Young and impressionable
Posted on Sunday, June 29, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Sports/230002/
Fred Gulley had just finished the fourth grade when he was introduced to the world of big-time recruiting. Gulley and his AAU team, the Arkansas Hawks, were playing in a tournament at Raymond Junior High in Fayetteville when he saw Byron Boudreaux, an assistant coach for former Arkansas Razorbacks Coach Stan Heath, talking to some parents in the stands. Gulley didn’t think much about it until he read in a newspaper the next morning that Arkansas had offered him a basketball scholarship.
The backlash was immediate as news outlets, from the San Diego Union-Tribune to the Lexington (Ky. ) Herald Leader and The Sporting News, all pointed to Gulley’s situation as an example of how recruiting had gotten out of hand. It turned out the scholarship offer was little more than just some talk by an assistant coach, but the backlash didn’t exactly sink in with many college coaches, who continue to hand out nonbinding college scholarship offers to athletes who are
years away from completing their high school careers. In basketball and football, college coaches are not allowed to accept a commitment from a high school athlete until his senior year. College basketball coaches cannot take a national letter of intent from a high school player until Nov. 15 of the player’s senior year. Football coaches cannot do likewise until the spring signing period, which runs from early February until the first of April. It doesn’t stop them from offering, though. Little Rock Christian running back Michael Dyer had a scholarship offer from Arkansas shortly after being named the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Sophomore Offensive Player of the Year last season.
CBSsports. com recruiting analyst Tom Lemming said the top 10 sophomore football players in California this past season all have committed to colleges — even though they won’t graduate until the spring of 2010.
Scout. com, an online recruiting service, shows that eight of the top 15 basketball players in the nation have committed to schools for the class of 2010. The same service shows four basketball players in the class of 2011 already committed as well.
“They’ll start on freshmen pretty soon,” Lemming said. “I imagine it will go all the way to kids in the cradle because of genetics. They’ll have a letter of intent before the wife is pregnant.”
A GROWING TREND To put Gulley’s story into perspective, he eventually committed to a college program some seven years later when he gave an oral pledge to Oklahoma State earlier this month. Even that isn’t binding until Gulley signs a letter of intent in November. Still, coaches are handing out nonbinding offers to younger and younger athletes. University of Arkansas coaches reportedly have offered basketball scholarships to three members of the Arkansas Wings ’ 15-and-under AAU team.
Little Rock’s Aaron Ross, East Poinsett County’s Ky Madden and Jonesboro’s Hunter Mickelson have purportedly been told scholarships at Arkansas are ready and waiting when they graduate in 2011. Ross is the only one of the three who has orally committed to the Razorbacks.
Kentucky Coach Billy Gillispie reportedly offered a scholarship to Michael Avery, an eighth-grader in Lake Sherman, Calif. That offer drew the ire of many in the coaching and recruiting community, but the pressure to stay one step ahead of the pack proved too great.
Gillispie followed that up less than two months later by offering a scholarship to freshman Vinny Zollo of Greenfield, Ohio.
“It don’t make any sense to me,” said Al Flanigan, who has just completed his 13 th season as the high school coach at Little Rock Parkview. “Some people think they can evaluate kids that far out. There’s no way you can really predict what will happen to a 14-year-old. Let him enjoy his high school. Come around his junior year.”
Drawing such attention from college coaches at such an early age certainly isn’t a new phenomenon.
In 1994, sophomore Schea Cotton of Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, Calif., was featured in a Sports Illustrated article. Damon Bailey of Bedford, Ind., also was mentioned in the best-selling book A Season on the Brink after former Indiana Coach Bob Knight talked to Bailey — then in the eighth grade — in 1986.
At the time, Knight said Bailey was “better than any guard we have right now. I don’t mean potentially better, I mean better today.” WHEN AN OFFER ISN’T AN OFFER
The rules surrounding the recruitment of junior high athletes are tricky at best.
College coaches are barred from having “official contact” with prospects before July 1 after their junior year of high school. Official contact, according to NCAA regulations, is any off-campus, in-person contact between a coach and a prospect or a prospect’s family.
The catch is, an athlete is not considered a prospect until he begins his ninth-grade year. Also, telephone calls can be made to basketball prospects on or after June 15 of a prospect’s sophomore year because they are not considered official contact.
The contact and offers to Ross, Madden and Mickelson are all within NCAA rules because they occurred at a basketball camp, which also isn’t considered official contact by the NCAA.
