College Basketball Becomes a Game Played by Recruiters : Courting Top Prospects Keeps Successful Coaches on the Run and Puts Points on the Scoreboard

North Carolina basketball Coach Dean Smith was on the phone in late November talking about the basketball-mad fans along Tobacco Road. The Tarheels had yet to play a game on their 1986-87 schedule, but the people Smith described had little interest in how the team would fare against UCLA, Atlantic Coast Conference opponents or anyone else it might meet in the NCAA Final Four.

These fans were already getting fired up for the next season--the recruiting season.

“In this area and across the country, it’s almost become another sport,” Smith said. “People are more concerned with who you’re getting rather than how the team is doing.”

The key players in the recruiting game are the college coaching staffs and the high school prospects and their parents. It is a game that pits the savvy of the recruiters against the relative naivete of most recruits. The two sides approach from different perspectives, but each manipulates the other to a degree in order to achieve its end.

It is a process that begins for a player as early as junior high and ultimately ends with the signing of a letter of intent as a high school senior. Along the way, there will be letters and telephone calls, home visits, more letters and telephone calls, campus visits, and more letters and telephone calls.

The NCAA allows coaches to make in-person contact with recruits from Sept. 1 to Oct. 1 and from March 1 or the player’s last official contest to May 15. There is, however, no limit on the number of phone calls or letters a college program can generate.

Prospects and coaches agree that it is often an arduous process. The romanticism of wooing and being wooed wears quickly.

Fairfax High senior Sean Higgins signed with UCLA in November after being contacted by most of the Division I programs in the country.

“Recruitment’s a drag,” Higgins told Times staff writer Robert Yount. “When it starts, it’s all happy-go-lucky, you’re being recruited and everything, but when it gets down to crunch time, you get headaches. I had more headaches this, my senior year, than all the rest of my life.”

Said Cal State Fullerton Coach George McQuarn: “It gets old after a while. The idea of taking planes from one city to another and seeing kids play sounds great to most people. But you have to remember you’re dealing with 17- and 18-year-olds. Sometimes they change their minds in a minute.”

McQuarn, like most coaches, has firsthand experience in the one-that-got-away department. As an assistant coach at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in 1979, McQuarn recruited Laker guard Byron Scott, then a senior at Morningside High.

At a press conference, Scott announced that he was going to UNLV. McQuarn was thrilled. The Runnin’ Rebels’ boosters were ecstatic.

Scott signed a letter of intent with Arizona State.

“I made a tactical mistake,” McQuarn said. “I spent too much time with the kid and the school principal and not enough time with the mother.”

The players aren’t the only ones guilty of surprising changes of heart and priority.

“There are kids that will say, ‘I really like school A and want to go there, but I’m going to wait and see if I can go to school B,” Pepperdine Coach Jim Harrick said. “But I can’t really fault them because there are schools that do the same thing.”

There are also hundreds of boys and girls playing high school basketball who are under the delusion that they are being seriously recruited by some of the biggest basketball schools in the nation because they received a form letter or information card in the mail.

Those mailings are culled from all-star camp sign-up sheets, scouting service evaluations and other sources. The letter is one of the first steps in the paring down process coaching staffs annually conduct to fill the limited number of scholarships available for the next season.

During the summer, leading up to November’s early signing period for seniors, a college program will consider as many as 30 candidates for three scholarships, according to Arizona Coach Lute Olson.

“It changes as your program gets more established,” said Olson, in his fourth year at Arizona. “When your program is down, you need to attract a lot more kids.”

Olson took over an Arizona program that had gone 4-24 in 1982-83. In his first season the Wildcats went 11-17 and Olson had five scholarships available for the next year.

Olson made 25 home visits after his first year, hoping to get the NCAA-allowed maximum 18 players to check out the campus. Sixteen players eventually came to Tucson before the scholarships were filled.

Last season, coming off a 21-10 record, Olson visited 11 homes with three scholarships to give. Eight of the players agreed to make campus visits. Three of the first five who journeyed to Tucson committed to the school. The rest had to find another place to play.

“That will be more typical now that our program is established,” Olson said. “I would be surprised if we go into more than 10 homes next year.”

At Pepperdine, Harrick said he will recruit 15 players to fill the need for one guard, one forward and a center.

McQuarn, however, said he is lucky if he can find five or six players to recruit, given his budget and NCAA restrictions that allow for on-site player evaluation only during certain periods.

“We’re not Kentucky or UCLA,” he said. “A lot of times, we’re looking at a marginal kid you have to see five or six times to make a valid judgment. All the people who are making decisions about recruiting periods are the big-time programs that are recruiting the blue-chippers.”

