College Basketball Recruiting
College basketball is considered a “head count” sport. What this means is that any scholarship that is offered is a full ride scholarship. The NCAA allows each college basketball team 13 scholarships in Division 1. In college basketball recruiting, scouts are looking for players who have a good mix of talent.
A great way for an athlete to get increased exposure is to attend one or many of the basketball camps available each summer. These summer camps not only allow an athlete to show off their current skill sets, it also allows them to get some training and hopefully improve on or gain new skill sets. Many colleges run their own camps and provide additional training that is critical to getting noticed by college coaches and improving development.
Just like what happened with college football, college basketball recruiting has had massive changes since the birth of the internet. Most players are getting noticed and at a much younger age. It is not unusual to spot players that are not even in high school yet and to make a note to watch these players as they develop. The college basketball recruiting industry has exploded and currently there are 3 big college basketball recruiting websites. ESPN, Rivals, and Scout are the three big recruiting websites. ESPN is usually not as accurate and tends to sway their information towards different states and recruits, but that is a whole different story. Scout and Rivals are the two websites I personally use to obtain the most up to date information for college basketball recruiting. As I mentioned in another article, I am expecting big things from 247 Sports in the realm of college basketball recruiting, but for now I am going to keep the discussion to how basketball recruiting is currently.
Just like college football, athletes are rated from 1 Star (poor) to 5 Stars (excellent). Players are also given a national ranking (basically their ranking out of all the basketball players in their class) with 1 being the best, and some sites even give a state ranking as well. Another thing that basketball does like football is that press conference for important recruits are becoming more and more common. Student bodies and alumni that are big sports fans are really starting to follow the recruiting process and over the past few years have even developed forums and other smaller websites for the sole purpose of monitoring and posting information about potential and current recruits.
College basketball has had its share of problems and scandals with recruiting as well. Some of the more recent ones involving USC and O.J. Mayo and of course when you hear the words “recruiting violation” you think of coach Calipari, who is currently the coach at Kentucky. He has had recruiting violations at both of the previous schools he has coached at but has somehow escaped unscathed in the process. It will be interesting to see how long (or short) his tenure is at Kentucky.