It’s Canada, so the odds of envelops of cash being exchanged are slim, and it’s highly unlikely that a student-athlete will reject a school because it has a deal with the wrong shoe company. And there’s certainly no evidence to suggest thatany ofthe nation’s universities have a private escort service a la the University of Louisville and “Escort Queen” Katina Powell, who penned a book detailing the escapades held inside an athletic on-campus dorm as part of bids to convince high school basketball players to become Cardinals.
Still, ask Canadian Interuniversity Sport basketball coaches about recruiting and it seems we have our own warstories: players who demand a spot as a starter; a parent who thinks that his son is a “one-and-done” talent who just needstoendure a year of time before becoming eligible for the draft and earning NBA rookie of the year laurels;the rival coach who pilfered someone at the last minute by offering a lucrative summer job; the recruit who flipped a coin in deciding between two institutions; the one who rejected a school because its cafeteria housed a Pizza Pizza franchise, rather than a Boston Pizza outlet;or the one who attended Power Forward U because “God told me that’s where I had to go” and the folks at Off-Guard College were known apostates.
What also becomes immediately apparent is that recruiting has become a 365-day, 24-hour occupation, and an obsession. Goneare the days when university teams would hold a tryout in mid-October and coaches would cross their fingers that a point guard would magically wander through the door, though, as McGill men’s coach David DeAveiro will attest, it’s still possible for that to occur, having had Jenning Leung walk on to the Redmen roster from Los Banos,Philippines.
For the most part, it’s a different world, says Lisa Thomaidis, coach of the Saskatchewan women’s Huskies, the reigning CIS titlists. “Ten years ago, it was all about developing the kids that you had, and not necessarily about being able to recruit far and wide, but more locally and provincially, and taking those kids that you had for five years, and hopefully, by the end of their fourth or fifth year, they were at a level where they can compete at a high level.”
“I feel like I’m always recruiting,” says Acadia men’s coach Kevin Duffie. “It doesn’t really end. … I wouldn’t be able to even guess how much time I spend on it. I mean, you’re even recruiting your own players, in a sense, all the time. You’re always trying to just build relationships and just keep going and moving forward.”
“Recruiting is never off the table, it doesn’t matter whether in midseason or playoffs, or the summer,” says Queen’s women’s coach Dave Wilson. “We probably spend more time at that than we actually spend at basketball, if you add up all the time you’re putting into it … whether it’s text messages, emails, phone calls, or the other contacts, the travelling to go see people, whatever. Then there are the kids that come in for official visits. You put them through workouts, spend time with their parents.”
Recruiting became a necessary condition of the profession after Canadian universities began to gain an understanding of the value of athletics and increasingly placed more pressureon programs to succeed, coaches say.
The higher expectations have made it “just way more competitive,” Thomaidis says. “All coaches are raising their game as well and that means more battles on the recruiting front. And we’re always fighting the NCAA schools for players as well.”
“It’s the name of the game in university,” says Duffie. “You gotta have good players to compete. There’s some coaches who have done a really good job at it, so they’re pushing the bar higher and higher. It’s probably the number one, most important thing that a coach has to do at this level.”
All that competition, in turn, has prompted CIS to endeavour to level the playing field, (Recruiting Part I: Sifting through the new regulations). And that, in turn, begs several questions: Has Canada reached the point, now altogether common in America, where envelops of cash are actually exchanged, cars purchased, work-free jobs arranged and all other manner of untoward services and goodies are provided? Are coaches left saying that chasing narcissistic 17-year-olds with wish-list demands has become the most “unsavoury” or even “repulsive” part of their job?
There’s certainly no evidence of systemic abuse within basketball circles, and certainly not enough money on the hardcourt scene, for programs to even contemplate making recruiting a game of dispensing largesse, coaches say.
“I haven’t seen any of that,” says uOttawa men’s coach James Derouin.
But if envelops full of cash aren’t involved, what makes a student-athlete choose institution X over institution Y?
“You could write a book on that,” Derouin says. “Every kid is absolutely and positively unique. One kid wants to get away from home. One kid wants to stay home. One kid, academics are everything. One kid could care less. One kid might want to like the coach. Another kid could care less. It could be style of play. It goes on and on and on. Then you’ve got: who is in the kid’s ear? Who’s telling them: ‘you’ll never play there’, or ‘don’t do this or do that’. Then you’ve got scholarships. Or it could be the cost of rent in the city. It could be nightlife. It could be the library. It could be who plays the position on your team. … Identifying what it is might be more important than identifying the talent because you can eliminate yourself, if you get it wrong.”
