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Post by sarasota on Apr 25, 2020 10:17:30 GMT -5
Joe- I'm afraid that scenario is all too common.
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Post by trimster on Apr 25, 2020 10:38:09 GMT -5
So a kid plays AAU from age 7. Maybe his dad coaches his teams and makes sure he plays point guard and gets the most touches. Maybe he’s pretty good and works hard. Gives up all other sports and majors in hoops. Every weekend of the year there are tournaments in all corners of the state, some out of state requiring airplane rides and hotels. Family vacations are cancelled. Along the way he’s told over and over he’s the best around. Every now and then he finds himself on a team where he isn’t billed as the top star so he bounces. Flash forward a few years and he’s played for maybe 4-5 AAU teams, transferred in junior high and again in high school. He is constantly recorded on video and over the years he has a nice mix tape. He’s invested so much time by now that not playing college ball would be absurd. He starts getting recruited and tweets how blessed he is to have so much lover from everyone. He creates a basketball related twitter handle and an online persona. His grades are decent and he gets offers from low majors down to D3. But he’s been playing for so long and been told he’s the best for so long that’s not good enough. Doesn’t think too much about adulthood and getting a job, just living up to expectations as an athlete. To get higher offers be preps for a year and this goes well. Adds a few plays to his mix tape. Now he gets mid-major offers but that’s still not good enough. He’s maybe an inch too short or a step too slow. Ends up getting an offer from Holy Cross University, some little Catholic school up north that his family doesn’t know from Adam. His father says, “Hey there’s nothing wrong with Holy Cross. It’s not Duke but it’s D1. Did you know Bob Cousey went there?” Kid is like, “Who’s that?” Kid ends up buying into the recruitment chatter and signs a LOI. He knows it’s a great academic school but doesn’t really care about that. Dad says out of the corner of his mouth, “By the way if you do well there you can always transfer up.” Kid has had full permission to think of himself first and this just reinforces it, but knows how to talk the talk as it relates to being a teammate. He shows up to HC with good enough intentions but with a little bit of a chip on his shoulder. Finds HC to be hard academically. Does OK as the hoops seasons go on but finds HC to be a far less glamorous place to play D1 basketball. No much fan support, losses pile up, crappy gym, apathetic students and fans, no celebrity status, not even a score board with video. Now maybe the kid isn’t getting much playing time and becomes unhappy. Or maybe he’s doing so well that he is again convinced he should have been given a high major offer. Starts to think about bouncing and maybe starts looking for things to complain about. Maybe he decides he wants to go to a warmer place or have an easier course load or major. Decides his hoop dreams are not coming true and that’s a heavy load to bear after all these years of work and being told how great he is. It’s now or never. Enter the transfer portal. He gets interest from a high major school whose top two players just went pro after 1-2 years and he wouldn’t even have to sit out a year. He bounces and never again thinks of Mt. St. James, his teammates, or the value of degree he just crapped on. Rinse and repeat. For HC, this may be how it goes indefinitely. Well said Joe. Unfortunately, it applies basically across the board at the low D1 programs with the exception of the Ivies. If you are a coach, you are always recruiting, not that you weren’t before, but now more so than ever. You are spending more time recruiting your current players. If you are an AD, you always have a short list of head coaching candidates in your mind if not your desk drawer. If you are a president, you know you will be replacing the AD you hired in a relatively short time period if he or she has a successful program. It is what it is.
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Post by longsuffering on Apr 25, 2020 13:53:03 GMT -5
R.P. sr. was not walking out that door. He still hasn't. Somebody has to make sure there's always a ticket left for Togo. May they both live long and prosper.
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Post by nycrusader2010 on Apr 25, 2020 15:18:10 GMT -5
Joe basically nailed it. The post overall reinforces my theory that in today's social media-hype age, "real" relationships are not valued as highly as in the past. Virtual popularity is at a premium.
The thing is, schools like Holy Cross SHOULD be somewhat immune to this transfer pandemic. We are proudly an academics-first, values driven institution. We're not exactly Bryant or Central Connecticut State. I'm certain that throughout the recruiting process, it's pretty deeply reinforced that recruited athletes are here not just to play sports. During the Willard era, both men's and women's basketball players were highly integrated into the community at large. The Torey Thomas, Keith Simmons and Kevin Hamiltons of the world could have dropped HC like a hat and taken their talents to bigger programs. They didn't in large part because of the value of the Holy Cross degree and because of the community they were (and still are) a part of. The Adam May and Josh Jones types also stayed despite what must have been disappointing and/or diminishing levels of playing time. From what I was told, under Milan Brown, the basketball team became more isolated from the student body. Maybe (or perhaps definitely) that continued under Carmody and we're still waiting for a true "culture change" to take hold under Nelson?
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Post by hchoops on Apr 25, 2020 17:29:08 GMT -5
Today’s player, as Joe accurately describes, is very different from the Hamiltons, Thomases, and Simmons. One person immersed in the sport for 50+ years, says it is diseased at all levels,
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on Apr 25, 2020 17:47:44 GMT -5
AH, could have been the FBI/sneaker thing. That didn't occur to me at the time, but certainly makes sense. To my ear, he said it in the context of the qualities he was looking for in a new head basketball coach. The first quality he mentioned was that "he had to be clean as a whistle". Which made RP a non-starter. I wondered whether he ever reads this board!?
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Post by timholycross on Apr 25, 2020 17:52:58 GMT -5
Be careful, PP, we seem to be jumping between P families here! One being Pitino and the other Perry. Both have a RP elder and younger, too.
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Post by Tom on Apr 25, 2020 22:32:01 GMT -5
Be careful, PP, we seem to be jumping between P families here! One being Pitino and the other Perry. Both have a RP elder and younger, too. Comparing RP's, given the criteria in an earlier post, one fits the mold as clean as a whistle, one does not. At least in my opinion
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