|
What makes a hoops star?
Freelin Jones, Sports Writer, fjones@newstopic.net Basketball talent the likes of which Caldwell County has never seen on one court squared off against one another Wednesday night at Hibriten High School when the The Patterson School Bulldogs hosted a preseason scrimmage against the Oak Hill Warriors. And with 13 players on both teams already committed to major division-I college basketball programs from the Atlantic Coast Conference, Conference-USA or the Southeastern Conference, the red and black stands were filled with college coaches and NBA scouts. On one side was Patterson sporting the remnants of a Laurinburg Institute basketball program that went 40-0 last year. On the other side was Oak Hill, the defending USA Today High School National Champions. In a game that consisted of three 20-minute periods - each with its own score and none of them counting toward the win-loss column for either team, what were the scouts and the coaches looking for in the players? ”The obvious answer is ability,“ event organizer and national basketball recruiting analyst Bob Gibbons said after the first game of the evening - a matchup between the Patterson School high school squad and Charis Prep from Goldsboro. ”It's a combination of athletic ability, skill level and how they perform against each other. In this game, you can tell the kids that really have more talent. Those are the guys the coaches are here to see. It's a tough question to answer.“ Expectedly, the play was marginal at best with little to no defense, a lot of transition and a plethora of fouls. Occasionally, the players wowed the crowd several times with monster dunks or lightning fast breakaways, but for the most part it was obvious the teams have only been practicing for a few weeks. ”You have to keep in mind that these guys are two or three weeks into their practice season,“ Appalachian State head coach Houston Fancher said. ”It's very early for them. They're not going to be in midseason form. College practice starts Friday night, and you wouldn't want to see a college scrimmage right now. I heard a lot of the college coaches commenting that it looks like their practices right now.“ But there were a lot of programs in the Hibriten gym evaluating the talent even after many of the players have already committed to a program. ”The college recruiting the player wants to show the kid that they are interested, because nothing is binding,“ Gibbons said. ”The kid can change his mind.“ In addition to ASU's Fancher, Virginia Commonwealth head coach and former Duke standout Jeff Capel, Charlotte 49ers head coach Bobby Lutz, along with representatives from Wake Forest, N.C. State, Kansas, Iowa State, East Carolina, Oral Roberts, Winthrop, Winston-Salem State, Liberty and Belmont Abbey were all in attendance. Several NBA organizations - including the Orlando Magic - showed up to evaluate Patterson's Davon Jefferson, a 6-foot, 8-inch, 215-pound forward. Recruiting is one of the lesser publicized aspects of college hoops - at least until a university has some recruiting scandal. But overall, the recruiting circuit is brutal - especially for lower level Division-I programs. ”For us, I think we have to be realistic when we're recruiting,“ ASU's Fancher said. ”When you come see a team like these (Patterson and Oak Hill), there (are) guys that may not get to play but are still good enough to play in college. With teams like Oak Hill or Patterson, they have a lot of guys who are high level players that don't play very much. So we continue to recruit and make sure we're visible.“ Even Capel recognized the difference in the type of players his program at Virginia Commonwealth can recruit. ”I honestly feel like it's not that much difference. There is a difference, don't get me wrong,“ Capel said. ”I've always felt that when you're at ... the highest level of the ACC, what you have is more big guys, and you have pros. You have one- or two-year guys that are pros. At our level, we don't have that. We have guys ... who can run and jump, but they can't shoot it that good. But we've got some guys in our league (Pioneer League) I know can play in the ACC, that can play anywhere in college basketball.“ Capel knows a thing or two about being recruited by an ACC program, having spent four years playing for the Duke Blue Devils under legendary head coach Mike Krzyzewski. He also realizes that selling a high school basketball player on Virginia Commonwealth is more challenging than recruiting for an ACC program. ”It's different. It's not anything that's really more difficult, it's just different,“ Capel said. ”We don't have immediate name recognition when we walk into a gym. We're starting to get it a little bit now because we've been good the past three years. ”If I walk into a gym with Virginia Commonwealth on my shirt and maybe a coach from Carolina walks in or a coach from Duke - it's different because those are schools that most people, especially in this state, most kids dream about going to Duke, to Wake, to Carolina, to N.C. State. There are very few kids who grow up dreaming about going to Virginia Commonwealth University.“ But the smaller college basketball programs are no longer intimidated by recruiting the same players that the major programs are going after - mostly because not everyone can play in the ACC, no matter how many schools are added to the conference. ”We try to create our niché,“ Capel said. ”What we do is we try to recruit guys that everyone else is recruiting because our philosophy is the ACC can't get them all. Duke can't get them all. Carolina, Clemson, Florida State - they can't get them all. There are going to be some really good players that are maybe good enough to go to the ACC, but maybe just not in that year. There's not space for them.“
|
