Miami coaches say recruiting has changed

Technology allows coaches to expand their reach beyond area.

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By Pete Conrad, Staff Writer 11:59 PM Saturday, July 2, 2011

OXFORD — College recruiting isn’t what it used to be. Everything has changed, and not just a little.

Improved technology has made the process of landing that special, perfect-fit athlete so much easier. And so much more frustrating. Just ask Miami University’s Charlie Coles, Maria Fantanarosa and Don Treadwell. They’ve seen, first hand, the fundamental changes in recruiting over a combined span of 72 years on the road.

Technology rules

Treadwell still is two months away from taking the field for the first time as a head football coach, but when it comes to recruiting he is an old-timer.

“To be honest, I’ve been involved in recruiting for at least 30 years, ever since I was a grad assistant,” Treadwell said.

College recruiting began to emerge from the dark ages about a decade ago.

“No question, 10 years ago you started seeing a lot of changes starting with the advent of new technology,” he said. “These recruiting services have produced so much insight into the location of potential athletes, they do a lot of the leg work. Almost every state has their own recruiting service.”

But coaches who rely too much on these services, he warned, do so at their own peril.

“It’s like a GPS that has a general idea of when you’re going but doesn’t have the exact address,” Treadwell said, adding that recruiting services “can’t show everything.” Statistics, yes. Attitude, demeanor, performance in the classroom, no.

“It just helps you with time management,” he said.

Expanding the field

Technology also has allowed coaches to reach farther, to look beyond their university’s own backyard. Now a laptop and the Internet can be two of a coach’s most valuable recruiting tools.

“Years ago you would just usually recruit Ohio and maybe Indiana and maybe look at Kentucky,” said Coles, who is in his 16th year at the helm of Miami men’s basketball.

“But with all of the technology, you know about all the kids across the country,” he said. “It used to be only the big schools who knew all the kids.”

Over the last several years Coles’ roster has included players from Georgia, Missouri, California and Colorado.

Another thing which has helped expand the recruiting base, according to Fantanarosa, the Miami women’s basketball coach, is an increase in the size of coaching staffs.

“Our staff has gotten a lot bigger,” she said. “At Xavier it was just Mark and me,” she said, referring to her stint as an assistant coach with the Musketeers, whose head coach at the time was Mark Ehlen. “Now at Miami we have four coaches (including Ehlen, now an assistant on Fantamarosa’s staff). We’re able to talk to more AAU players and to more recruits in general.”

Hi, how R U?

Technology has forced coaches to adapt in the way they communicate.

The NCAA has banned coaches from sending text messages to recruits. Still, this is becoming a text-message/email kind of world, especially for teenagers and young adults. It’s the way they communicate. Short bursts of words have replaced long, thoughtful, in-depth conversations.

All a coach can do is shrug and think to themselves “LO” (normally an Internet abbreviation for “laugh out loud” but in this case maybe it should be “lots of luck”).

“Communication (with recruits) can be as short as 2-3 sentences,” Fantanarosa said. “Kids don’t want to talk on the phone for a long time.

“Their communication skills are different, more compact,” she said. “It’s just something we’ve had to continue to adjust to.”

All in one place

Coles has been forced to adjust to the notion of watching many of the nation’s top recruits playing in a small number of national tournaments in July. It does have the advantage of convenience.

“They used to play all over the country in local summer leagues,” he remembered. “Now we go to Florida (Lake Buena Vista) for the AAU nationals and to Indianapolis (for the Hoosier Shootout) and coach (Jermaine) Henderson is going to Las Vegas in late July.

“In the ’80s kids weren’t playing a lot of AAU basketball,” he said. “They were sticking with their local summer teams.”

Coles is not overjoyed with the concept of AAU basketball.

“One thing about AAU, you don’t always get a good brand of basketball, and that’s not good for kids coming to college,” he said. “It’s not that the AAU coaches don’t know fundamentals. It’s just that the players don’t practice very much because they’re always playing games, and that’s not good.”

A matter of money

Everything costs more these days. It’s a fact of life, always has been. Recruiting is more expensive.

That’s not at the top of the list of recruiting changes as far as Treadwell and Coles are concerned, but Fantanarosa, for one, is incredulous at the cost of simply watching games at some of the elite summer tournaments.

It’s good that you get to see the best players in a span of about 20 days, she said.

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NCAA recruiting spending: 2009-10 school year

Division I-A $89,158,785

Division I-AA $31,518,410

Division I-AAA* $18,610,679

All members $174,010,596

* No football

Source: U.S. Department of Education

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