The Recruiting Game : It Has Become Big Business--for More Than Players

Sometime this evening, Brad Sham will begin his nightly “Sports Central” radio talk show on Dallas station KRLD, broadcasting home of the Cowboys and Southwest Conference basketball, and do a no-brainer. He will need patience and understanding, but not much expertise.

Max Emfinger, head of National High School Football Publications, will be making another appearance, and that means time to talk football recruiting. For Sham, that usually means answering the next caller and a few minutes later saying, “Thanks for the question.” Thus, it is a no-brainer.

Tomorrow night, though, “Sports Central” will become more like election central as Sham gets live reports from correspondents in every Southwest Conference city on the returns from the national letter-of-intent day for football. Just simple things, such as what schools landed which players with how much potential and where the hometown fans are going the next day to buy tickets for the 1989 Cotton Bowl.

And through it all, even though he has been living in the football-crazy state for 11 years, he will be amazed at how fanatical some people get at the mention of the word recruiting .

“Personally, I can’t think of too many things less intriguing than finding out where a high school football player is going to college,” Sham said. “But I am astounded at the reaction we have when Max comes on. If I didn’t have him on at least twice during the recruiting season, I’d probably get run out of town.”

So Emfinger goes on--just as he does on similar shows in Atlanta, New Orleans and Des Moines--and talks recruiting.

“Whatever adjective you want to use-- unbelievable, awesome, obscene, completely distorted from reality. Keep going in that direction and you’ll get an idea what kind of reaction we get from those shows,” Sham said. “Some people can never hear enough about recruiting.”

Emfinger, Bob Gibbons, Dick Lascola, Don Mead, Jeff Duva and many others who put out newsletters or run scouting services will attest to that. They’ll also bank on it.

Recruiting has become fairly big business, which means that it comes equipped with some fairly big problems. Some aspects of recruiting are handled without problems, coaches say. Sometimes the media do not add to the hype, the newsletters don’t fill up like the National Enquirer, the scouting services don’t rip people off and the All-American teams are not political.

But there are cases to the contrary, and that’s when coaches see trouble.

NEWSLETTERS

Willard Wells, football recruiting coordinator at Purdue: “The problem comes when you have a structure at a school in which the tail wags the dog, when the big-hitter alumnus who is pouring the bucks into the athletic department thinks he has all the answers. These guys believe that stuff that is being written. Then they tell us (coaches) how screwed up we are because we didn’t get this guy, that guy and the other guy.”

Dean Smith, basketball coach at North Carolina: “There’s a lot of people making money off the kids playing basketball. It’s unfortunate that fans, ours and with the other schools, are more interested in who’s being recruited than who we are playing now. And that really amazes me.”

Even Bob Gibbons, publisher of the respected All Star Sports Report in Lenoir, N.C., reads the publications with a grain of salt.

“In a way, we are the Rona Barretts of recruiting,” he said. “That kind of speculation is our bread and butter.”

How much bread these services bring in, however, is not common knowledge. Gibbons, like most others interviewed, won’t say how much his publication makes, but all say that nobody gets in the newsletter business to get rich. One, Jeff Duva, who runs the National College Recruiting Assn. in Woodland Hills, said that he has lost about $10,000 in his five years of operation.

But it must mean something that more newsletters and scouting services are being seen by college coaches around the country than ever before.

Gibbons, whose 10-year-old service deals mostly with basketball, said he has 5,000 subscribers who buy 18 newsletter packages ranging from $22 to $48. He also has a package that he sells for $200 to more than 200 colleges.

Subscribers get a dots-and-dashes type update on where players took recruiting trips and why they may prefer one school over another, with plenty of the words in quotation marks, underlined or capitalized for effect:

“6-5 G/F RANDY DOSS, Chicago, IL, will chose either DePaul or Ohio State. We’ll guess The Blue Demons, simply because they are under ‘pressure’ to sign some local players, and Doss is the top Windy City prospect now planning to make an early decision. However, he reportedly had a ‘great’ visit with ‘The Buckeyes.’ . . . 6-4 2G REX CHAPMAN, the ‘wondrous one’ from Owensboro, KY, will sign early. Virtually everyone has him almost wearing the colors of Louisville. We’ll play a ‘hunch’, and predict that Kentucky will prevail. The ‘darkhorse’ school is Georgia Tech, with North Carolina and Western Kentucky completing his final five.”

Translations of the recruitaholics shorthand? G/F is guard/forward and 2G is an off guard.

