June 2010 Archives

What is so interesting about top 100 lists is the recruiting analysts who annually rank the leading football prospects in the nation--Tom Lemming, Rivals, Scout and ESPN, all dedicated and well-meaning competitors who put in plenty of time and effort--rarely agree on anything. So who's right? And who's wrong?

Take the class of 2011, for example. Lemming, Rivals, Scout and ESPN are in agreement on only four of the top 10 players--RB/LB James Wilder of Tampa, Fla., DE Jadaveon Clowney of Rock Hill, S.C., OL Cyrus Kouandijo of Hyattsville, Md., and RB Malcolm Brown of Cibolo, Texas.

Rivals, Scout and ESPN rank Clowney as the No. 1 player in the nation. Lemming lists Wilder and Clowney as his 1-2 choices.

It never is too early to begin speculating about the state basketball championship, especially if you are a Chicago Public League fan. The races for the 2011 state titles in Class 3A and 4A almost certainly will feature Whitney Young, Simeon, Morgan Park and Orr.

But the best team in the city could be De La Salle.

Coach Tom White declares he will put the most talent on the floor of any team he has had in his 16-year career. Last year's squad was 14-0 in the Catholic League and 19-6 overall against arguably the most competitive schedule in the state. The Meteors finally lost to Foreman in the sectional.

White's 2010-11 squad features what shapes up as the best front line in the state and six reliable and talented guards. They will be augmented by a sophomore squad that was 24-0 last season.

Van Coleman of Hoopmasters.com is one of the pioneers in the very competitive and often very controversial business of recruiting analysis. Coleman, like Bob Gibbons, has been evaluating high school basketball talent for more than 30 years, before ESPN and the Internet and cell phones, even before Worldwide Wes.

Coleman attended the recent NBA players camp in Charlottesville, Va., and came away very impressed with the performances of the contingent of representatives from the Chicago area. His report confirms, if there ever was any doubt, that the class of 2011 ranks among the best ever produced in the city and suburbs, comparable to 1979 and 1998.

Here are Coleman's evaluations of the Chicago area's top players, based on their performances at one of the nation's leading exposure camps:

Phillip Daniels, the Washington Redskins' defensive end and father of Vernon Hills wide receiver DaVaris Daniels, has expressed his displeasure over the story I wrote about his son on Tuesday. He chose to go public, which is his right, but he didn't provide a deliverable e-mail address so I could respond to his criticism.

I would suggest that Phillip should re-read the article for what it actually says, not for how he chooses to interpret it or read between the lines. Let's set the record straight:

1. I didn't fabricate the story and I didn't write a bunch of lies, as he claims.

2. I didn't write that DaVaris said he was unable to qualify academically.

3. I didn't write that DaVaris said he was going to Miami.

4. If the conversation was taped, Phillip knows I made two calls to DaVaris, the first that confirmed his earlier favoritism toward Notre Dame and the second to obtain his feelings about Miami. The quotes are accurate.

5. Phillip claims his son has 16 scholarship offers, not 13 as I mentioned in the article. DaVaris said he had 13 offers. Yahoo, Scout and Rivals also list 13. The figures are irrelevant. Only two matter.

6. Vernon Hills coach Tony Monken alerted the Chicago media that DaVaris would conduct a press conference at noon on Tuesday at the high school to announce his decision, either Notre Dame or Miami. We didn't make that up.

7. Now Phillip says that DaVaris was going to announce on Tuesday but he canceled because "he needs more time to decide and take his visits." So who's lying? If his son wasn't going to Miami, why didn't he go forward, announce the school and stuff it down the Sun-Times' throat? Or why was he ready to announce on Monday, then not ready on Tuesday? So who's fabricating the story? DaVaris said he wanted to announce on Tuesday, as a Father's Day present, that it was his father's idea. That's on the tape, too, isn't it, Phillip?

8. DaVaris said he would choose Notre Dame or Miami. If possible, the Sun-Times wanted to break the story. This is a very competitive media town, Notre Dame is a major player in the sports market, so we didn't want to wait for everybody to learn the news at a press conference if we could get it beforehand. The time has passed when the Tribune knew everything that was going on in the Bears' camp because the Bears' owner/coach and the Tribune's editor were pals.

9. I took journalistic license regarding his grades. It is a sensitive subject. The media and college recruiters have long been aware that DaVaris' grades were borderline. Last November, his coach generously listed his grade-point average at 2.0 on a 4.0 scale. His ACT score has never been revealed. DaVaris said on Monday that he is "completely fine." That isn't true. If it was, why didn't he commit to Notre Dame, his first choice? The fact is that Miami is the only major school on his list that can get him into school, with the possible exception of Oklahoma and perhaps Cincinnati.

10. But Phillip brings up another interesting subject that we have dealt with in other cases involving high school athletes and their academics. If DaVaris was a borderline student in November, as his coach indicated, how did he become "completely fine" by June? I don't buy it and apparently neither did any college except Miami.

11. In the latest chapter to this drama, coach Tony Monken has alerted the media that the family has decided to wait to make a decision until after the season and after DaVaris is able to make more visits.

I think that is a great idea, the best for the kid. He can work on his grades and improve his transcript and he likely will receive more offers and will be able to take at least five official campus visits, including Miami, when he hasn't seen. This all makes a lot of sense. What didn't make sense was declaring he would announce his decision at a press conference on Tuesday. If his father pushed him into that, he was dead wrong.

DaVaris' father may not agree. But those are the facts of the matter.