The question of whom to pursue and in what fashion is generally left to assistant coaches, who do the real legwork in recruiting.

Assistants traverse the country or a particular region to check, recheck and cross-check prospects. Using scouting service reports and other sources of information, assistant coaches dot the bleachers at spring leagues, summer leagues, regular-season games, tournaments, all-star camps and practices.

“Calling certain head coaches good recruiters is a misnomer,” said Olson, who plays down the fact that he is considered one of the best. “I think the reason some of us get that reputation is for our ability to pick assistant coaches.”

It is the assistants’ responsibility to prep the recruit, the parents and the head coach for what in most cases is the most important part of the process--the home visit.

Some head coaches prefer to make a home visit by themselves and others bring their entire staff. Some stress academics and others focus on athletics. Some bring videotapes and others show a slide presentation.

“Anyone who is coaching successfully at the major-college level is very, very, very good in the home,” Harrick said. “When you’re going in for a home visit, it’s a lot like a game. You go in and adjust.

“I treat it as a business meeting. I have a packet I present and I like to sit at the dining room table and make eye contact with everyone involved. I stay away from the couch.”

Mark Georgeson, a 6-10 center at Marina High in Huntington Beach, decided early that he wanted to attend a college in the West.

The Georgeson home had been inundated with phone calls and letters from universities across the nation after Mark made an impressive showing last summer at the Nike all-star camp in Princeton, N.J.

He scheduled home visits with seven Pac 10 schools and Pepperdine.

“You’ve talked to them on the phone so many times, it seems like you know them,” said Georgeson, who signed with Arizona. “They come in and shoot the bull a little and then they have a presentation. I think you can hear only so much about a school, but you’re lucky to have them in your home and you don’t want to be rude.”

Many players and their parents, however, make the mistake of not asking important questions for fear of offending their guests.

“There is one question that absolutely every parent should ask when a coach is in their home,” Harrick said. “Where does my son stand with you?”

And in more and more cases, where does my daughter stand with you?

Louisville High center Andrea Knapp was one of the most highly recruited girl basketball players before this season. The 6-2 senior was contacted by 160 schools. When the coaches came calling at the Knapp household, Andrea had a list of 20 questions to ask regarding academics, social life and tutoring programs.

“My schoolwork really went down during the recruiting, and I think my mom got sick of making dessert,” said Knapp, who signed with UC Berkeley. “My dad always asked the basketball questions.

“He put each of them on the spot when he asked, ‘If Andrea said she’d sign with you today, would you offer her a scholarship?’ ”

The campus visit, the final stage of the recruiting process, can also be the turning point in a player’s decision. The NCAA allows players to make five official visits that are paid for by the universities. A recruit may take more trips at his or her own expense.

Georgeson visited UC Berkeley, Arizona and Washington. The routine was pretty much the same. Leave Southern California on a Friday, have dinner with the coach, tour the campus and meet some dignitaries the next day and go out that night with some of the players.

“It’s pretty helpful and you can get a good idea of what it might be like to go to school there,” Georgeson said. “At some schools, the players are fired up and they have a lot of pride in the program. At others, you could tell people weren’t happy. You can ask the players about the coach, too.”

When Knapp visited Western Kentucky, she got a glimpse of a high-powered basketball program and the fall colors of the state. At UNLV, she was taken to see Kool and the Gang at Caesar’s Palace. At UC Irvine, she was able to enjoy the nearby beach.

“For women, there is no pro basketball after college so what it really comes down to is education,” Knapp said. “I said to myself, ‘If you got injured and could never play basketball again, where would you want to be?’ That’s why I chose Cal.”

Some players still feel the effects of the process even after the decision is made and the pressure is off. Georgeson spent the early part of December writing thank you notes and letters to coaches who recruited him.

“It’s hard because you shouldn’t feel guilty about choosing one school over another, but you do,” Georgeson said. “It’s a business. You can’t take it personally.”

The coaches agree. Most have learned that lesson through experience and have given up trying to figure out why a prized recruit decides to go elsewhere.

Dean Smith said he stopped being disappointed in 1970 when Tom McMillen told him he was coming to North Carolina and then went to Maryland. Harrick thought Michael Cooper was going to Pepperdine, but he went to the University of New Mexico.

“You just have to shrug it off,” Harrick said. “When I got into college coaching, I didn’t want to be the kind of guy who looks like he’s in heat, like a dog with his tongue hanging out. If I lost a guy, I didn’t want to jump off a mountain.

“I’ve had some crushers just like everyone else. You go out and spend thousands of dollars recruiting kids and come up with nothing. Then you’re on vacation and you find out a great player is transferring in.

“It’s a strange, strange game.”