“It is an endless checklist,” he adds. “That’s recruiting.”
In decades past, recruiting was often entirely a matter of institutional reputation, says Wilson. “It used to be that they wanted to come simply because ‘it’s Queen’s’. Today, players scrutinize schools more and make decisions based on a combination of factors.”
That shift may, in part, be a function of several recent trends within the nation’s universities. Canada has historically limited the number of universities that it has accredited and therein, guaranteed a certain quality of education across the nation, unlike the US, which allows anyone with a shovel and a few bucks to create a university, and as a consequence, has some incredibly mediocre institutions offering degrees that are about as worthless as a campaign promise.
But more recently, the academic side of Canadian universities has been substantially re-structured, primarily because of a number of government incentive programs that were essentially aimed at promoting more differentiation and specialization within institutions, which resulted in the creation of often-unique programs and degrees, or conversely, the winding-down of some departments to focus resources on others.
That means student-athletes who have particular academic interest can, and do, automatically eliminate some schools from consideration simply because they don’t offer the degree the player is interested in obtaining.
“Increasingly, we’re all different universities,” notes Laurentian women’s coach Jason Hurley. “We don’t have the pull that some other schools have. But we have some programs, like forensic science, sports psychology, or our PhysEd program, that are awesome across the board.”
But degree-program options are far from being the only consideration in the minds of recruits, the coaches say. Among the more common factors that recruits identifyas being important to their decisions are such things as the type or location of the university (whether in a big or small city); the strength of a basketball program (does it have a winning tradition or is it a perennial bottom-feeder? Does it get good media coverage? ); the level of financial aid; and the personality of the coach (charm, or lack thereof).
Given the variability of those factors, and the fact that, when it comes to decision-making, people put more or different emphasis on some factors than others, does a coach have to be a mind-reader to know whether he has a shot at inking someone to a letter-of-intent?
“It would help,” says Derouin. “Sometimes, it can be a random, random, random event and often, it’s only their final decision that paints a picture of what exactly they had prioritized.”
Assuming that an institution can tick off all the boxes that the recruit has identified as important, does the texting, telephoning and tweetingthen begin in earnest?
That, it seems, all depends on the player, and the coach.
“I’m not the kind of coach who’s going to dote on kids and spend the majority of my time calling them and staying in contact,” says Thomaidis. “It’s more laying out for them: this is what we have to offer and this is where I’d think you’d fit. What more do you need to say? Certain kids want more than that and they want that attention. Or they want the instant gratification of knowing they can play right away as well. But if you’re recruiting players in grade 12 in high school, there’s no one that talented enough that can really step in from the high school ranks and play a big role on a successful team. So you need to find those kids who are willing to put in the time, and the sacrifice and the work and hopefully see it pay off two or three years down the road.”
Duffie, though, says it’s become far more common for kids, in the social media world, to demand constant contact. “It feels like you’ve got to be in touch with them a lot more cause things happen so quickly.” And in the competitive world of recruiting, it’s also likely that if you’re not in the business of constant contact, someone else is: “If you go a couple of days without talking to them, they might think you don’t want them anymore, or that you forgot about them, or something.”
Derouin notes that “sometimes you’ll get a kid who will ‘value’ how interested you are in them by how often you talk to them. And if you take the approach in which you only talk to them once every few weeks, then they’ll say, ‘so and so was much more active and interested in me, so I think I’m going to go there’. Then you’ll get the kid who’ll say: ‘this guy never left me alone and it was a little creepy, so I’m not going to go there’. It can be an impossible equation.”
Wilson says the question of constant contact has become such a tricky issue “that I just ask the players what they want, because it can be so hard to read. If you want me to text you every day, I will text you every day. If you want to hear from me once a month, I will contact you every month. I don’t want to be a pest but I also don’t want you to interpret that I’m not interested. So I need help from you. … And some of this is just ‘keeping up with the Jones’ stuff. If so and so is contacting them every day, do I have to contact them every day? That’s why I just ask the athletes: what is it you would like? And think carefully about your answer.”
It’s an interesting approach, if only because the answer would be quite revealing of the recruit’s character.
