Kentucky's Billy Gillispie has one. Bruce Weber, coach for Illinois, has one also. So does Jerry Wainright of DePaul. Tim Floyd, still dealing with the O.J. Mayo scandal at USC, has two.
I'm not talking about national championships, or even plush offices where they can relax in their leather chairs and watch game film.
No, I am talking about kids—young kids around the age of 14. Each one of these coaches in the past two years has offered a scholarship to an eighth or ninth grader.
Gillispie is the latest to join the group, and he has quickly become the biggest perpetrator of this trend. Not long ago he offered a scholarship to Michael Avery, a kid from Thousand Oaks, California—and Avery hasn't even chosen a high school yet.
Avery becomes the first player in Kentucky's class of 2012, which should complement the class of 2011 in which Gillispie already has three commitments!
Did I mention these kids are freshmen in high school?
Last year Tim Floyd did the same thing when he offered a scholarship to Ryan Boatright, an eighth grader from Aurora, Illinois. The year before that he offered a scholarship to Dwayne Polee, Jr., then a 14-year-old eighth grader.
Jereme Richmond, now considered one of the top players in the country for the class of 2010, played one game of high school basketball as a freshman before he committed to Bruce Weber.
This growing trend among college coaches has spread across the country and has become a full-blown epidemic. There is absolutely no reason why any college basketball coach should be offering scholarships or accepting commitments from students who haven't been to high school.
Forget for a minute the easy argument about their basketball skills and how they will grow. These coaches are essentially thumbing their noses at the institutions they represent.
It's no secret that basketball players have an easier time getting into school than your everyday student. But Gillispie is basically making the entire admissions department at Kentucky irrelevant by offering a scholarship to some kid who hasn't even taken algebra.
These coaches could at least pretend that academics mattered to them and wait until these 14-year-old kids demonstrate the academic ability to succeed in college.
I understand the pressure that is put on these coaches to win year in and year out. I also understand that recruiting is incredibly difficult, especially in today's game with so many teams competing over the same players.
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But this type of action is what will eventually lead to the rapid decline of any sort of integrity in college basketball.
Our country has become infatuated with youth sports. Overbearing parents scream at referees in youth soccer games, while websites like Rivals.com sprout up and immediately begin ranking players all the way down to the class of 2011—high school freshmen.
People eat it up. In the past three to four years, recruiting websites like Rivals.com and Scout.com have blown up, receiving more and more hits as kids and adults alike beg and plead for 18-year-old kids like Terrelle Pryor to attend their school.
The problem is these websites and John Q. Public aren't doing these kids any favors.
We can all agree, in the wake of the O.J. Mayo fiasco, that Mayo was essentially a basketball mercenary, someone who never should have attended college.
Why? The answer is simple...hype.
By the time he was a sophomore in high school, Mayo had an underground following and a serious reputation as the next big thing in basketball. The hype machine began rolling.
There were magazine covers, interviews with local television and national television, adoring fans. Mayo had become a pseudo-celebrity.
He was 16 years old, and coaches and sponsors and agents were filling his head with dreams of the NBA, and million-dollar shoe contracts, and his face on the cover of every prominent magazine and billboard in the country.
Now think about Michael Avery. He hasn't bounced around schools like Mayo did during high school. In fact he lives in a rather wealthy suburb in California, and it looks like he has a great support system surrounding him.
But now his face is plastered everywhere. His name is appearing in print in the Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Times, ESPN, Rivals.com. As a 14-year-old kid, all of that publicity must seem surreal, and it could go straight to his head.
Next thing you know, he could be graduating high school in the same situation LeBron was in—where he had accepted so many gifts, and received so much attention, that it would be impossible for Kentucky to even allow him in school for fear of the wrath they would incur from the NCAA.
But these coaches aren't doing themselves any favors either. They are taking commitments from kids who have barely hit puberty. How is it possible for Gillispie or anyone else to to evaluate the player's talent level when he is only 14 and has four years of structured basketball left?
Some of you might remember the story of Demetrius Walker, the 14-year-old who was being hyped by the mainstream media and was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated and mentioned by Fox Sports, amongst many. Everyone anointed him as the next LeBron James, the next great basketball player.
Now Walker is a high school junior, and quite the basketball player. But the next LeBron James? That seems like a stretch seeing as Walker is now ranked the 86th-best prospect in the country by Rivals.com and doesn't even achieve five-star status.
If they had six-stars on Rivals, I am sure LeBron would have achieved that, but his successor, Walker, is only four-star.
My point is that it's pointless and/or extremely difficult to get a grasp on the talent pool when the kids you are scouting are young and not yet fully developed or matured.
Jereme Richmond looks like he will pay off for Illinois, and there is a good chance Avery will be a stud when he is 18 as well. But Gillispie is using one of his precious scholarships on someone who may not have even ever kissed a girl.
He is the coach for the University of Kentucky, one of the most tradition-rich schools in the country and a perennial powerhouse. There will be plenty of good recruits he can nab four years down the road when Avery's class are seniors.
He doesn't need to start making wild and blind predictions about kids who still have four years to change their mind. Avery might not have even VISITED Kentucky yet, let alone spoken to Gillispie in depth.
Wait until Avery goes down to Los Angeles, gets inside Pauley Pavilion, and starts looking at the incredible facilities and amenities that UCLA has to offer—not to mention the general attractiveness of the co-ed population. Avery could change his mind and play there.
Where would that leave Gillispie? Up a creek—the same place the NCAA will be if they don't wise up and make some serious rules about the age when a player can give a commitment.
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9 days ago
I think your continued rampage about KY and BG shows your bias when you admit the others did it before him. Stop your crying and act like a journalist. Right now calling you a journalist would be a crime. Besides if its within the rules, and remember BOBBY KNIGHT did it years ago, why be a bitch about it. Honestly stick this in your ear before somebody sticks it up your ass. See ya.
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