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.