Regardless, a high school basketball player still cannot sign a national letter of intent — the only binding document — until mid-November of his senior year. That means any agreement or offer extended or accepted before that date is nonbinding.
It doesn’t stop athletes from thinking it’s official, though.
“In their minds it’s legitimate, even though it’s not,” NCAA President Myles Brand said. “It’s manipulative of the young man and his family. Of course, the young man and the family are also taking advantage of the situation. The coach could change his mind, the coach could change entirely. People who planned on going to the university could be in a lurch.
“ It’s just not right.”
The National Association of Basketball Coaches, whose president is Minnesota Coach Tubby Smith, formerly the coach at Kentucky, released a statement this month discouraging the practice of offering scholarships to eighth- and ninth-graders.
“If the current rules state coaches cannot offer scholarships or accept commitments from students earlier than June 15 following the conclusion of the sophomore year, it certainly makes sense that this should apply to anyone in lower grades,” the NABC said.
Brand was pleased to see college coaches taking a stand.
“I applaud the NABC for taking this step,” Brand said. “Nothing substitutes for working themselves toward making basketball and coaching better. I think it takes moves like this to improve the sport and the perception.”
Smith agreed perception is a large problem for coaches today. “My biggest concern is that we’re in a lot of fights about the perception and image of college basketball, the perception of coaches trying to look to get an edge,” Smith said. “In our society, that’s part of it.” Brand said the move by the NABC was a good first step, but coaches have to take the advice to heart or more action will be necessary. “If this practice continues to take place, I imagine there are a number of people — myself included — who would see legislation as the next step,” Brand said.
TRICKY BUSINESS Another former SEC basketball coach has his own reasons for not wanting to recruit athletes before their junior year, and it has nothing to do with NCAA legislation or the NABC.
Arkansas State Coach John Brady, who coached at LSU from 1997-2008, simply isn’t convinced a coach can get an accurate read on a player’s ability at such a young age.
“I don’t know if all those [other coaches ] are just better than me or smarter than me or what, but I think it’s very difficult to say what a young man in the eighth- or ninth-grade year is going to be able to do in four years,” Brady said.
He also said offering scholarships to freshmen and sophomores is shortsighted, limiting the number of scholarships available closer to signing date.
“I think there are a lot of good basketball players out there,” Brady said. “You’re hoping that he develops into what they think he can be. For every one that commits early, that’s one more out there that you can’t get.
“ Sometimes the guy who is patient is the guy who gets the better player.”
The evaluation of talent isn’t the only issue with offering scholarships to young players.
“I guess I’m from the old school,” said Nolan Richardson, the former Arkansas Razorbacks basketball coach. “I feel as they [recruits ] get younger, there’s more chances of trouble taking place as opposed to something good happening.”
Richardson said he thinks there is little to be gained by extending a nonbinding scholarship offer to an athlete in the ninth or 10 th grade.
“How is a student-athlete who is focusing on being a big-time college basketball player going to be able to focus on schoolwork or his high school team,” Richardson asked.
Ron Crawford, who is on the AAU national board and coaches in the Wings AAU organization, also said he believes offering a scholarship to an eighth- or ninth-grader takes away a large part of the player’s incentive to get better. “The dream of a high-school athlete is playing at that Division I level,” Crawford said. “If a coach comes in and says, ‘We want you right now,’ what motivation does that young man have to get better ? “ If I had my way about it, I wouldn’t see offers in the ninth grade or the eighth grade.” UNDERSTANDING THE GAME
Ross was practicing with his junior high team in 2006 when his coach presented him with a letter from the University of Arkansas.
“I was pumped,” Ross said. “My coach brought me into his office after practice and handed me the letter. When I saw who it was from, I just started jumping up and down. I was just so excited.”
It was little surprise, then, when Ross took Arkansas up on its scholarship offer this summer.
Madden, whose cousin is former Arkansas wide receiver Marcus Monk, was offered a scholarship by the Razorbacks earlier this summer. Madden’s sister Jordan has accepted a scholarship offer from Baylor. Ky has also received a scholarship offer from Baylor.
NCAA rules prohibit Arkansas Coach John Pelphrey from disclosing whom he has or has not offered a scholarship to, but Pelphrey said he thinks the recruiting process is an individual thing.
“It’s interesting because I think that the recruiting is so much broader than it ever has been,” Pelphrey said. “All of us, I know from my standpoint, want to make sure we do a real good job in our state. You see some programs right now taking some commitments from kids in their home state, that really doesn’t surprise me.”
