Poster Child for Recruiting

Late Wednesday night my daughter, Marina High senior Chanda McLeod, will return home from high school basketball and club volleyball practices, plop into an old wooden chair at the kitchen table, and end 3 1/2 years of personal drama by signing a letter of intent to play volleyball at Arkansas.

As a reporter who has interviewed countless high school and college athletes in a 27-year career, I thought I knew everything about college recruiting.

Then I experienced it as a parent and was helpless to insulate my family, and especially my teen-age child, from the way this emotional roller coaster inevitably plays out.

It will be tough for my wife, Ellen, and me to have our first-born child leave us for the Ozarks. She’s the fourth generation of a family raised within walking distance of Pacific Coast Highway.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that this process isn’t about parents, many of whom push their kids into sports hoping they will get a scholarship offer and go to college for free. Recruiting is a rare passage to adulthood for a handful of high school athletes skilled enough to take their games to the next level.

After Marina won a 1997 state volleyball title and the 1998 Southern Section Division I-A basketball championship, Chanda, a two-time Southern Section first-team volleyball selection, told me she wanted to go to college to win an NCAA volleyball title.

Arkansas, ranked No. 13 in the country last fall, has recruited what many believe is among the top five freshman volleyball classes. Chanda has an opportunity to start as a freshman. In 2000 the Lady Razorbacks will travel internationally, perhaps to the Far East. Their roster includes players from Puerto Rico to China, Oregon to Albania.

And now it also features the school’s first freshman volleyball recruit from Southern California.

Getting to Chanda’s final decision is a story in itself. For one thing, she is a left-handed right-side player, known in volleyball circles as an opposite. It’s a position not every college puts high on its recruiting list, particularly for a player who stands only 5 feet 10.

To her disdain, many college coaches said they wanted to switch her to the left side as an outside hitter. That was true in the case of one Southern California coach, who dangled a scholarship in front of Chanda and three outside hitters, saying the first one to jump gets it.

Twice, college coaches led my daughter to believe she was their top recruit, but then offered their scholarships to someone else. Two of her campus visits were abruptly canceled when those colleges received quicker verbal commitments. Last November, Chanda read about one of those in the newspaper before the coach called her to break the news.

Nevertheless, she had fine institutions from which to choose, and it pained her to have to turn down other good offers. She tearfully rejected Indiana, for instance, even though she would be allowed to play volleyball and basketball. And the Hoosiers’ assistant volleyball coach, Elaina Oden, a two-time Olympian from Irvine High, is Chanda’s idol. But being a Hoosier, Chanda said, just wasn’t in her blood.

Only time will tell if being a Razorback is.

But for now, at least, during Wednesday’s small celebration with family and teammates, we’ll toast the end of this momentous event, even though the process wasn’t as glorious as most of us have been led to believe.

Letters, Letters

The first recruiting letters arrived in the summer of 1996. A basketball letter came from a community college, and two four-year schools--one each for basketball and volleyball--sent questionnaires, the only correspondence allowed by the NCAA before July 1 of a player’s junior year.

Eventually, letters from about 70 colleges filled three large packing cartons.

But getting letters doesn’t put you any closer to getting a scholarship. Most are fishing expeditions. Return the questionnaire and your name gets put on a mailing list.

Some of the mail was at least creative. Arkansas sent a 1999 team photo with Chanda’s head cut into it. It proclaimed her “1999 Freshman of the Year.”

Then there was a complimentary letter from a basketball coach in Northern California. Inside the envelope was mistakenly stuffed a second letter, word for word the same, but addressed to a girl in Delaware.

I mailed that second letter to the kid in Delaware. We never heard from that coach again.

On Display

It was 10:30 on a Thursday evening last July 2. I ventured out of the hotel past the state capitol building and into the Sacramento Convention Center. Competition in the 18-and-under division at the prestigious Davis Volleyball Festival was still in high gear.

This is an opportunity for college coaches to find prospective players. Most of the top national club teams, including Chanda’s top-seeded Orange County Volleyball Club NIKE team, had long-since concluded play for the day. But action was furious this night on 26 portable plastic courts.

