Mike DeCourcy has an article up on Maryland
and the pursuit of Omari Isreal, who plays for D.C. Assault, an AAU team
that Maryland has not been able to tap into despite geographic proximity.
This brings up a couple of interesting points, the first being the controversy
over Gary Williams' recruiting. To recap, some criticized him for not
recruiting higher-ranked players. His response was that he got the players
he wanted and they did fine. Game, set, and match to Gary.
The second
point is that sometimes there's a reason why a particular team does (or doesn't)
have a tie with a particular AAU team, and while we're not saying anything about
anyone, if a number of players from one AAU team beat a path to the same school,
well, we'd be mildly intrigued. Maryland has not gotten to full leverage their
natural recruiting advantage (though they have decisively replaced Georgetown as
the dominant team in the D.C./Baltimore hotbed of talent), but not getting a lot
out of D.C. Assault could (and we emphasize could, we're not suggesting a thing)
could say something positive rather than negative about Maryland.