The Recruiting Process Has Led to College Basketball Parity

UNC and UCONN go to the NIT, Northern Iowa defeats Kansas, Butler plays for a national title. All of these things were part of the 2009/10 college basketball season. Across the board it seemed as if the disparity of talent between middle of the road division I schools and the top dogs is indeed closing. Why is that? I argue that it is the process by which the kids are recruited in the first place. Drive around your city and if you are my age you might remember when all the parks were full of kids playing basketball. When I was a kid back in the 20th century, we would play in the spring and summer til the moon came out. If your team lost a game and had to sit out, then you might have an hour wait to get to play again. That is not the case anymore. The spontaneous pickup basketball game that taught so many of us, including our President, valuable lessons not just about the sport but life, is fading and fading fast. If you go to the park these days, the only pickup games you are subject to find are old guys like me trying to relive their glory days. What happened? The growth of AAU and showcase basketball has made the game a much too organized affair. It has limited the influence of the high school playing experience and has led to a flawed player ranking system. This ranking system has one upside, it has helped bring about the parity we are now seeing in college basketball.

For the most talented or sometimes most affluent younger players, the recruiting process starts young without them really realizing it is happening. From time a player begins to show a talent for the game, sometimes as young as 11 or 12 years old, they enter into another realm of basketball. The AAU coaches are scouting them and recruiting them. I know of 12-U and 13-U AAU coaches who recruit middle school and YMCA leagues looking for their next star. The kids who are selected begin to be treated differently by their peers, they learn early on that there are many benefits to being a "basketball star". Once the showcase teams have these little projects, they have endless weekends of travel and tournaments and at least organized practice two to three times per week. Once the player reaches 14-15 they have to throw weight training, agility and jump training into their weekly mix. There is no time for pick up basketball, their basketball life is already organized. (Have you not wondered why so many kids can dunk a basketball these days? I grew up in Raleigh, NC and I am willing to bet that way back in 1983, my senior year of high school, there were less than 25 kids in the entire city that could dunk a ball. Now a kid is in the minority if he cannot dunk on many teams. Why is that? simple, the science has improved. The things available to these kids now to help them jump is mind boggling. Too bad I missed out.) School ball sometimes takes a backseat to this showcase basketball. Many players have been "made" on the showcase and AAU circuit. Likely NBA #1 draft pick John Wall is a prime example of this. He was an average high school player for his Raleigh public school but then blew up on the Spring/Summer AAU circuit the summer leading to his junior year. He transferred to a local private school and developed into one of the nation's top players. The problem comes in when a player is not the best player on his or her AAU team or even a starter in some cases. That player can easily fall through the cracks because the scouts never get to see them play. If you want a college coach to come watch a high school kid play these days and he is not on one of those top AAU teams, your coach better be proactive and calling the colleges personally or that player will likely not be seen. This is a shame because there are still many parts of the country that don't have great AAU set ups and the kids still are working hard and are very talented. The college programs that get out and find those unranked kids and those hidden gems are the ones that have a chance to be really successful. Look at St. Mary's this year, they went all the way to Australia to find their group of stars and it worked pretty darn well for them.

