December 2008 Archives

Too many people criticize the recruiting process without understanding what it is all about. They badly need an education, a cold splash of reality. Recruiting may not be what we want it to be but it is what it is and it isn't going to change. So people, especially parents, must learn to deal with it.

Since I began covering high school sports in the 1950s, I've become acquainted with the process and some of the best football and basketball recruiters who ever persuaded a highly impressionable teenager to leave his family, friends and hometown for a name on a map that the youngster didn't know existed. In some cases, there wasn't even a name.

Sam Miranda was the best of all. He was an all-state basketball player at Collinsville under Vergil Fletcher, played at Indiana, then coached at Kankakee before joining Ted Owens' staff at Kansas.

Isn't high school sports supposed to be all about a level playing field?

Isn't that what Title IX was all about? Isn't that what the class system is all about? The multiplier? Giving each school an opportunity to be competitive with every other school?

This isn't collegiate or professional sports. This isn't supposed to be about a salary cap or a luxury tax or Boone T. Pickens. This isn't about who can produce the best team that money can buy.

High school sports in Illinois has a sense of sanity when the Illinois High School Association enforced a rule that prohibited teams from traveling more than 300 miles to compete in contests.

Tom Lemming and Van Coleman are two of the most respected recruiting analysts in the country. Both have been evaluating high school talent for 30 years, Lemming in football and Coleman in basketball. The only other evaluator who belongs in their class is Bob Gibbons, who began covering basketball about the same time as Coleman.

Although they are associated with different sports, they have a lot in common. Both, for example, place an emphasis on quickness and athletic ability while evaluating the skill level of prospects. And both believe statistics count for nothing.

"The biggest difference between a scout and a fan is the use of statistics," Coleman said. "A fan thinks statistics tell everything. I look for things that fans don't look for. Fans get hung up on statistics. They don't anything to me."

The class of 2010 in the Chicago area is being touted as one of the most talented groups of football players in years, maybe the best since 1986, which was to football what the class of 1979 was to basketball.

But according to Scout.com, which recently released its list of the top 100 juniors in the nation almost before the 2008 season had ended, only two local products rank among the best--Fremd offensive lineman Christian Lombard and Johnsburg tight end C.J. Fiedorowicz.

Chicago-based recruiting analyst Tom Lemming disagrees. He insists wide receiver Kyle Prater of Proviso West is a top 100 player. And he believes at least six other Chicago area juniors could make the elite list by the end of the 2009 season.

If you are true high school sports fan, a real bleacher bum, if you are Chicagoan that knows how to get from Englewood to Ravenswood to Rogers Park, then you have to be enjoying Sun-Times sportswriter Neil Hayes' weekly series on the 25 greatest athletes in Chicago history. It's a great read.

The last installment is Sunday and you have to have been living on another planet if you didn't figure out that the No. 1 choice is Red Grange.

I had a hand in the selections. I was asked to submit my list of the top 25 athletes. So were several other Sun-Times writers. Hayes made the final selections. I don't have a problem with his choices.

I've been covering and observing high school basketball for more than 50 years and my memories of the way it was are as fresh as the way it is.

I enjoyed it more when I was covering as many as seven or eight games in a week for the old Chicago Daily News or spending every waking minute at the Proviso West Holiday Tournament or attending as many as six holiday tournaments in one day.

Driving to Pontiac to see the top-seeded team, usually Bloom or Quincy, play at 10:30 in the morning.

My first trip to the Centralia Holiday Tournament.

If you are a graduate of a Big 10 school and a fan of Big 10 football, you had to come away from Saturday's menu of college football extravaganzas--Florida/Alabama, USC/UCLA and Oklahoma/Missouri--with a bad case of indigestion.

As the great Bobby Jones told a golf writer after seeing Jack Nicklaus for the first time: "He plays a game with which I am unfamiliar."

Well, the SEC, Pac-10 and Big 12 play a game that is unfamiliar to the Big 10. Those teams have more speed, more athleticism and more talent. Not to mention the electric atmosphere and enthusiasm generated by the crowds. You don't see that kind of excitement this side of a Michigan/Ohio State game.