And character, as much as athletic skills, appears as important to some coaches in deciding whether to chase a player. Certainly, no one who has been in the vague proximity of the Carleton Ravens men’sprogram over the past 14 years could reach anyconclusion other than that coach Dave Smart hunts down players who are nothing short of driven to compete and win.
Coaches also note that in the modern era, in which everyone seems to play ball year round, whether in high school, club, AAU or other programs, it gets more and more difficult to find that traditional “sleeper” player, the kid who no one knew about but who then hit the university scene and proved to be a diamond from hardcourt backwaters. And with recruiting having gone big-time, coaches start watching, and chasing, kids at ever-younger age levels, which gives them years to get to know a kid and get a sense of their character, as well as their skills and development through time.
While it’s still possible to find “that sort of underdog player,” or identify a kid who hasn’t yet developed into a star at their age-group, it’s more and more difficult because there are so many more opportunities to assess their talents, says Hurley.
“My Mom can go watch a game and know who the best player is,” says Duffie. “That’s not the biggest issue. We all know who’s pretty good out there. The top kids, for sure, have been identified. It’s the second-tier group. Sometimes you have to decide: are they good enough? Or will they fit what you’re trying to do, when they get there? … Do they pass the eyeball test in terms of the initial talent? Then you get into what kind of person are they? What kind of grades have they got? What’s their personality? Are they going to be totally disruptive? Which isn’t always a bad thing; sometimes you need someone to stir it up a bit and change a little bit of the culture of your team. Depending on what it is, within reason obviously. As you peel back the onion over the course of the process, you kind of start to figure out that a bit more.”
“Character is huge,” says Wilson. Former national team coach “Jack Donahue told me: Never fall in love with talent, fall in love with character. … I also feel, as a representative of an educational institution, that I have a responsibility to recruit more than just a basketball player, per se. … And I’m very concerned about the fabric of our team, the chemistry of our team, the character of our players. I tell them, bluntly, when I’m recruiting them, that everything I’m doing, when I’m meeting them, talking to them, watching them, is all about assessing their character and demeanour.”
Are kids more demanding than in the past? Do all those so-called precocious, indifferent millennials want to be instant starters garnering 30+ minutes per game?
“Not all of them,” says Duffie. “Some of them do, and you want a little bit of that. You want a little bit of that ego. That makes players good, that they believe in themselves that much. But I think you gotta manage expectations as well. It’s a very small percentage of people who come in and impact a program at that level in their first year.”
Several coaches note that it’s often parents who are more demanding than players, or increasingly, street agents, recruiting gurusor whoever else is whispering in a kid’s ear, often because they have a more exaggerated notion of a player’s capabilities.
If a coach is brutally honest with a player or a parent, does their interest dissipate like the wind?
“I think it scares some away, absolutely,” says Thomaidis. “But the ones that are scared off, we don’t want them anyway. It’s those that are willing to put in that time and really know that it’s going to pay off down the road, that you want.”
In their experience, what has been the most influential factor in the decisions of recruits: coaching charm?
“Oh yeah, that’s it,” Derouin drolly replies.
“I’m not sure that there’s a bunch of high school girls who are saying I’m going to Laurentian to play for Jason Hurley,” quips the affable Voyageurs coach.
There’s no question charm “is a factor,” says Wilson. “It’s like any sales. If you connect well with the salesperson, you’re more apt to be receptive to their offers. And it’s really important that they get a sense of comfort in what you’re doing. A lot of parents want to know that they’re putting their kids in the hands of someone they can trust.”
Given all the variables, is it a level playing field? Is it more difficult to recruit to some schools than others? How, for example, does Hurley pitch Laurentian, ina small city surrounded by rock, which doesn’t have the academic cachet of Queen’s or the University of Toronto, or the trendy reputation of Ryerson, what with the latter being located in the centre of the universe and armed with a hot facility like the Mattamy Centre?
“Well, we put the individual ahead of everything,” he says. “If you want to be a doctor, if you want to be a Rhodes scholar, this is probably the place for you to go because we put the player and the individual ahead of the institution. But if you want to be a follower, and this is not being negative because I have total appreciation for Queen’s or U of T or whatever school, then you should probably go there. We put the name first, and then we put Laurentian second. It’s sort of a northern Ontario thing to do.”
Now that, good readers, is clever spin.