New Rules Would Limit Recruiting

If the National Assn. of Basketball Coaches has its way, college coaches, club coaches and camp organizers will play a substantially reduced role in the summertime recruiting of high school and junior college basketball players.

The NABC Board of Directors has proposed restricting the summer recruiting season to a series of USA Basketball Development camps, state high school sanctioned all-star games and national junior college-sanctioned all-star events.

College coaches would be banned from contacting high school players on the telephone until Aug. 15 before their senior year, with the exception of one call in April or May. They also would be restricted from speaking on the phone with high school, AAU or summer coaches from July 1 through Aug. 14.

The proposals are designed to reduce the time spent by college coaches recruiting during the summer. They also would lessen the influence of club coaches and camp organizers, particularly in boys’ basketball, where the lure of exposure to college recruiters has been used as a way to attract top players to their teams and events.

“I’m for anything that restricts all-star and AAU coaches,” Villa Park boys’ basketball Coach Kevin Reynolds said. “There is so much negative influence out there and AAU and all-star coaches have no governing body or rules that they come under. Our rules are the CIF, but these guys are only in it for themselves.”

At the same time, the NABC is proposing to increase the number of evaluation days permitted during the fall and spring. Currently, there are 23 days available in July for coaches to evaluate prospective athletes and 40 days between Nov. 17 and March 15.

“There are concerns about the number of events being conducted during the summer,” said Jim Haney, executive director of the NABC. “The summer is becoming increasingly more important and detracts from the high school season. The goal was to increase the opportunities for high school and junior college coaches to take a more prominent position in the recruiting process.”

The proposal was discussed by the NCAA Management Council at its recent meeting in Kansas City, Mo., and is expected to be forwarded to the NCAA subcommittee on recruiting, Shane Lyons, an NCAA Senior Membership Service representative.

The Management Council wants to hear opinions from the subcommittee and other basketball constituency groups, Lyons said. Legislation will probably be drafted at the next Management Council meeting Jan. 9-10, with a possible vote at its April meeting.

If, as expected, the plan gains momentum, it will then take legislative form. Changes in the college recruiting calendar probably won’t take effect until 1999 at the earliest, Lyons said.

Sonny Vaccaro, a representative of Adidas who runs the prestigious ABCD summer camp in New Jersey, strongly criticized the proposal. In particular, Vaccaro objects to making USA Basketball the only organization sanctioned to run summer camps that can be attended by college coaches.

“Who deemed the wisdom of Solomon on these people?” Vaccaro said. “If they make summer a dead period for all organizations, Sonny Vaccaro will lead the parade down Broadway. But who said the people who run USA Basketball are moral?”

USA Basketball has formed a committee to develop the concepts for running eight regional camps under the proposal, Haney said.

The proposal could have a significant financial impact on such tournament organizers as the Chatsworth-based Pump brothers, Dana and David, who sponsor more than a dozen camps and all-star competitions during the summer, including an all-star camp at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson that has attracted top Orange County players in the past.

“All I do is provide venues for kids to gain exposure,” David Pump said. “This is my source of income. This is what I do for a living.”

Nike spokesman Vizhier Mooney said Nike would continue to support its prestigious All-American camp held in the summer even if coaches were barred from attending. She said Nike endorses changes in the summer recruiting period.

“Clearly, what’s happening is the current recruiting environment breeds a frenzy during the summer,” Mooney said.

Former Long Beach State and Oregon assistant coach Bobby Braswell, now Cal State Northridge’s basketball coach, is in favor of shortening the summer recruiting period. As an assistant coach, Braswell did most of the recruiting at Oregon and Long Beach.

“It’s just too long,” he said. “By the second or third weeks, we’re just out there because everyone else is out there.”

But Cal State Fullerton basketball Coach Bob Hawking says he’s mostly reserving judgment on the proposal.

“I don’t think they have all the kinks worked out yet,” Hawking said. “I do think they’ll be hard-pressed to get this done by next summer anyway, even though that’s what they’ve been talking about.”

Generally, Hawking has been opposed to additional restrictions placed on the time coaches can recruit. He thinks that favors the traditional established programs, at the expense of ones that are developing.

Longtime Brea Olinda Coach Gene Lloyd, who considers himself old-fashioned and has never kept it a secret that he detests outside influences on high school players, applauded the proposal.

“To me, this is a long time coming,” Lloyd said. “This has been a problem that I didn’t have to face prior to 1986 or so. When players were being evaluated by college coaches then, it included the main man in his career, an educator who was his coach, who had more in mind than making a buck or glorifying their name.”

Coach Gary McKnight of Mater Dei agreed.

“I remember a time when I had Dean Smith, Roy Williams, John Thompson and [Jerry] Tarkanian all together [in our gym] on the same day,” he said. “Nowadays I don’t see any of those guys here. They are so confined in their time by attending these summer all-star camps that they can’t stop by and make small talk because of all the time they spend recruiting.”

McKnight and other high school coaches say they have more interest in a player’s well-being than all-star coaches do.

“The all-star coach gets the kid in prime time, during the summer,” McKnight said. “The all-star coach doesn’t have to deal with whether or not a kid has homework, or has failed a test or has acne or has just broken up with his girlfriend. He’s with them in prime time with no problems. High school coaches have to deal with all of that.”

Longtime Ocean View Coach Jim Harris, who is expected to have one of the county’s top-ranked boys’ teams this winter, believes college coaches will benefit more from dealing directly with high school coaches, rather than all-star coaches.

“By and large, if all of these [all-star camps and coaches] were upstanding and in it for the kids, there wouldn’t be a problem,” Harris said. “But it appears that too many of them are in this for themselves, whether it means making money off basketball schools or camps or a particular [all-star team] team, or whether some organization pays a person to contact these kids to get them involved in a product. It may just be that these people have an ego and they use [the all-star] process to be able to drop names to take credit for a kid’s development.”

Already, the NABC may be backing down from a proposal to change its early letter-of-intent signing period from November to late December or January. Some prep coaches, such as McKnight, favor the change, but others complained that a later signing date would help only high-profile colleges.

Hawking said the current early signing date has made it necessary for coaches to make earlier decisions on prospects, and has put “more clout in the hands of the AAU summer coaches, and taken it out of the hands of high school coaches.”

Whichever new recruiting rules are adopted, Haney said the proposals have been “a catalyst for discussion.”

“The consensus is there needs to be a change,” he said.

Staff writers Lon Eubanks and Paul McLeod contributed to this story.