NCAA Basketball Recruiting: Competition

Anything worth having takes work to obtain.  The higher the stakes, the more work is required to get it.  Whether it is a job promotion, rare collector’s item, or that perfect significant other; the higher the stakes, the more people you had to beat out to get it.  Recruiting is one in the same.  Let’s look at some curveballs the competitors will likely throw your way in trying to beat you out on top prospects.

Coach Calipari does not condone negative
recruiting (John Bazemore/Associated Press)

One route recruiting competitors take in getting an upper hand on players is negative recruiting, also known in today’s terms as “hating”. In general, hating is when a person wants to knock someone else down a notch to look better.1  Texas A&M coach Billy Kennedy was diagnosed with symptoms of early-onset Parkinson’s disease back in 2011. This lead to opposing coaches trying to convince Aggies recruit Alex Robinson that Kennedy’s health would not allow him to coach through Robinson’s college career.2  Other methods of negative recruiting could include:

·         Age of Coach

·         Coach about to be fired

·         Programs’ discipline issues

·         Lack of graduates

·         Skewing statistics

·         Manipulating depth charts

Not all recruiting competitions have the same approach.  Due to the closeness of the coaching fraternity, often times friends are matched against each other to jostle for recruits.  My initial experience of competing against an acquaintance of mine came in my first year on the recruiting trail.  At the conclusion of the event, I was torn to know that my former graduate assistant coach was already recruiting a player I was impressed with.  I quizzed a few of my coaching mentors about whether I should recruit the player, or if this would be considered operating in poor taste. They let me know that as long as I went about things the right way, all players were open targets. I was ecstatic when the player signed with us over the competition, but I was still uneasy until I finally ran into my ex-coach in person.  He simply congratulated me on the signing and we carried on having a good time as we always had.  That let me know that there is friendly competition in recruiting.

The natural reaction of a competitor is to find an advantage and capitalize on it.  In most cases, the advantages are about praising their own programs.  Then there are some who must cast a dark cloud on other schools to create the advantage for themselves.

REFERENCES

1(2004, March 2). Retrieved July 24, 2015, from http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hating

2Eisenberg, J. (2013, September 18). Billy Kennedy undeterred by foes using his Parkinson's to sway recruits away from Texas A&M. Retrieved July 24, 2015, from http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaab-the-dagger/billy-kennedy-undeterred-foes-using-parkinson-sway-recruits-192918064--ncaab.html