Even when someone like Gibbons makes a mistake--in the same issue he writes: “West Coast sources tell us that UCLA has a ‘verbal’ they’re keeping ‘mum’ about from 6-8 BF Stuart Thomas, Santa Ana, CA” before the Mater Dei star signed with Stanford--it doesn’t seem to make a difference to the readers. In Gibbons’ case, respect has already been earned from years of traveling around the country just to watch high school games.

Surprisingly, college coaches like to read the publications in hopes of learning about a potential recruit--where the player’s best friend is going to school or from where his idol graduated.

Newsletters also have been known to indirectly cost a school a player, as was the case last year with Stanley Brundy from Crenshaw.

According to Craig Impelman, an assistant at Weber State, Brundy planned to take his only recruiting trip to the Ogden, Utah, school, but then appeared on a national list of the “Top 10 Sleepers.”

Brundy called Impelman the next day, said he suddenly had some interest from DePaul and would visit the school. He later signed with the Blue Demons and is getting considerable playing time as a freshman.

So while the newsletters may be primarily for the fans, they also effect the colleges.

“They put extra pressure on the college coaches who aren’t doing a good job,” Emfinger said. “Some college coaches like to lie to their alumni, and I’m here to tell them otherwise. The people know who the good players are out there. (The publication) has made coaches more honest.”

Apparently, the newsletters are here to stay and are an accepted part of the recruiting game.

Said Dick James, football recruiting coordinator at Stanford: “Many times, people do them for the same reason that the colleges came up with the top 20 rankings. It makes for more interesting reading and conversation and controversy.”

THE MEDIA AND RECRUITING

Scott Hill, football recruiting coordinator at Oklahoma: “A player has enough coaches calling him if he is good. I’m talking once a week, just at the starter, from the USCs and UCLAs and Oklahomas and Notre Dames and Michigans, and that’s just five. They probably want to be able to sit down with their parents and discuss it all. But when the media gets involved, it just takes away more of the time they need.”

Dick Lascola, head of the Scouting Evaluation Assn. in Fallbrook, Calif.: “I would agree with that to some extent. The media puts a lot of undue pressure on kids that age. The talk and the hype, and pretty soon recruiting is almost a season of its own.

“The sports go from football to recruiting to spring football, and basketball is just something for the student body to do while the recruiting goes on.

“Maybe some of that is my fault for letting the door open and putting the first ace down (touting a player at the start of a season). Sometimes, we all build the high school players up too much.”

Lin Lofley, a sportswriter in charge of recruiting news at the Houston Chronicle, says the media should take more responsibility and not, as Lascola suggested, look at outside sources as the blame.

“This whole thing was out of hand before the scouting services ever came along,” he said. “We were talking the other day among ourselves, the reporters, that this monster was created by newspapers long ago.”

The monster is alive and well and living very comfortably in Texas, where recruiting is probably covered with more emphasis than any other state.

An example: On Jan. 23, about three weeks before letter-of-intent day, Lofley wrote a 600-word story on how nothing had happened the day before. The headline said it all: “No news remains no news in recruiting.”

His competition in town, the Post, has apparently cut back in its recruiting coverage, and Lofley talks almost as if he is going through withdrawals without anyone to challenge him in the extensive daily coverage.

“In the past, the Post and Chronicle really went tooth and nail,” he said. “They (the Post) have backed off a little now. But I know that the Times Herald and the Morning News are really going at it up in Dallas. Just like their regular newspaper wars.”

There are no such battles in Southern California, where recruiting and verbal commitments are, for the most part, back-of-the-section items. But most writers believe that the stories of who is going where have gained more attention and increased readership in recent years.

Just ask the people at the Long Beach Press-Telegram.

“It’s a really big thing,” said Frank Burlison, who covers high school and college sports for the paper. “Literally starting a couple of weeks before the letter-of-intent day and until a week after, when pretty much everyone has signed, we get about 100 calls a day. On the day players sign, we have to screen the calls because so many people are calling in.”

The Press-Telegram, however, is an extreme example compared to the rest of Southern California and the state because of the emphasis it puts on recruiting coverage. One writer, Don Borst, has been giving daily updates on the colleges and nearly full-time attention to the players. On Wednesday, D-Day, nine writers will be working on stories and charts involving major conferences and the independents, and all the local schools and players.

In particular, the paper’s “Best in the West” survey to determine the top players on the West Coast in football and basketball is respected by rival newspapers and schools around the country as authoritative since college coaches do the voting.

