clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

Old Tricks, Revisited

Recruiting is always one of the more interesting, is seamy aspects of
basketball and college sports in general.

One of the gimmicks is in
hiring someone close to a kid,
usually the coach, although Larry Brown
pulled Ed Manning from the cab of a truck when he hired him. Ed brought his son,
Danny, and Kansas ultimately got a title out of the deal.

Herb Sendek played a variation of this theme recently in Tempe, hiring the
coach of a hot prospect not as a coach but as a video coordinator or something
along those lines. He got his player.

There's almost no way to regulate it, as Larry Brown illustrated.

Text
messaging is a new frontier,
and coaches are jumping all over it. The
NCAA is taking a look, but without subpoena powers, it's almost impossible to
regulate.

None of this is new. The text messaging has been around for a couple of
years and has proved handy for coaches who can't recruit off-campus because
they've been, well, naughty.

There's very little new under the sun. Text messaging is just a one-way phone message married to words and an updated way to do what Henry Bibby did with letters (he would mail hundreds a day to a recruit).

One of the classic ACC stories
about recruiting shenanigans features a staff which got girls for father and son
on a recruiting visit, and then waited outside a dorm room for dear old dad
until they heard bedsprings. "We got him!" they yelled
jubilantly.