Without the presence of Francis, the camp would have lost its edge and a chunk of its paying clientele. “They all know that Clark Francis is going to be here” is how the camp director, Joe Keller, explained. “They know coming in, you’re going to get evaluated, you’re going to get ranked. That’s part of the branding. Without it, we wouldn’t get players. But we get the best players, and they get what they pay for.”
A certain kind of sports obsessive likes to feel in the know—that he has seen, or even just heard of, some up-and-coming player before the rest of the world has caught on. A whole industry grew up around so-called NFL draftniks, men (and they are just about all men) who keep track of not just the top projected picks in the annual spring draft, but also the obscure offensive lineman from some out-of-the-way school who might get picked up in the sixth or seventh round. In basketball, the clock is set much earlier, in large part because of LeBron James, who was such a known talent from his early teens that his first high school game, in ninth grade, was eagerly anticipated by insiders. The televising of high school games took off during the four years James was prepping for the NBA at St. Vincent–St. Mary High School in Akron, and the explosion in basketball interest below the high school level, and much of the money that courses through it, is directly related to him.
Francis, the Hoop Scoop editor, is a man of strong opinions and snap judgments. “It’s not PC what I do, ranking young kids,” he said. “I know that. Some people like it, some people don’t. But if you’re playing at an event and I’m not scouting it, nobody knows and nobody cares.” He laid out what he was looking for in players this young: “Size, athleticism, outside shooting. Bottom line is, if you don’t have one of those things, forget it. Go play soccer. Have a nice life.”
The boys at the Phenom Camp were put on teams that played twice a day, on one of six full courts in a cavernous gymnasium at Alliant International University that was as big as an airplane hangar. Presiding over everything was Keller, the camp director, a former AAU coach in Southern California and the president of the company that ran the camp as well as a web of other similar events in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Japan, and China. “Have you seen No. 109?” he observed at one point as he watched the action on one of the courts. “He’s a monster, isn’t he?” He was referring to a sixth grader who played for an AAU team based in Houston that had competed in 118 games in the previous twelve months—36 games more than the NBA’s regular season. The boy lived down in the Rio Grande Valley, nearly four hundred miles away, but flew to Houston to join his teammates for one of their rare practices or to meet them at the airport to set off on road trips.
A moment later, the camp director’s attention was drawn to another sixth grader, a smaller but highly skilled player. “Going to be a pro,” Keller said. “You mark my word.”
Everyone seemed to know this kid had a six-foot-eleven father and assumed he just had not yet hit his growth spurt. It’s something that basketball aficionados always clock: the size of a kid’s parents. If the father is not on the scene, they just ask the mom: How tall is his dad?
The most exalted of the campers was a sixth grader named Allonzo Trier, who lived in Federal Way, Washington, outside Seattle, and had his own line of clothing emblazoned with his signature and personal motto: “When the lights come on, it’s time to perform.” His basketball socks were marked with either his nickname, Zo, or his area code, 206. (He was then too young to fall under NCAA rules governing the benefits an athlete being recruited could receive.) Francis was enamored of Trier—he loved his game and his dedication to the sport. He always called Trier by his first and last name, as a sign of respect. “Allonzo Trier is going to make it no matter what,” he said. “And that’s what makes Allonzo Trier fun to watch. He just does things right.”
The father of another camper tapped Trier on the shoulder between games and asked if he would pose for a picture with his son. “Thank you,” he said to him after snapping the photo. “You’re a role model, brother.”
The only child of a social-worker single mother, Trier would spend the next half dozen years bouncing between AAU teams in Seattle, Dallas, and Tulsa, and private high schools with prominent basketball programs in Oklahoma City, suburban Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas. These were not relocations occasioned by his mother’s work or other family considerations. They were career moves, driven by basketball. Better opportunities on the grassroots scene.
It’s not unusual for young players and their families to pick up and move in order to change high school or AAU teams, although Trier, who went on to play for the University of Arizona, was one of the more extreme examples. When the Washington Post wrote about his journey, it headlined the story, “Allonzo Trier Is a Complicated Case of Free Agency in Elite High School.”
All kinds of merchandise was on sale for purchase at the Phenom Camp, including a camp program for $25 that listed the participants and their heights, hobbies, hometowns, and nicknames. The monikers they chose revealed all you needed to know about the milieu in which young basketball talent is identified and nurtured. There was a G-Money, a K-Money, a Cash-Money, and one young man who simply called himself Money. Two campers went by Sir, while others also had handles that seemed to demand respect—Da Truth, Superstar, Big Dog, and the Chosen One.