It was started 10 years ago by Gary Rausch, a former sports information director at UCLA and now an assistant athletic director at Arizona State. The survey has become almost like a prized possession and bragging point. Borst, who coordinates the football issue, recently answered 150 requests for copies.

“It’s the bible of high school recruiting,” said Steve Guiremand, who covers prep sports for the Herald Examiner. “That’s why we started the ‘Super 11,’ because there was so much interest in the ‘Best in the West.’ ”

That seems to translate into more interest in recruiting.

“I think it’s safe to say that more people are into recruiting than who won the girls’ volleyball title or something like that,” Guiremand said. “I know I get more calls on recruiting than anything else and I’m sure most other papers have the same kind of reaction.”

Counters John Cherwa, an assistant sports editor who handles prep coverage at The Times: “There is a fine line between reporting on the recruiting battle and becoming a part of the recruiting battle. The politics of recruiting, the pressures of recruiting and the deception that goes on in recruiting should force the media to be especially wary of not being used. We prefer to cover the high school athlete for his achievements in high school, not his potential achievements in college.”

Meanwhile, down in Houston, things may be looking a little more interesting for Lofley. Competition has arrived.

“Like I was saying, I was down because the Post wasn’t doing recruiting as hard and there was no one to fight with,” he said. “Then one night I went home, sat down with a drink in my hand and turned on the TV. And there was the sports guy breaking the story about Charles Arbuckle committing to UCLA. Well, I poured the drink down the sink, hauled back to work and didn’t get to sleep until three in the morning.”

The monster is, indeed, alive and well.

RECRUITING SERVICES

Purdue’s Wells: “You don’t (fool) me twice in this business.”

Oklahoma’s Hill: “I remember one case last year with a player from the Northeast. He was a running back, and his coach got me to look at some films. A heck of a player. So I went out to a game to watch him play. He had a different number and was a different size. In fact, he was a different player. He was totally different than anything I had seen the first time.”

Respect from college coaches means everything to those in the recruiting business--their future--and in football, Lascola and Emfinger are mentioned most often as those who have it.

“Dick will follow up and make phone calls to see how things are working out,” Stanford’s James said. “It’s different than just getting names in the mail, sending out a survey form and mailing those back out to the colleges. It’s going out and seeing the players and talking to as many people as possible. That’s what we like.”

Lascola, 43, a former high school and college coach in California, Arizona and Ohio, started the Scouting Evaluation Assn. in 1976 with a lot more enthusiasm than money after having quit teaching and spending three years “floundering around in the business world.”

Then he came up with what he likes to call the 13 apostles--the first schools that bought the service, the first people who trusted him.

Back then, when he asked questions about players regarding such things as college preferences, the high school coaches told him they didn’t think it was any of his business.” But today, with 80-85 clients, high school coaches are glad to make almost any information Lascola’s business. He and others in the field are often the first link between a player and a college.

In contrast to the established lot are Greg Croft, 25, and Jim Miceli, 28, of Altoona, Pa., who are planning to launch the first issue of the Northeast Recruiting Service in late July or early August. For this football and recruiting season, though, they rated some of the top players in the country and determined, as did nearly everyone else, that quarterback Jeff George of Warren Central in Indianapolis is the No. 1 prospect in the country.

But Croft and Miceli selected George and the other players without having seen them play, either in person or on film. The judgment was made, Croft said, after talking with high school coaches around the country, some colleges coaches and reading the other newsletters and scouting services. Next year, they’re planning to expand the operation and get films.

Still, they may not have a whole lot of trouble getting clients, what with colleges figuring that it’s better to deal with too many people than to miss any players.

The services, though, are basically a cross-reference for the colleges, coaches say, and anyone who uses them as the prime source of recruiting has a program in real trouble.

“A service is only as good as the person who uses it,” Lascola said. “Some colleges take it, use it and work from it. Some colleges take it, read it and then set it aside.”

Either way, there are plenty of people taking the services, and that means good business. Most coaches interviewed said that their schools spent about $3,000 a year for football services and that it was probably a safe figure for the rest of the country. Duva said that his company, NCRA, has 15 clients who pay $1,000 each for his top-of-the-line effort and about 60 others who buy packages ranging in price from $100 to $1,000.

So, this football and basketball recruiting is, indeed, fairly big business, and getting bigger.

“I’m sure when I drop dead that there will be people lining up to take my job,” Lascola said. “Then they’ll have to marry my wife because she’s the one who knows how to run the computer.”