SIGN OF THE TIMES : More Recruits Are Committing Early to Relieve Pressure

Krista Dill and Brennon Martin play different sports and have never met. Yet, the collegiate paths they have chosen share a common thread.

Each decided to put an early end to the college recruiting process by committing soon after the start of their senior year.

Dill, a Newport Harbor volleyball player who turned down recruiting trips to Notre Dame and others, will attend Duke. Martin, a Trabuco Hills basketball player, chose Texas A&M;, forgoing a number of expense-paid campus visits offered by recruiters around the country.

While the NCAA says it keeps no statistics on the number of early commitments each year, coaches, players and recruiting experts seem to agree: More athletes are making their decisions sooner, though the jury is out whether this is the best thing to do.

“Committing early is definitely a trend,” said Cameron Dollar, a former UCLA player and Vanguard men’s basketball coach who is now the chief basketball recruiter for St. Louis University.

“Kids are tired of being bombarded by the phone calls and recruiting trips. In reality, if you have been playing for a while, you pretty much know where you want to go.”

Several factors appear to be fueling the trend. Among them are advanced technology, the desire to know what the future holds, increased competition for a limited number of scholarships and a desire to avoid the nuisances involved with a lengthy recruiting process.

The Net Effect

The Internet has made it easier for athletes to research colleges, discover where other high school players are committing and communicate with college coaches long before the NCAA officially allows coaches to contact recruits.

Because the NCAA doesn’t regulate the use of e-mail, it’s not unusual for hot-shot high school underclassmen, known as blue-chippers, to converse with college coaches on a regular basis, sometimes beginning as early as their freshman year.

Chat rooms allow athletes to exchange information about their recruiting trips and share the latest gossip about who is visiting where. Jane Jankowski, an NCAA spokeswoman, said computer technology has forced the NCAA to study the feasibility of moving up some of its seven early signing periods, when athletes formally commit for a period of a year to the colleges of their choice.

“It’s a huge relief to know who your incoming players are going to be,” Duke volleyball Coach Jolene Nagel said. Nagel received a commitment from Dill, a 6-foot-1 middle blocker, in September, five months before the early signing date.

“From a coach’s point of view, by the time our season begins in the fall, I’ve already begun to recruit for the next year,” Nagel said.

As director of compliance at UC Irvine, it’s Keith Shackleford’s job to make sure Anteater coaches follow the strict and sometimes murky NCAA recruiting rules. He believes early commitments help sort out the pecking order for coaches and players.

“If [a volleyball coach] signs a setter early, other setters can now look elsewhere,” Shackleford said. “It frees them up to consider options that may have closed otherwise. And if a setter really has his heart set on attending [a certain school], he can always choose to enroll as a walk-on.”

Risks and Rewards

Dill had more than two dozen college coaches drop by her house last summer to talk, but she didn’t take even one of her NCAA-allowed five recruiting trips before announcing her decision. On vacation with her mother last summer, she visited more than a half dozen East Coast schools.

“West Coast schools weren’t really an option,” Dill said. “I really like Duke’s coach. She’s just like someone’s best friend and she was at Georgetown before Duke and recruiting me then, so the interest was already there.”

Martin, a 6-foot-7 shooting guard, visited USC on his own and took an official trip to Texas A&M.; Two weeks ago, he canceled three other trips and announced he intends to sign with the Aggies on Wednesday, when the NCAA early signing period for basketball begins.

“I could get it done early and it would take the pressure off of me,” Martin said. “Now I can concentrate on my senior year and not worry about all those letters and phone calls.”

But are kids who commit early taking a chance? They have to, says Liz Ward, women’s volleyball coach at Mt. San Antonio College from 1993-95. Her daughter, Mater Dei senior setter Jennifer Ward, committed in September to attend Georgetown.

“Kids are pressured into making early commitments,” said Liz Ward, of Huntington Beach. “Coaches tell them they want their decision by September of their senior years. The sea is full of talent. You can’t wait any more. You’ve got to know where you want to go. Everyone is committing so fast.”

Stanford women’s basketball Coach Tara VanDerveer admits some coaches push too hard.

“I hate to see the student pressured by coaches and manipulated in ways where they get the facts confused so they just want to get it over instead of enjoying the process and taking their visits,” VanDerveer said. “Some people know what they want. That’s great. As coaches, we don’t want to waste our time. But I’ve seen coaches who have pressured the kids way too early, and it was not in the players’ best interests.”

VanDerveer believes one reason more athletes are committing early is because getting an education--not just playing sports--at a particular college has once again become a priority.

Dave Miller, USC assistant men’s basketball coach and recruiting coordinator, said that’s the way college sports were intended to be.

“It all goes back to having the high school coaches place more emphasis on the academics,” he said. “ If you do that, it puts young men and women in the position to sign early. I see it as an advantage to college coaches and the players.”

Education, in fact, was the determining factor for Brea Olinda’s Chelsea Trotter, a 6-3 All-American and The Times’ 1998-99 Orange County girls’ basketball player of the year. In early September, she committed to Stanford, a school she had favored since her junior high days.

“I’m really into academia and you can’t get a better education than at Stanford,” Trotter said. “And they’ve got a great basketball program.”

Trotter called the recruiting process “a pain in the butt” and said she was glad to stop the many phone calls and home visits.

That was also on the mind of Cedric Bozeman, a 6-5 junior guard at Mater Dei, when he decided recently to commit to UCLA.

“He didn’t care who the coach was,” Monarch Coach Gary McKnight said. “His whole life he’s favored UCLA and he just said, ‘I’m going to commit now.’ I think that’s a pretty intelligent move.”

But McKnight didn’t feel that way some years earlier when late-blooming swingman Sean Jackson made an early commitment to attend Wyoming, which he eventually left. McKnight was furious with Jackson, which begs the question, is there culpability involved when a player commits early?

“For him it was a mistake,” McKnight said. “He improved so much as the year went on that by the end of the season he was our best player on the floor and he could have gone anywhere in the Pac-10 and probably any upper-middle Division I school.”

Committing early may be the right thing for blue-chip athletes who want to end the recruiting process, but most high school athletes are not blue-chippers, points out Dave Stoeckel, who operates Athletic Scholarships Information Services, a Laguna Niguel company that helps match scholarships with athletes.

“A lot of times kids get an offer from a good school and they commit early out of fear of losing that scholarship,” Stoeckel said. “I say, don’t rush it. You’ve spent hours, your whole life, developing skills in this sport. Don’t suddenly jump at the first [offer] that comes along.”

Some coaches believe players who commit early often lose interest in their final year of high school.

“I guess it’s good for the kid because all the pressure goes away and he can sit back and enjoy himself,” Villa Park boys’ basketball Coach Kevin Reynolds said. “But there’s this kind of natural letdown that happens, and it’s tough from a coaching standpoint because it’s hard to find that nugget to motivate them.”

For the athletes, though, the positives of signing early often outweigh the negatives. In fact, the process by which Ross, one of the top volleyball recruits in the nation and The Times’ Orange County player of the year as a junior, came to select USC may be a textbook case for why it’s a good idea: It gives the athlete time to jockey for position if his or her first choice doesn’t work out.

Ross visited Stanford shortly after the end of her sophomore year. Though she was heavily recruited by UCLA, among a number of schools, she filed papers for early acceptance at Stanford.

When Stanford declined her request last summer, Ross made visits to UCLA and USC, where she found things to her liking.

“I wanted to take some trips,” Ross said. “But I knew that would prolong the process and I just wanted to get it over with, plus I knew I wanted to stay in Southern California.”