The attention directed at young talent by Clark Francis and others makes the best of the players magnets and attracts opportunists who swoop in and attach themselves to kids and their families. “You have runners, street agents, and advisors right from the jump,” says a veteran assistant coach who has worked at top programs in several different conferences. “You have sixth graders with advisors. Advising on what? How the fuck does a kid in the sixth grade need an advisor? The kid is twelve years old. He still watches cartoons. What’s your advice? Stop watching cartoons? Watch better cartoons? That’s what we deal with when we’re recruiting—a kid who’s had a circus around him for four, five, or six years. That’s his life and it seems normal to him. People think we corrupt these kids. But that’s not how it is. There’s shit that’s already been going on since way before we get on to him.
“The advisor, he doesn’t have any advice that’s worth listening to. His role is get himself embedded with the family and take credit when the gear from the shoe companies starts coming. He says, ‘I did that.’ Maybe he tries to get more stuff and he spreads it around to other kids he’s working on. The payoff he’s angling for is to be there when the real money starts coming. He’s a parasite, pure and simple.”
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At all the major college basketball programs, a head coach has three assistants on his staff, along with a “director of basketball operations” who functions as a coach but without the title, an athletic trainer and a couple of assistant trainers, strength and conditioning coaches, a video coordinator, a half dozen or so student managers, and various other administrators and staffers. There is a maximum of thirteen players under scholarship at any given time, but easily four times that number to serve their needs and keep the program moving forward—which includes acquiring players for future seasons.
Recruiting is an obsessive year-round pursuit for coaches who are intensely, if not pathologically, competitive. They have ascended to their jobs for a variety of reasons, and one of them is that they want to win more than normal people do. Men with hundreds of career victories and multiple titles still feel after losses as if the life has been sucked out of them.
Recruiting for these coaches is another game in that it only has two possible outcomes: A win or a loss. Life or death. Their egos are in play, perhaps even more so than during athletic competition. Having set their sights on recruits, often for many years—having made calls and visits and sent dozens of letters and texts—they feel personally rejected when a high school player chooses another suitor.
Landing a top prospect is as much about winning the recruiting battle as it is about actu
ally coaching him. In both college football and basketball, recruiting does not stop during the season, and in fact takes on a measure of importance that rivals game preparation. I spent a week with Pete Carroll, coach of the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, back when he was head football coach at the University of Southern California. His team had just suffered a surprising loss to Oregon State and had an important game upcoming against Ohio State. After practices, Carroll and his assistants ate dinner together out of plastic takeout containers in a common room at the center of their office suite and spent an hour making phone calls to high school kids.
“How you doin’ academically? You keepin’ up with your classwork?” Carroll asked one recruit. When he was done with his conversation, he passed the phone to another coach. “Coach Sark wants to talk with you,” he said, referring to his then assistant Steve Sarkisian. Carroll dialed up another recruit and talked to him, and then asked for his mother. “Hey Mom, what’s happenin’?” he said when she got on the phone. The cell phones got passed around like they were part of some multiple handoff play as each coach got a kid on the phone, started a conversation, and then brought in another staff member. I was struck that even on such an important week, and following an upset loss, recruiting retained its high priority. But the talent pipeline must constantly be replenished.
As the college basketball season is under way, coaches are looking toward the next season and the one after that. LeBron James went right from high school to the NBA in 2003, which is no longer permitted. The rule change in 2005 that players had to be at least nineteen years old and one year out of high school ushered in the current “one-and-done” era. Now the best young players, and the objects of the most fevered recruiting, often play just one season and are on campus for no more than nine months. For the coaches who ardently recruited them, they get to compete for all of five months.
At the top programs that lose multiple underclassmen each year to the NBA and must replenish, recruiting is especially intense and high-stakes. If a coach loses three or four of his kids to the NBA draft and doesn’t have a good recruiting cycle, he is basically left without a team. That prospect—the cupboard stripped bare, a losing record in the conference, no NCAA tourney bid—is never far from his mind.
Top coaches fly to visit recruits at their homes on private jets, paid for by the university or lent by wealthy boosters. In sales terms, they are the closers. The day-to-day, constant pressure of recruiting falls to the assistant coaches. They follow kids from their early teens on up (sometimes after they end up on one of Clark Francis’s lists) and develop relationships long before a program is sure it wants to extend a scholarship offer.
To demonstrate interest, they show up at as many games and all-star events as they can—often during periods when the NCAA does not permit them to talk to recruits or their families but does allow them to scout. “I was like a sandwich board,” a veteran assistant says. “I would position myself under the basket where a kid is warming up. I’ve got my shirt, my hat, my pants—everything’s got the school’s colors and logo—I want to be seen by the kid. He knows I’m there looking at him. He thinks to himself, ‘There’s three hundred coaches in the gym, but this guy, he really wants me.’”
A crucial role of the assistant coach is to function as an intelligence gatherer: How big is the entourage around the kid? Who’s the decision maker? The mom, the dad, an uncle, an advisor, a high school or AAU coach? They need to find out if a player’s family is seeking money or other benefits not permitted by the NCAA. A program that pays will want to know how much. The ones that don’t will walk away.
