he’s got to give us water, towels — if he’s got to go to Krispy Kremes and get us some doughnuts, he’ll do it. He’s willing to do anything.”
And so how did Rivers go from striving to become Pitt’s head manager to checking into NCAA tournament games while also picking up discarded warm-ups? Well, he has the bloodlines: His father was a star at UC-Davis. He has the rsum: He was a two-year starter in high school in Phoenix and played against a number of big names, including the NBA’s Jerryd Bayless. But Rivers was 5-foot-10 in high school, wasn’t picked up by any AAU squads, and didn’t get a single basketball scholarship offer.
So when Pitt began recruiting him for academics — sending him constant letters, flying him and his parents to campus, offering a hefty academic scholarship package — he figured that was the move.
“I was over basketball, over AAU and all that, all the politics involved,” Rivers said this week. “I felt like I had a good high school career, played solid. I thought coaches would want to reward me, would want to pick me up. So I was like all right, maybe that’s a sign for me to pursue something else in my life.”
His uncle, an executive with Adidas’s basketball unit, helped Rivers get a job as a Pitt student manager: ferrying coaches to airports, setting up the film room, breaking down the gym after practice. At the same time, Rivers grew a few inches, and got serious in the weight room. He was also a regular at the school’s pick-up courts and in the intramural gym, where his teammates would see him play.
“He would dominate,” Pitt forward Gilbert Brown remembered. “I’m talking about 30, 40 points a game.”
“Whew, he was killing it,” said guard Ashton Gibbs, who began playing one-on-one with Rivers away from practice. “He was definitely doing his thing in intramurals.”
“He wasn’t out there trying to just jack everybody; he was playing team basketball,” Woodall said. “He probably was THE best player in intramurals, hands-down, but he was out there playing as a team player.”
And so, with the recommendation of teammates, and with some e-mails from his high school coach and his dad — who played collegiately against Pitt assistant Pat Sandle — Pitt Coach Jamie Dixon took on Rivers as a walk-on. Teammates described him as an incredible asset and a legitimate practice contributor, and even though Rivers is set to graduate this spring, coaches asked him to come back for a final season, so he’ll start working on an MBA.
Teammates have told him he could be logging major minutes for scores of mid-major programs, but they said they’re glad he slipped through the recruiting cracks.
“He’s a walk-on, but he still works harder than some guys that are on scholarship,” Woodall said. “He works out like he’s preparing for a championship.”
Rivers said his eventual goal is to become a collegiate athletic director. In the meantime, he has more basketball to play, and perhaps a few more towels and water bottles to pass out.
“It’s not humbling. I love doing it — anything I can do to help the team,” Rivers said. “I just love the game. I love basketball. I feel like it’s a part of me, like without basketball, there would be no me.”
Oh, and if you’re wondering, McNulty — his former fellow manager — insisted that Rivers’s personality hasn’t changed despite this fame, that he’s still the same guy who used to play pick-up games against the other managers.
“I can still guard him, though,” the head manager said. “He knows that.”
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