Madden and Ross say they’ve talked to coaches from only a couple of schools. Part of that, though, boils down to their naivete concerning the process.
“They have been contacted by way more schools than that,” said Tim Loring, the Wings’ 15-and-under coach and national director of Youth Sports America in Maumelle. “That’s the thing about these kids, they have no idea of how good they are or how many people are interested in them.”
GET ON THEM EARLY Many point to recruiting services as a big part of the problem. These services evaluate younger and younger players, often raising expectations at an early age when players aren’t close to maturing mentally and physically. That draws the attention of some college coaches, but Brady wonders why stock is put into the services at all. “It’s not coaches that are putting these labels on these kids,” Brady said. “It’s guys that are out of a different profession than coaching. It’s anchored by people that are not coaching. I think some of the hype that is created is superficial and not based on a real evaluation of these kids.” Brady admits some of his view is based on where he is now.
When Brady coached at LSU, where he took his team to the NCAA Tournament four times in seven years, including a trip to the Final Four in 2006, he said there was temptation to offer scholarships to players at an earlier age.
“We got a commitment from a 10 th-grader at LSU one time, and he shows exactly what the problem with that policy is because he’s now decommitted because there’s been a coaching change,” Brady said.
Richardson said toward the end of his coaching career he became disenchanted with the whole recruiting process. “My last four or five years coaching, I couldn’t even talk to high school coaches anymore,” Richardson said. “Guys with no degree, we were calling Coach. When you go to a gymnasium, you might see 18, 000 fans, there might be 18, 000 coaches. “ The word ‘coach’ is losing the battle of the word I call ‘coach’ — an educator, someone who has gone through the mills and the battles of coaching. They no longer have control.”
SCOUTING YOUNGSTERS The trend of recruiting younger and younger athletes in football isn’t as prevalent, in part because it is harder to project the course of a 14- or 15-year-old football player.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
“It’s a definite fact. The better athletes are being heavily pursued earlier than they ever have been,” said Allen Wallace, a recruiting analyst for SuperPrep. “There’s also a lot of promoting by these athletes. There’s a giant amount of pressure on programs nationwide to lock up the best kids earlier. If the schools don’t offer soon, they run the risk of not getting kids that they otherwise could.”
Arkansas Coach Bobby Petrino said while he isn’t a big fan of offering early, in this day and age, it’s part of the game.
“I don’t like it. It is a trend, and it is because they’re reading people on the Internet,” Petrino said. “The thing that coaches have is offering early. You have to offer early just to get into the game.
“ We’re having to offer more guys because of Internet recruiting. That’s basically it.”
Petrino was one of three SEC coaches who voted against a recommendation to institute an early signing period for college football similar to the one that college basketball has. The recommendation to SEC athletic directors and college presidents passed 9-3, but the presidents and athletic directors voted not to pursue the proposal.
Currently, a football player cannot sign a national letter of intent until the regular signing period between early February and April 1 of his senior year.
Houston Nutt, the former Arkansas coach who is now at Ole Miss, is among those who also think it’s a dangerous progression.
“It’s been my complaint since day one. It’s always faster and faster,” Nutt said. “It’s going to continue until one of them has a bad experience. It’s just the world that we’re in.”
Athletes might commit early, get to the university and find out it’s not what they signed up for. Or, an early commitment might find out a commitment doesn’t stop others from pursuing him anyway.
Nutt voted for the early signing period.
“It’s for the guy that’s already been to your camp three or four times since the ninth grade,” Nutt said. “It’s the guy that’s already been to your games and knows exactly what he wants to do. It’s one less guy that you have to worry about somebody turning him.”
Like basketball, the possibility always exists that a football player might peak physically as a ninth- or 10 th-grader and never develop into a college player. He might also get so caught up in his hype that he loses focus on his academics and isn’t eligible to receive a college scholarship.
None of that, however, is what disturbs former Razorbacks Coach Ken Hatfield the most.
“I’ve always thought that we ought to allow a high school kid to be a high school kid as long as possible,” Hatfield said. “By coming in and telling a young man that he’s ready for college now, you’re forever changing that kid. Now, he’s worried about what he’s going to do in college, and he’s no longer focused on high school or his high school team.
“ And, I think that’s wrong.” Information for this article was contributed by Bob Holt and Tom Murphy of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.