The dimly lit drop-ceiling corridor that leads to the team rooms at the University of Massachusetts-Boston's Clark Athletic Center is one of the country's least-heralded sports meat markets. Sometimes, the chaos is controlled. Other times, it's every athlete for himself.

When the NBA Summer League swaggered into town last August, state troopers patrolled the passageway, shooing away various groupies, hangers-on and autograph seekers. But in March, when the McDonald's High School All-American Game festivities included two days of events at Clark, the hallway became an unguarded gauntlet.

	Omar Cook is a premiere player.

At least a half-dozen provocatively dressed teenage girls formed a human funnel through which McDonald's' honorees passed on their way to the relative sanctity of the dressing area. The human funnel shouted out requests for autographs and future NBA tickets. There were also comments laden with suggestive innuendo, punctuated by outright marriage proposals.

Some of the players stopped to sign books, slips of paper and articles of clothing while exchanging pleasantries. Others merely pressed past, acknowledging the chatter with a smirk or a shake of the head. But all of them seemed well acquainted with the few feet through which they were walking. It was no longer just a cramped fieldhouse corridor. They had stepped into the jungle, and it was definitely not the first time they made the trip.

"The hardest part of all the attention we get is living as a regular person when everybody's got their eye on you," says Omar Cook, a 2000 McDonald's All-American guard from Christ the King High (N.Y.). "It's like the microscope is on you. You've got to be careful. Be mindful. Be low-key and take care of yourself. Basketball is fine; it's everything else you have to watch out for. [People] expect you to be better than everybody else, but you're just a kid growing up yourself. It's hard to grow up so fast."

It is, more often than not, mission impossible. For scholarship athletes, the distractions and vulnerability wrought by the recruiting process don't end with the agonizing choice of a collegiate destination. If anything, the lures intensify.

Sports psychologist Andy Palmer, who counsels athletes at his North Carolina-based Zap Corporation, experienced the phenomenon firsthand during his Ph.D. candidacy, when he interned as the live-in dormitory counselor for an Atlantic Coast Conference collegiate football program. According to Palmer, a team (he asked that the university go unnamed to protect those involved) lacking any married members had fathered more than 50 children, and players on that same school's men's basketball squad had more children than it did coaches.

At its core, scholarship athletics offers otherwise inaccessible educational opportunities, along with perks like travel, free food and national celebrity to its beneficiaries. But only the most thick-skinned and meticulously prepared of the nation's top annual high school recruits navigate the path from preteen prospect to collegiate prosperity with regularity. Even in those cases, the journey is rarely without its bumps.

There is a colossal machine at work determining the fortunes of the country's most talented young athletes. The machine has many working parts, some completely unrelated. And like all machines, it can't always determine what's in the best interest of the humans involved.

"[My dad] wants me to play professional baseball," says Coppell High (Texas) senior first baseman Jason Stokes, the No. 5 baseball prospect in the nation, according to Baseball America. He received more than 30 scholarship offers before deciding on the University of Texas. "My mom wants me to experience college life, but then she also wants what's best for me. If the situation doesn't work out, I look forward to experiencing college life. I plan on going [to college] in the offseason sometime down the road."

Juvenile Injustice

The educational research team for the 1994 film "Hoop Dreams," which chronicled a four-year window in the lives of two heavily recruited Chicago boys' basketball prospects, conducted a statistically significant survey of African-American middle school boys. A whopping 67 percent of those surveyed were "sure" they were going to make a living in pro sports.

As talent scouts and recruiting coordinators cast their nets ever deeper into the developmental pool, young athletes face adult decisions and pressure to formulate long-term plans at unconscionable ages.

"I don't think there are any 'pros' to the meat market that the recruiting process has become," says Art Taylor, Director of Urban Youth Sports at the Center for the Study of Sport in Society in Boston. "The almost disgusting behavior starts early, at the AAU (Amateur Athletics Union) level, with coaches dragging these kids around the country to market them for years.

"These kids are bigger than life and everything around them becomes bigger than life," Taylor continues. "You usually end up with one of two things. You create these kids who can't deal with anything else like an adult but their [playing ability], or you have the kids who just break under the pressure."

There is perhaps no better example of a quality player and person who got banged around by the process than Tamir Goodman. The Takoma Academy (Md.) senior guard, dubbed the "Jewish Jordan" by Sports Illustrated in 1998 because of his unique combination of skills and Sabbath-related playing restrictions, was publicly courted by the University of Maryland. Goodman made a verbal commitment to play at College Park, but the Terps' coaches soon became disenchanted with the teen. Some reports indicated the shift was a result of Goodman's lackluster performance at last June's adidas ABCD camp, while others postulated it was Goodman's refusal to compete from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday because of the Sabbath.

Regardless, the turnabout illustrates how even the best-laid plans of the most coveted players can crumble.

"It's something I'd be scared for my kids to go through," says Goodman, who landed on his feet and will play at Division I Towson University on a full scholarship this fall. "People pass judgment about you without knowing you as a person, which is totally unfair. But the pressure's another thing. You know that if you play bad at a camp, you can break your career."

"I had a lot of long nights of tears because of it, but you can't give in to it, he continues. If you want to be a big-time player, this is what you have to go through. Every job has a flip side. The difference is doctors don't have to go into their field until medical school. A basketball player has to start at 8 years old and work hard every single day. You've got to be a special person or you're going to crack."

	KK Sharfe, a senior All-American girls' lacrosse defender at Governor Dummer Academy (Byfield, Mass.), will be a Virginia Cavalier in the fall.

KK Sharfe, a senior All-American girls' lacrosse defender at Governor Dummer Academy (Byfield, Mass.), says the early decisions facing the cream of the teen-athlete crop are at the heart of what ails modern-day recruiting.

"The hardest part is that the whole recruiting game is getting earlier and earlier," says Sharfe, a member of the 1999 U.S. under-19 national girls' lacrosse team, who will play field hockey and lacrosse on scholarship at the University of Virginia in the fall. "Now, sophomores have to start writing letters and you have to have everything almost done by your junior year. It's a hard game because 15-year-old kids don't know what they want to do yet. You see kids who feel if they make one mistake on the field, their life is over. Putting things into perspective really comes into play, and some kids don't have the support system to help them do that."

Scharfe's analysis may be just the tip of the iceberg for women's athletics. A study of 311 college athletic departments published in the April 7 Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that only 31 percent of recruiting budget dollars are being spent on women. As that percentage rises, so will the stakes and the corresponding pressure.

Goodman says only those who ride the roller coaster can truly understand it.

"[Division I recruits] are living totally different lifestyles than every other kid in their class," he says. "You have to perform on demand at a very young age. And there are so many things to worry about in making a final decision in the process. What kind of offense do they run' What kind of coaching they have' What other guards are coming in' Do they have a good center' Does the coach have a long-term contract' It's crazy, but it's all part of the territory."

Log on to SchoolSports.com tomorrow for the second half of "Welcome to the Jungle," the life of a blue-chip recruit.