It is 24 hours since I posted this blog and I can't -- well, I really can -- believe there are so many people who are totally ignorant of the recruiting process. They apparently aren't aware that thousands of kids are listed on hundreds of web sites on the Internet. Many kids even pay to have their videos shown and to have feature stories written about them.

These people really believe these 18-year-old kids are entitled to privacy, that their grades are privileged, that their decision are sacred, that their rap sheets shouldn't be revealed, etc. Yet these are the same kids whose parents complain bitterly if the media doesn't provide exposure for their kids, who blame the media if their kids don't receive college offers or aren't named to all-state teams. And these are the same kids and parents who lobby for TV coverage on EPSN so they can make their college announcements.

Who are they kidding?

Don Schnake coached Elk Grove to a mythical state football championship in 1972 but he always insisted that the most satisfying moment came in 1963 when he produced his first unbeaten team at Vandalia.

Talk about pressure. At a huge midnight pep rally after the last game, the school board president distributed small trophies to each player that stated: "Vandalia, Mid-State champions, 9-0." The engraving had to be done before the game was played.

"Football was better in the Vandalia area than people think," Schnake once told me. "Because of Taylorville and Hillsboro, basketball was more popular. It was basketball country. Football didn't get enough credit. The kids were sons of coal miners. The 1963 season at Vandalia was more satisfying than 1972 at Elk Grove because we beat teams that had beaten us for years."

Like most Americans, I grew up playing football, basketball and baseball in season. And I attended high school, college and professional games. That's all I knew. That's all any of us knew.

Now I am told that more youngsters grow up playing soccer than football in this country. Would you believe it?

Soccer. The older generation, my generation, thinks it is a boring sport. No excitement. No home runs, no slam dunks, no long touchdown passes.

Well, that's what I used to think about hockey. Until I got slam dunked by the Stanley Cup, about 10 years before the Blackhawks turned Chicagoans into hockey fans.

Nobody in authority is talking on the record, including Calvin Davis, the Chicago Board of Education's director of sports administration, but it has been confirmed that the Chicago Public League's office that supervises the city's vast sports programs has been "gutted" by a series of recent personnel layoffs and budget cutbacks.

According to reliable sources within the sports department, 21 employees have been jettisoned since the Chicago Board of Education announced that it is facing a $700 million budget deficit and as many as 2,700 teachers could be laid off. At the same time, it was revealed that all sports in the CPS below the varsity level are in jeopardy of being cut.

"They don't care about sports," one CPS official said.

I never planned to write this commentary. I hoped I wouldn't have to. But it became necessary because some readers, rather than use a web site to engage in an intelligent debate on issues, get much too personal. Name-calling might be acceptable in the bleachers but not on my blog.

It has happened in other cases but the most recent, involving my blog on "Public League in crisis," went over the top. In my view, it confirms all of my long-held suspicions about what is wrong with the Internet. I can't speak for other web sites because some bloggers are in business to count hits and page views, attract attention or make money. Not me. I just enjoy a good conversation. If we agree to disagree, so be it. But we can be--and must be--civil about it.

Jordan Walsh is a 6-4, 280-pound offensive lineman at Glenbard West in Glen Ellyn. He is one of the most widely recruited high school football players in Illinois. Here are his views on the recent May evaluation period, the recruiting process and the 2010 season:

What did you learn during the May evaluation period?
I learned a lot about different coaches and how they run things. I got a feel for the coaches who came through and I visited. And I learned a lot about the academic support at the schools, like tutoring. The most surprising things I learned was that Wisconsin has a class for sign language.

You have 19 scholarship offers, including more Big 10 offers than anyone else in the Chicago area. What does that say about you?
There is a lot of buildup for who and what I am and I have to live up to that potential in the games. When a player has a lot of offers, he might not play hard all the time because he doesn't want to get hurt. But I will try my hardest. I will go all out in every game.

Kyle Ruchim, a 5-10, 180-pound senior pitcher/shortstop, is the leader of Stevenson's baseball team, which meets Naperville Central Friday in the semifinals of the Class 4A tournament in Joliet. This is how Ruchim looks at the game he loves:

Coach Paul Mazzuca said this year's team is more balanced that last year's sectional finalist. Is it good enough to win the state title?
Absolutely. Ever since our freshman year, we have talked about this class as the one that can do it. We have pitching, defense and offense. We have a good blend with senior leadership and juniors in pitcher Tyler Radtke, third baseman Mike Martin and relief pitcher Blake Fiedelman.

I was watching a sports talk show on television the other day and the moderator asked a longtime sports reporter to recount his favorite memory of John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach who died last week at 99.

"I only regret that I never met him," the reporter said.

It reminded me that I once had an opportunity to meet the great man.

Wooden was a featured speaker at a coaches' clinic at a hotel in Rosemont and the sponsors mailed publicity releases to the media in the Chicago area, informing them that they would arrange for interviews with Wooden upon request.

Like most coaches in the Chicago Public Schools, Simeon's Robert Smith is deeply concerned about reports that all of the city's interscholastic sports programs below the varsity level will be scrapped unless educators find other ways to pay for a $700 million budget deficit.

"We're setting our kids up for failure if there is no underclass or feeder programs for athletics. What will they be doing? They can't go to the parks," said Smith, who guided Simeon to its third boys state basketball championship in the last five years in March.

"All of the young men and young ladies aren't good enough to play on the varsity. They already have too much idle time as it is. Will they hold a basketball or baseball or football in their hands? Or will they hold a gun in their hands? We have to help them make a decision as to what they will be holding in their hands."