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| Wednesday, July 16 |
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| Sign of the Times By Jeff Lemberg SchoolSports.com | |||||||||
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Virtually everything the Hurt family owned, from brooms to heirlooms, silverware to athletic hardware, was either boxed, bagged or waiting to be tossed out of their two-story townhouse in Houston, Texas. A lifetime's worth of memories were packed away in cardboard and bubble wrap, but the most telling possessions from the family's past few years were in 17-year-old Carlos Hurt's bedroom closet waiting to be thrown away.
"When we left Houston, we had three bags -- and I mean three of those big leaf bags -- filled with letters," says Margaret Hurt, Carlos' mother. "Even the postman said, 'God, this kid gets a lot of mail!'" The University of Southern California would sometimes send Carlos, a 6-foot-1 point guard and one of the top high school boys' basketball players in the nation, up to 100 pieces of mail a week. Letters from the University of Arizona, Kentucky, Texas and just about every other major Division I school in the country also graced the inside of the Hurt's mailbox on a regular, if not absurd, basis. By the time the family was ready to move from its home in Houston to a new residence in Louisville, Ky., Hurt had received nearly 2,000 pieces of correspondence. "For awhile it was like Christmas, but he got tired of it," says Margaret Hurt. "I think that played a big role in his committing early to Louisville." What Carlos did by publicly announcing in early June -- five months prior to the NCAA initial signing dates for men's basketball (Nov. 8-15) -- that he will play for coach Denny Crum next year was throw a mighty big wrench into the ever-growing machine that is Division I college basketball recruiting. Once word got out that Hurt was off the shelf, the tidal wave of letters and phone calls from college coaches withdrew to a gentle and manageable flow. "It was nice at first," says Hurt of all the attention he received, "but it got to be a big pain." Welcome to recruiting in the 21st century. Those who want to play in college basketball's Garden of Eden (a.k.a.: Division I) must first make their way through a confusing and often overwhelming jungle. But to understand how and why the system has become so taxing on today's teens, one must first understand the entire landscape.
Show me the Money! What they offer the lanky teen -- he weighs just 215 pounds -- is a free education and, more importantly to him, a basketball program that will help him move on to the NBA. "I'm going to college to get to the NBA," says Rickert, who made an oral commitment in late October to attend the University of Arizona next year. "That may be foolish, but that's still what I plan on doing. I love basketball. I want to do it for the rest of my life, and I want to get paid to do something I love to do." It's a sentiment heard by virtually every one of the top high school basketball players in the nation. "I'll stay in school until I'm a sure shot," says Hurt, a sweet-shooting left-hander who starred at Elsik High in Alief, Texas, for three years before transferring to Moore High in Louisville this fall. "If that's one year, two years, three or four, it doesn't matter to me.
"For me, college is a pit stop for me to get my money." Which is exactly what college basketball has become -- a pit stop for players who are looking for the fastest and most direct route to financial wealth. On the other side of the track are the universities, which will do just about anything to sign the top players, win the most games and, consequently, get their money. What's staggering is just how much money. Starting in the 2002-03 season, an 11-year contract through which CBS purchased the television rights of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament will kick in. That contract is worth $6 billion, an increase of $5 billion from the two parties' previous eight-year deal. How individual colleges and universities reap a share of that windfall is through a program administered by the NCAA called "The Basketball Fund," a revenue distribution structure for Division I schools. According to Jane Jankowski, assistant public relations director for the NCAA, the association gave $70 million back to schools last year through its present revenue plan. The structure works, in part, like this: Every game a school's basketball team plays in the NCAA Tournament -- not including the championship game -- is worth a unit. Last year, a unit was worth $98,086. At the conclusion of the tourney, the NCAA gives each conference the total sum its teams earned over a six-year rolling period and leaves it to the individual conferences to divide the money between their member schools. And that's just a sliver of the overall pie, which is stuffed with cash from licensing agreements and ticket revenue. Individual colleges and universities can also make a pretty penny through equipment and shoe endorsements, regular-season TV contracts and arena advertising. So the recipe is pretty simple: The schools that win get paid. The schools that don't, won't. "When you're on an official visit, they want you to commit right there, and they go all out for you," says Rickert, who reneged on his oral commitment and signed with Minnesota in early November. "They'll pay for dinner. They'll take you to parties. They'll make a jersey for you with your name on it -- but you can't even keep it. They'll basically just spend a lot of money to impress you and try to get you to commit."
A Campin' They Will Go Thanks to his Amateur Athletic Union basketball coach and, later, his legal guardian, Vinny Pastore, Hazelton traveled the country in the summer of '98 and participated in various basketball camps, tournaments and clinics. Hazelton hit all the big ones -- Five Star in Pennsylvania, the Big Time Tournament in Nevada and the Bob Gibbons Tournament of Champions in North Carolina. He hadn't played a high school basketball game in more than a year, and yet virtually every Division I college basketball coach in the nation knew the name Scott Hazelton. "What's changed is the recruiting," says Pastore, who retired from coaching the Massachusetts Wildcats AAU team at the end of last year, when Hazelton committed to the University of Connecticut. "You have these so-called experts who pick who they think are the best kids, put them on a list and sell it -- now, if you go to an adidas camp, you can buy a packet for $100 with every player's address and phone number in it. Many of these coaches have never seen you play, but will send you a letter telling you they want you to play for them." The summer basketball circuit, often sponsored by sneaker manufacturers like adidas, Nike and Converse, has created various one-stop shops for college basketball coaches. Guys like Kentucky's Tubby Smith, Duke's Mike Krzyzewski and Arizona's Lute Olson no longer have to visit upward of 50 gymnasiums a year. Today, college coaches need only to jet out to a few summer tournaments to see the cream of the high school basketball crop. "That's ideal for a college coach," says Kentucky's Smith, who started his coaching career at Great Mills High (Great Mills, Md.) and entered the 2000 season with a 210-85 college coaching record, including a victory over Duke in the 1998 national championship game. "If you can go and see 100 players and not have to spend the school's money flying all over the place ? well, that's ideal. By the time I go (to a summer tournament), we've narrowed our list of kids we want to see down to about 15-20." "It's a showcase," says Rick Rickert's father, Lew, of the summer basketball circuit. "It's a meat market, and you're all out there trying to impress the coaches. "And yet, it's a great thing for the kids to get the exposure," adds the elder Rickert, who, coming out of high school, agreed to play for University of Minnesota men's basketball coach Bill Fitch after a handshake and a 10-minute conversation. "It does, however, get a little hectic." According to the NCAA, a little too hectic. In April, its Division I Board of Directors approved a proposal to decrease the number of days college coaches can evaluate players over the summer from 24 to 14. It also increased the number of evaluation days during the academic year from 40 to 50. But that plan was only a one-year deal, which goes into effect in the summer of 2001. A 16-person committee, dubbed the NCAA Division I Basketball Issues Committee, was formed this past summer to make recommendations to the association as to how the summer recruiting process should be reconstructed. "My guess is that we'll modify the structure of summer basketball so the kids can have a more wholesome experience -- where playing basketball isn't how they spend their entire summer, where kids aren't receiving extra payment for their participation, where they're not playing a couple of games a day, every day, for a month," says Syracuse University chancellor Kenneth "Buzz" Shaw, chairman of the issues committee. "We want them to come out of a summer as better people and not just better basketball players. "In a perfect world, kids would be in school all the time, studying, working hard and making themselves better people so they can get into college based on their knowledge," adds Shaw. "But, unfortunately, we don't have a perfect world."
Material from SchoolSports.com.Visit their web site at www.schoolsports.com | |
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