Recruiting,
Intensified:
NCAA Division I Coaches
Far removed from the days of one-dribble women’s basketball played in
bloomers, NCAA Division I women’s hoops has become a hypercompetitive,
fiery breeding ground. Coaches have more on the line, with potential for
greater payoff. Accordingly, their recruiting efforts are more
concentrated, extreme, and passionate.
Former
Christ the King High coach and current Stony Brook University assistant
Vince Cannizzaro says “I’ve seen it all” in terms of recruiting. He remembers one college coach sitting down to talk to one of
his high school players and her parents at their home. “He talked about
the school, he talked about himself as a coach, and he talked about . . .
why he was recruiting this player,” Cannizzaro says, “but was so
intense, came across as such an intense person that when the coach left
the house, the mother turned to me and said, my daughter will never go to
that school. It was almost
scary, like this is too, too intense.”
Conversely, Cannizzaro has also seen college coaches lull
prospective student-athletes to sleep in living rooms with their
unenthusiastic presentations.
Sometimes
things work out for the best in recruiting, despite college coaches’
errant assessments. Case in point is Tennessee associate head coach Mickie
DeMoss’ tale of recruiting WNBA superstar Ruthie Bolton-Holifield when
DeMoss was an assistant at Auburn University. “Basically, we tried to
talk her out of coming to Auburn,” DeMoss chuckles. DeMoss and current
Florida coach Carol Ross, then also assisting at Auburn, had signed
Ruthie’s older sister Mayola, who DeMoss says was the better player in
high school. As an Auburn freshman, Mayola kept indicating that her sister
wanted to come to Auburn, and Ross and DeMoss wanted to keep Mayola happy.
“So we put her off from signing early, and we waited and
waited.” The duo even tried to pawn Ruthie off on Jerry Blair at Stephen
F. Austin, but he decided to pass. After Ruthie made her campus visit at
Auburn, DeMoss was almost resigned to the fact that if Ruthie wanted to
come to Auburn, she was coming to Auburn.
However, she
and Ross had one more ploy in mind. “Carol and I drove Ruthie back
home,” DeMoss continues, “and in the car we were like, ‘Ruthie,
we're going to be really honest with you. You may not even make the
traveling squad next year. We're going to Hawaii. How are you going to
feel when everybody's packing their bags and you're sitting in your dorm
room and everybody's getting ready to go to Hawaii?
How are you going to feel?’ She goes, ‘not too good.’
So I thought, OK, we're making progress. Carol would chime in and
she'd say, ‘Ruthie, how are you going to feel when you walk across
campus and everybody's going to go, hey, there's Mayola's little sister?
Oh, yeah, that must be Mayola's sister.
They're not even going to know your name, Ruthie. You're just going
to be known as Mayola's little sister. How are you going to feel about
that?’ She goes, ‘not too good.’
Then we'd do another scenario, like, ‘How are you going to feel
when Joe [Ciampi, Auburn head coach] is just all over you about something
and he says, you're not as good as your sister, I wish you could play like
Mayola, blah blah blah. He's
just all over you, and you get kicked out of practice, dah dah dah.
How are you going to feel?’
‘Not too good.’” Then Ruthie curled up and took a nap for the
remainder of the drive, further angering DeMoss and Ross, who had cooked
up more badgering scenarios for her.
Finally, the
car came to a stop in the Boltons’ driveway in McLean, Mississippi. “I
said, ‘Ruthie, now have you thought about all of the things that we've
talked about?’” says DeMoss. “She goes, ‘Yes, ma'am.’
I said, ‘OK, well, what have you decided?’
The only other school recruiting her was William Carey, a little
small school down in Mississippi. We
said, ‘Now you could go to William Carey and you could be the show. You
could run the show – you'd be the star at William Carey.
You come to Auburn, people aren't going to even know who you are,
and so on.’ And so we go, ‘OK Ruthie, have you thought about what we
said?’ ‘Yes ma'am.’ ‘OK, what have you decided?’ ‘I want to
come to Auburn.’ I said,
‘Well, if you want to come after all this, then Auburn is the place you
need to be, Ruthie.’” DeMoss then left for Tennessee, and she was
shocked when Ross told her that Ruthie was Auburn’s best player as a
freshman. “We just challenged her and didn’t even know we were
challenging her,” she remarks. “Then she went on to be a two-time
Olympian.”
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Accountability
grows with each season for NCAA Division I women’s basketball coaches.
While mounting resources and publicity have promoted women’s college
basketball, coaches also now feel more pressure, externally and
internally, to win. Providing
an enjoyable experience for players and amassing decent graduation rates,
while still important, will not ensure them job stability. They must have
successful records and advance to postseason competition. Since they feel
more strain to excel in the victories column, and since women’s
basketball has become more competitive overall, they apply more pressure
to student-athletes during the recruiting process. Assistant coaches and
recruiting coordinators have also assumed a crucial role. In many ways,
coaches’ livelihoods depend on decisions made by teenagers, a somewhat
frightening reality.
In the
basketball world, the increasingly popular term ‘recruiter’ has taken
on a negative connotation. “I think that when people think about
recruiters, they think that they're some slick-talking, fast-talking
salespeople,” states DeMoss. “I'm sure there are recruiters out there
that are like that, but I don't think that you're going to have long-range
success if you rely just on some type of a quick fix, slick-talking,
let-me-just-tell-you-what-you-want-to-hear type of thing.
I think eventually it catches up with you.”
How
much of recruiting concerns selling a program, and how much is about
finding a good match? At top
schools, the selling takes care of itself through history, success, and
exposure, and recruiting lists are smaller.
Tennessee might actively recruit six players, hoping to sign five.
At Connecticut, associate head coach Chris Dailey says the staff never
recruited high numbers, “even when we were bad.” Those trying to build
up poorer programs find themselves in a quandary. Few top recruits want to
sign with an unsuccessful program, but how can a squad rebuild without
convincing talent to jump on board?
“Recruiting
is sales,” decrees Ed Wyant, assistant coach at the University of New
Mexico. “We have a product. Do
they want to buy into the product? You don’t last long in this
profession unless you recruit very good players.”
For Eastern
Illinois head coach Linda Wunder, whose squad finished 7-20 in 2000-01,
the challenge becomes getting the finest possible players to help her
program improve. “For our level, the most difficult part is finding the
right fit and the right level of player that we have an opportunity to
get,” she explains. “It’s easy to identify top-level players, but I
think from a realistic standpoint, your chances of landing them are
sometimes not extremely high. Then
you’ve got to find the next level of player that you will have an
opportunity to be able to recruit and also be able to get.”
Wunder’s yearly recruiting list features a few elite players, a
slew of athletes on a secondary list, and a third level, so that she
always has second and third choices.
