Just Preps : Great Fanfare of Their Own : Girls Get the Red-Carpet Treatment as Recruiting Drive Gears Up

As a highly recruited 6-foot-3 high school basketball player, Maylana Martin thought she had heard every imaginable sales pitch.

When the Perris High senior returned home one night last summer, however, there was a memorable message from Cheryl Miller. Miller, who was coaching at USC, wanted Martin to call her in Indianapolis. She left a number for a cellular phone that belonged to her famous NBA brother, Reggie Miller.

An impressed Martin returned the call, but several months later she signed with UCLA.

Going to extremes is nothing new in college recruiting, but the red-carpet treatment is no longer only for the boys. Martin, recently selected the state basketball player of the year by Cal-Hi Sports, is one of a growing number of girl athletes in the Southland who have been bombarded with enticing scholarship offers.

For Martin, the attention started when she was a 14-year-old freshman and didn’t subside until she signed her national letter of intent last November.

“The idea that boys are the only ones who get the royal treatment is totally false,” said Pam Walker, the assistant women’s basketball coach at UCLA. “I know we go just as much out of our way to impress a recruit as Jim Harrick and his staff do. And that’s the case at most of the big schools.”

Softball pitcher Lana Moran of San Bernardino Cajon isn’t sure how the top male athletes at her school were recruited, but she can attest to the barrage of attention she received from college coaches the last few years.

At a national tournament last summer in Midland, Texas, dozens of coaches were in the stands every time Moran pitched for her traveling all-star team. Her phone started ringing off the hook last July, the first month coaches could contact her in accordance with NCAA rules.

A.D. Moran, Lana’s father and her pitching coach since she was 8, recently had to clean out his garage to make room for the boxes of recruiting letters his daughter received from hundreds of colleges.

“I don’t even know how many boxes there are,” A.D. Moran said. “There wasn’t a day that went by for the past couple of years when Lana didn’t get at least one letter. It seemed everybody was interested.”

Moran, an honors students who is threatening to break several state pitching records, said she received at least 30 scholarship offers. And those were from schools that met her family’s long list of demands, which included a five-year scholarship that would be guaranteed even in the event of an injury.

When she visited Notre Dame, Moran had a meeting with Lou Holtz. At Washington, she was taken to a Mariners’ playoff game. She eventually signed with Oklahoma, which has one of the nation’s top programs.

“There are NCAA rules that govern when and where coaches can contact recruits, but I always felt their presence,” Moran said. “They watched my every move, talked to all my coaches and did whatever they could to get my attention. Softball is obviously a big deal to those who play it.”

Title IX changed the complexion of collegiate sports by requiring schools to have an equal number of men’s and women’s programs. As a result, colleges are offering women more athletic scholarships as their budgets increase.

At UCLA, for example, women’s basketball Coach Kathy Olivier has a recruiting budget of $40,000, while Harrick gets $60,000. Olivier and her two assistants zig-zag the country looking for the top players. During the summer, they are on the road almost every day attending all-star tournaments and camps.

During a tournament in Grapevine, Texas, last July, Martin said college coaches would wait an hour or more to get five minutes with her traveling team coach in the hope their kind words would get back to her.

When Martin spent a recruiting weekend at UCLA in October, she was taken to a football game and told she could order whatever she wanted. She was treated to a brunch in Malibu and shot baskets in Pauley Pavilion.

Chino basketball standout Rasheeda Clark signed with Colorado in November after returning from a weekend trip that she didn’t want to end.

Clark, a 5-7 guard, said her lavish hotel room was decorated with school memorabilia and stocked with enough snacks to last a month. She attended a football game and sat in on Coach Rick Neuheisel’s pregame pep talk.

Recruiting efforts are expected to increase as revenue from women’s sports continues to grow.

“There is a lot of competition out there for the top players, so you have to start early if you want to be part of the game,” UCLA’s Walker said. “The recruiting game has changed over the years, and it’s very intense.”

No one knows that better than Martin, who said she barely had time to sleep last fall while she was deciding on a college.

“I’ve never spent so much time talking on the telephone,” said Martin, who averaged 31 points and 18 rebounds last season. “I talked to a lot of people I didn’t know from schools I had never heard of. But they never seemed to be short on conversation.”