Friday, Jul. 04, 2008

Series: Length, intensity of recruiting process ramps up

Editor’s note: This the second installment of a three part series that publishes on Saturday in the print edition of The Olathe News. Sports editor Tod Palmer will look at the changing landscape of high school sports. From conditioning to year-around play on specialized teams and recruiting, a lot has changed for the prep athlete in the last 30 years.

Eighth-grader Michael Avery committed to the University of Kentucky basketball program in May. It’s a clear indication of the mad, mad world recruiting has become.

Avery, a 6-foot-4 15-year-old from Lake Sherwood, Calif., hadn’t even settled on what prep school he’d attend when the Wildcats offered him a scholarship.

It boggles the mind.

College recruiting used to be a fairly simple and straightforward process reserved for high school seniors or junior college athletes.

Coaches would visit high schools and talk with coaches, collect some game film if it was available and dispatch position coaches to watch games live.

For football, official visits typically took place in December or January after the season had ended, and players got signed in February. Visits for other sports occurred in the offseason as well and were unheard of for underclassmen.

That’s the way Olathe East football coach Jeff Meyers remembers the process that landed him at Kansas State University in the 1970s.

But those simple days are long gone, never to return.

Today, official visits aren’t allowed before a player is a senior, but recruiting trips and jaunts to campus by underclassmen are becoming increasingly common — and are well within the rules as the long the coach doesn’t initiate contact. Or as long as it can’t be proved the coach initiated contact.

Not everyone is convinced that the new recruiting absurdity, where kids who’ve yet to enroll in high school are offered scholarships by coaches who may not even be around when the kids reaches college, is a good thing.

“The recruiting process is hurt by early commitments,” Shawnee Mission West football coach Tim Callaghan said.

It tends to devalue individual and team performances.

Endless camps and combines, recruiting Web sites and services, bios, 40-yard dash times and snippets of film and projections have replaced more traditional observation. Stats and game performance still matter but not like they used to matter.

“The recruiting process tends to make kids focus more on themselves,” Callaghan said. “They worry more about getting a scholarship than getting better with the team, going to camps and trying to show off what they can do. If it was just tied to their season, they’d probably give a little more effort at making the team better.”

It’s become an overwhelming process for many students.

“If kids let it be a distraction and allow it to consume them, it can be detrimental,” Olathe North football coach Pete Flood said. “But if they understand there are still things they have to do in order to continue to be recruited, it can be good. You just can’t let the process become bigger than you are.”

Savvy athletes and their parents begin selling themselves early in the process, which is fine as long as expectations don’t zoom out of control, Meyers said.

“Parents are becoming much more aware and involved,” Meyers said. “The problem with it is when people’s expectations are unrealistic.”

While parents are seeing an increased role in the recruiting process, especially where money is concerned to send kids all over the region or nation for camps and combines, many high school coaches are being cut out of the picture.

That’s not necessarily the case in football, which doesn’t have an organized club component and its relaxed atmosphere and recruiting rules.

But for a lot sports, high school coaches aren’t even consulted when a school recruits a student-athlete.

“College coaches rarely visit with me or even come to me and ask if I have any runners they should be interested in,” said Van Rose, cross country coach at Shawnee Mission Northwest High School. “They pretty much rely on their on scouting.”

NCAA rules governing recruiting in some sports almost dictates that the high school coach is cut out of the picture. With basketball contact periods in the summer, for instance, college coaches seldom deal directly with high school coaches at that time, North Athletics Director Lane Green said.

“Volleyball, baseball, basketball, soccer — I hear some of those coaches say they haven’t talked to a recruiter once,” Meyers said. “A lot of kids get recruited in the summer.” Many coaches consider it an alarming trend.

After all, the nature of high school programs, which practice every day and involve faculty at the athletes’ school, seems to dictate that high school coaches have the most insight about their athletes.

“The programs that are successful include the coaches, but I don’t get as many calls anymore even about the character of a kid,” Callaghan said. “College coaches look at Rivals and take their word for it and don’t ask mine.”

Of course, some aspects of college recruiting undoubtedly have benefitted student-athletes. Even if parents and players don’t realize it, academics have become the keystone to recruitment.

“Academics can unlock a lot of doors for you if you want to pursue athletics in college,” Flood said.

Even the greatest high school athlete can’t play in college without solid academics.

“Athletics have been wonderful for academics,” Meyers said. “Kids who want to play in college find out real quick that they can’t without the grades, without school. It works hand in hand.”

If a players’ academics don’t make them an automatic qualifier, schools tend to look elsewhere when offering scholarships, especially at the NCAA Div. I level. Besides, academics in general provide greater scholarship opportunities than athletics.

“A lot of people have their focus on getting a college scholarship in athletics, but if parents are really concerned with getting financial aid for their kids, they need to send their kids to the library,” Green said. “For every dollar of athletic scholarships, there are a lot more dollars in financial aid for academics.”

That’s not to say, however, that athletic opportunities are limited.

“There’s more opportunities for kids and I get letters from all over the country for kids even for track,” said Mike Wallace, Olathe East track coach. “With the Internet and all that stuff, it’s probably easier these days.”

While Web sites like Rivals.com and ESPN.com have cranked up the hype for elite high school athletes, avenues at the Div. II and NAIA levels continue to provide the bulk of post-high school opportunities. And those programs aren’t worried about combines.

“With the way colleges run things now, if a kid wants to participate in whatever sport, as long as they don’t limit themselves and say, ‘I’ve got to go Div. I or something like that,’ they are going to have the opportunity to play,” Wallace said. “And it doesn’t matter what camp or combine you went to.”

In other words, a lot of the hubbub surrounding recruiting today may not be necessary. It’s a dog-and-pony show, but one that seems likely to continue.

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