All of this organization has created big politics around the player rankings. Coaches have come to depend on a handful of experts around the country who travel around and watch young talent perform, then report back on what they saw. This evaluation starts young, real young in some cases. I never will forget when I had a parent come into my office with his two young sons wanting to come to my school to play for me. I was the high school coach and his oldest son was a great shooter so I was looking forward to getting him. However, all the Father wanted to talk about was his rising 5th grader who had just been to some ridiculous camp that had rated him the 4th best 5th grader in the country. I was shocked that anyone would even rate a 5th grader and even more dismayed that a parent would buy into that. However the kid did turn out to be pretty good, he was offered by several division I schools as a rising 9th grader. Still not a healthy system for younger players or the game. What happens is a love fest develops with the top talent among the scouting services. They write about these kids and make them 4 and 5 star level players, then all of the colleges start beating themselves up to get in the door to see them. You would be surprised to find how few of the high major colleges even look at kids anymore if they are not part of this ratings conglomerate. Three of the top companies for this are Rivals.com, Scout.com and ESPN. Not to take anything away from these organizations, they have great scouts who know the game, the problem is these scouts are usually watching the same kids week in and week out. The top teams go to the same tournaments. The kids they are watching are usually a packaged commodity that is showcased by their AAU coaches and teams. These young people travel the spring AAU and showcase circuit showing their wares each step of the way in an orchestrated, organized basketball road show. The people coaching these kids are many times not experienced or trained coaches. In many cases they are street agents or Dads who got tired of sitting on the couch watching. Therefore what you usually see in these contests are a bunch of athletes running wildly up and down the floor, jacking 3 point shots or trying to make some dazzling dunk. Guards get the most exposure because they keep the ball all the time. For a big man to show anything he has to get out and run rim to rim. If he gets it in the post and then tries to show he can kick it out and repost, 90% of the time he will never see the ball again. The idea of set offense with picks and cuts along with changing defenses and various traps is not the norm. It is my feeling that many times these scouts never get an idea of really how skilled or knowledgeable a player may be or whether they truly understand the game especially playing the game in a half court setting. The other thing that happens is it gets confusing. I think any basketball schmo can pick out the top 20 kids out of a group they see every weekend for months in a row. Where you are seeing the breakdown is in the #25 - #250 ranked players. It is my contention that there is very little difference in talent between #26 and #250 and the services themselves cannot seem to agree. I have seen players ranked as high as the top 40 by one service, then be ranked 200 or not even ranked by another service. This in turn means that when ,lets use Carolina as a hypothetical team, signs player #32 in his class, he really might not be as good or better than #232 who signed at a mid major such as Butler or Northern Iowa. If you are a mid major and you get 3-5 of these kids in the 150-300 range you might find you have as much talent or more than some high major teams. It is amazing how many great kids slip through the cracks because they were not on one of the elite AAU teams or did not play showcase or AAU ball at all. I see it all the time.

Case in point is Hassan Whiteside, a 7'0 freshman center out of Marshall University who is considered a top 10 pick in this year's NBA draft. Hassan had moved with his family from New Jersey down to Kings Mountain NC back in 2007. He was a little skinny but still stood over 6'10" at that point. I met Hassan while doing ratings for the Prep All Stars Camps based out of Charlotte, NC. This is a group that runs exposure camps for young athletes in hopes that colleges will take note of them. For those kids who are not considered "special" enough to be sponsored so they can afford to play for a top AAU team or are at a high school that is off the beaten path, these camps offer a great way for them to get some college attention. The top ranked players are usually much too busy in their orchestrated basketball lives for this kind of event. Granted, you usually get quite a few NCAA Division II and III level players at these gatherings, but the Prep All Star events have been so popular it is not unusual to see 5-10 NCAA D1 level prospects at one of their events. My job was to rate each player attending the camp then do a camp highlight report to be posted on the web. The kid that impressed me the most at that camp was Hassan. He was completely under the radar, no one knew about him. He was a little awkward and needed some strength, yet he was 6'10" and ran the floor like a gazelle and possessed a great reach. He seemed to have a knack for timing when it came to blocking shots. I remember ranting and raving about him to some of the camp staff there. They were not impressed. He did not play AAU for anyone, he was playing at a little private school called Hope Christian and they figured he probably didn't have any grades anyway. The general assessment was that he was a good Junior College candidate. I did not share that sentiment and rated him a mid to high major player. A few weeks later I got a call from a Marshall University assistant. He had seen Hassan play somewhere that weekend and like me, left the gym really impressed. He called me to get the kids contact info because he could not find the kid listed on any of the half dozen scouting reports his college had subscriptions for. No, he did not play on the top AAU team and the one he had been on was one that was loaded and showcased their "top" players. The kid never got to show his stuff on the AAU circuit. So the big services missed out on him. The rest is history, Hassan finished up his high schooling at Patterson Prep with the legendary coach Chris Chaney where he really blew up on the national scene. However he stayed true to the original school who had faith in him, Marshall and signed there. Now in a few months he is posed to become a millionaire.

What this means is that until the high majors start doing their homework and quit depending on other people to tell them who the top players in the world are, then you are going to keep seeing the Butlers, Northern Iowa's and St Mary's sneak up on them year in and year out.