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With college basketball coaches going around the rules, the NCAA was forced to take action to protect seventh- and eighth-graders as recruiting starts sooner and sooner for prospective basketball players
After blood began dripping from his lip, a 12-year-old went toward his bench.
His AAU team was playing in one of Hec Ed's auxiliary courts during the recent King Holiday Hoopfest. The referee decided to stop the game while the coach stepped to his injured player. Problem was, his team didn't have the ball at the time. This prompted a parent to yell at the referee, the parent upset the other team had a fastbreak at the time the kid was bloodied. This is how it starts.
A few steps away in Bank of America Arena, oodles of local high school basketball talent was on display, the high school players the NCAA tries to protect. Also on display during the gathering were the agents; people working for agents; people whose employers were unclear; scouts, and others wading in the cesspool that the recruiting of children can become. This is how it progresses.
Four days prior to the hoopfest, 3,000 miles away, the NCAA Division I Legislative Council convened just outside of Washington at the Gaylord National, a convention center on the Potomac River. There the group voted to change the definition of a prospect, putting seventh- and eighth-graders under its protective umbrella. Previously the NCAA treated only high school athletes, those in ninth through 12th grade, as "prospective student-athletes." Now, the council felt the kid with the bloody lip needed their protection.
"I think it came about as a result of a lot of different factors," Joseph D'Antonio, who is chairman of the 31-member Division I Legislative Council, said. "Most specifically it's an attempt by the NCAA membership to address some of the concerns related to the current youth basketball environment. Specifically, I would say those concerns are the increase in non-scholastic influences in the game. As well as issues associated with early recruitment."
Here's what was happening: Coaches were getting the ear of seventh- and eighth-graders during "non-institutional" camps, camps run by people not associated with a college. The camp director would invite coaches to help at the camp. Coaches would come, and, not being on campus and meeting with kids not considered PSAs by the NCAA, were able to talk to the 11- or 12-year-old.
The people often running these camps are part of the "non-scholastic influence" the legislation aims to slow.
The coaches participating in these camps are part of the "issues associated with early recruitment."
Put it together, and the recruiters had figured yet another way to circumvent the NCAA.
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While there were rules set forth as to how coaches can handle PSAs at their institutional camps, such as the camps have to be open to any participants that met the age, gender or grade year requirements, that was not the case for younger players.
"What the current rules didn't get at is, if I'm the basketball coach at institution X and I want to have a tryout camp for the best seventh- and eighth-graders in the Seattle area ... I just want to hand-pick kids and have them come to the camp? Under the current rules I can do that," D'Antonio said.
With this work-around being exploited, coaches stood to benefit in the long-term. Able to describe all the glory associated with institution X to 11-, 12- and 13-year-olds, the college coach received an early jump on things.
"You have the potential of undue influences as it relates to those employment opportunities," D'Antonio said. "And coaches, I think, feeling some pressures to work in those camps because they don't want to lose any established relationships they have with some of the non-scholastic basketball operators."
That's why it's odd to find the main group that presented and pushed this topic as a concern was the National Association of Basketball Coaches. The group that stood to benefit the most prior to the legislation, essentially turned itself in.
"That's an important piece of this that I don't think people realize," D'Antonio said. "The NABC backed this proposal 100 percent."
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The recruiting process has always started early, but the proliferation of Internet scouting services and the ever-increasing desire for hype in American culture have resulted in an even more mangled process. The money at stake in and around college athletics is another enormous factor.
When a former player has a child, there's a coach at a midwest school who sends the player a congratulatory note and an unsigned letter of intent. Internet recruiting services are ranking younger and younger players. Major local media outlets have profiled fifth-graders for their high level of basketball talent.
Washington assistant coach Jim Shaw has been on the college basketball recruiting trail for more than 20 years. Shaw said he supports any legislation that protects the younger players, though he thinks recruiting is more difficult than ever.
"That recruiting stuff all starts early enough, is intensive enough," Shaw said. "If they have to do things to help kids be kids, then I am all for it."
Shaw feels not all of the NCAA's rules and regulations have benefited the players or the schools. The strong influence of AAU programs has left both schools and the NCAA to figure out ways to best protect recruits from those "non-scholastics influences," while allowing coaches enough contact to determine true character and ability. During the summer, coaches scout players at AAU events, where the players often participate in three or four games a day with teammates they hardly know. According to Shaw, that makes it difficult to obtain a true read.
"I think that the evolutions there have been since I started, most of them are negative ones," Shaw said of the recruiting rules. "When I started, there was only one signing period. Most of your recruiting was done during the season and was done through kids in their homes. You didn't have as many restrictions. Once kids were old enough to recruit, you could follow them and have more contact with them. You really didn't have to do as much outside the kid's home. You dealt with the kid, you dealt with his family, his high school coach.
"With the way recruiting is now, it's all pretty much swung to the AAU things in the summer and we have to deal with more people that are outside the home. Because you have so many more restrictions on how often you can contact, you just don't talk to the kid as much."
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For D'Antonio and his staff, the choice of seventh grade as a cutoff point wasn't landed on thanks to a scientific formula.
"I just think we felt as a group that we needed to start somewhere," D'Antonio said.
Jon Brockman, the Huskies' all-time leading rebounder, received his first recruiting letter during his freshman year at Snohomish High School. Brockman was lucky. His father, Gordy, played at Seattle Pacific. His sister, Kirsten, had just finished the recruiting process with the University of Washington. His AAU coach, Jim Marsh, was a family friend who dealt with all of this before, knowing college recruiting and the AAU world. Brockman was surrounded by people familiar with the pitfalls and falsehoods of recruiting.
"I had a lot of people able to clue me in on what to take, what to leave, what to fill your mind with," Brockman said. "There is a lot of chance for a lot of that hype to get caught up in a person and they can get real overconfident."
Brockman feels it's easy to steer young athletes in the wrong direction, especially with so many in their ear about how great they are and will be.
"You need to have the people that you really trust to be able to be a straight shooter, be able to tell you the truth, not what you want to hear," Brockman said. "You're not going to know if someone is going to be a great player when they're in seventh grade. There's no chance."
Washington coach Lorenzo Romar recently joined the NABC Board of Directors. Romar did not have a direct hand in the movement of this legislation.
But he's aware of it, and the movement of recruiting to younger and younger players. Just not where the downward coverage will end.
"Who knows?" Romar said. "I would have never told you that kids (will) come out of high school and go straight to the pros. You've got your scouting services right now on the Internet who are telling who the best third-graders are in the country ... "
Todd Dybas is the editor of Seattle Sports Online. Contact him at tdybas@seattlesportsonline.com