There’s an adage in recruiting that the best answer is “yes” and the second best is “no.” The worst is “maybe,” because coaches do not want to be strung along or used as leverage by a player seeking a better deal elsewhere.
Few coaches currently working in college basketball, or hoping to get back in, are willing to be quoted by name. A former assistant coach at a Big Ten school tells the following story:
“I was involved with a kid and I get a call from his AAU coach, and he says, ‘Just to let you know, the starting price for him is room and board for his family,’ meaning they wanted to move to the college town and be set up with living arrangements. I said, ‘Thanks for letting me know,’ and I really meant that. We weren’t going to provide that, so I was really glad he told me what they wanted.
“It’s not always overt. Things are hinted at and you get the idea. But sometimes it’s so overt that it blows you away and you think to yourself, ‘Did I just hear that?’ We had one kid verbally commit to us, and the next thing you know, he shows up on campus with a guy we had never seen before and this guy says, ‘So how does it work? You set up an LLC in a name that we give you, and put the money into that?’ We said no, and the kid decommitted. He went somewhere else and I assume they got the money they were looking for. I don’t know if he got it in an LLC or not.”
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Tom Konchalski was one of the first of what are now commonly called recruiting gurus. He is seventy-two years old, a six-foot-six former high school basketball player (he says he was not particularly good) and a lifelong bachelor who works from his apartment in Queens when he is not traveling to see games. He composes his recruiting reports on a typewriter and mails copies to coaches who subscribe to his service. He does not use a cell phone or computer, and perhaps as a result, his memory is especially sharp. When we were setting up a meeting, he asked if there was a casual spot to talk near where I was staying in Manhattan. When I suggested the Chelsea Diner, he said, “I know that place. Southeast corner of 23rd and Ninth.”
Konchalski, who has a philosophy degree from Fordham, is a gentleman in an elbows-out business. A New York Times profile once described him as a combination of concerned priest and military dad, and the sportswriter John Feinstein referred to him as “the last honest man in the gym.” He is not, however, naïve. He began following college basketball when it was a niche sport and he had to watch NCAA tournament games on tape delay on local stations, or not at all if a New York–area team was not involved. “There’s so much more money now, which means more temptation,” he says. “It’s coming in from every direction. The NCAA has never been able to police it, and I don’t know how hard they’ve tried. So now you have something that I don’t think anyone ever expected—the FBI being involved.”
Konchalski and others stressed the pressure assistant coaches are under to deliver players, and the challenge of dealing in a realm in which families have been getting paid in various ways and by various sources, for years.
An NBA scout with long-standing connections in the grassroots scene explained how it works. “You have families that when their kid gets good, the parents stop working. They’ve got a million people telling them their son is going to be in the NBA and they believe it because it’s their first time around the block. They don’t have any objective measure to weigh it against. Their life becomes the AAU scene, camps, private training. If they didn’t need money before, they do now, because they have no income.”
There is a progression of benefits to families. In the beginning, the grade school years, it is boxes of sneakers and gear and maybe hotel rooms and dinners when their son is traveling with his AAU team. Eventually, the NBA scout said, the “runners”—proxies acting on behalf of agents—“and the financial advisors and college coaches come around. In the worst-case scenario, they’re all working together. The runner brings in the coaches—or one of the assistant coaches brings in the runner. You have to understand, these people all work together. It’s one world. It doesn’t seem wrong to them. They share intelligence. They have common interests.
“The family gets a car. Then some money. When it comes time to commit to a college, you’ve been taking money at every step along the way, so there’s absolutely no rationale to stop. Has the kid gotten any of it? Probably not, or not much.”
Co
aches who outright bribe recruits to attend—and no one denies that there are some—face the challenge of teaching, mentoring, and, if necessary, disciplining players whom they have lured illicitly. They’re in a dirty deal together. The traditional role of a coach—leader of young men, instiller of values, builder of character—is subverted. “Can they be coached if the coach broke the rules to get them there?” Konchalski says. “Sometimes not. But I’ve seen it both ways. If there’s a point of intersection of mutual self-interest, yes. When the kid truly wants to improve, he’ll accept coaching, even from a coach who paid to get him there.”
The top grassroots players have already been playing under AAU coaches who may have profited off their talent. Nike’s circuit of top AAU players consists of forty teams around the nation (it’s known as the EYBL, for Elite Youth Basketball League) that play a national schedule and a series of tournaments in the spring. Adidas operates a grassroots tournament called the Gauntlet, and Under Armour’s goes by the UA Association. The shoe companies contribute as much as $300,000 to some of these individual clubs, which operate as nonprofits. The case announced by the Justice Department in September 2017 implies that shoe companies use the clubs as pass-throughs, sending money to the clubs that is then sometimes funneled to players or their families.
The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino Page 10