The NCAA allows a head coach to observe each player four times a year. The festival, in which more than 9,000 girls ages 12-18 participate, and the rival Junior Olympics tournament, have made it easy for college coaches to do one-stop shopping. That’s why you rarely see a college coach attending a high school match anymore.

It wasn’t difficult to distinguish coaches from parents. Coaches wore rumpled polo shirts with distinctive school logos monogrammed on their breast pockets. They carried shoulder bags and stood in packs, row upon row, like cattle ranchers sizing up the herd.

According to NCAA rules, the coaches can’t talk to parents or players until the event is over, but players knew which coaches were watching them.

The finals were a night later, in front of 10,000 spectators and a national cable television audience at the UC Davis Recreation Center. The Orange County Volleyball Club, coached by Charlie Brande, swept NIKE Northwest of Oregon in a little more than an hour.

By midnight at a college bar near campus, young coaches were letting off steam. Parents gathered in a corner to celebrate their kids’ victory.

‘You’re going to get a lot of action when you get home,” a parent told me.

At daybreak on the Fourth of July, Ellen and I picked up Chanda and her teammate, Lindsay Phillips, now at Pepperdine, at the UC Davis dorms and began the long drive home.

It proved to be the calm before the storm.

Phone calls.com

Messages from college coaches were on our answering machine when we walked into the house that evening. The NCAA restricts coaches to one phone call a week after July 1 of a prospect’s senior year. It must be the worst part of the job. Coaches say the same things to several different kids. If they get lucky, they might land one.

Coaches who used e-mail made a more direct impression. The NCAA does not restrict Internet use, and a few coaches, including Arkansas assistant Beth Nuneviller, have been in contact with Chanda that way for nearly two years. Arkansas Coach Chris Poole swayed us with e-mail, including his correspondence of January 1:

“I can feel you slipping away from us and it is frustrating,” he wrote to Chanda. “Signing you would make it one of the best [recruiting classes] in the country.”

Home Visits

The door to our house swung open July 6 to the first of what proved to be a parade of two dozen visiting coaches.

“Ya’ll got a VCR?” asked Poole, who brought a video of volleyball matches at Barnhill Arena, Arkansas’ gym.

I learned quickly that if the head coach doesn’t visit, it’s a good bet the college isn’t that interested. Assistants and head coaches rarely seem to be on the same page.

A young assistant coach from Northern California, making the first home visit of his career, presented a three-page, typewritten letter. It detailed the full scholarship that I mistakenly thought he was offering.

Another head coach brought a scrapbook of pictures. She talked for an hour and a half about the football team and the school cheer.

We asked coaches about study halls, tutoring and homework on road trips. We asked if our daughter would have a chance to start as a freshman.

The young assistant with the typed document told another college’s assistant that my wife and I asked the toughest questions of the eight home visits he had made. He phoned back a few times, but in September, the head coach, eager to end recruiting, got a quicker commitment from someone else and we never heard from them again.

Trippin’

At 4 a.m., Ellen and I wheeled our car toward Malibu, where Chanda was on an official visit to Pepperdine. She had a 6:35 a.m. flight to Texas A&M; and was supposed to meet us in front of Firestone Fieldhouse at 5.

The NCAA allows each high school senior a total of five, 48-hour paid campus visits. But the trips can’t take place before the start of the school year, so you cram visits into the weekends.

Chanda wasn’t at the field house when we arrived. She was out late with some Pepperdine players, and the alarm clock, which belonged to one of her escorts, didn’t sound.

An hour later, a student security guard located her, asleep in a dorm, and she eventually boarded the plane as its door was being closed.

Two weeks later, when she returned from Indiana, she arrived at John Wayne Airport dehydrated and delirious.

“Mononucleosis,” the doctor said later. He blamed stress.

Decision Time

On Jan. 21, the day after Marina’s 56-37 basketball victory at Esperanza, Chanda and I sat at the kitchen table until 1:30 a.m.

We narrowed her choices to Arkansas or UC Santa Barbara.

I gave Chanda my cell phone and told her to use it when she was ready.

“I’m behind you whatever you choose,” I said. “You’re my daughter.”

The next morning she skipped her English class, went to her car in the Marina parking lot and placed a call that has already changed her life.

A few moments later, she made another call, to my office.

“Dad,” she said, in a relieved voice that barely held back tears. “I’m a Razorback.”