High school performance still matters to football recruiters

Arkansas coach Bret Bielema, right, talks to players as Arkansas State coach Blake Anderson, left, looks on during the All Arkansas satellite camp Sunday, June 5, 2016, at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock.
Arkansas coach Bret Bielema, right, talks to players as Arkansas State coach Blake Anderson, left, looks on during the All Arkansas satellite camp Sunday, June 5, 2016, at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock.

I was surprised when a high school basketball coach told me recently he was not involved in the recruiting process of one of his players.

All the contact, he said, was between the player, his parents, and the player's summer-league coach. Later, I read a letter from a summer-league instructor who warned that players who stayed with their high school teams in the summer could pick up bad habits or get hurt.

These are actions in summer-league basketball that Alabama football coach Nick Saban warned about when he railed against satellite camps at the SEC spring meetings in Destin, Fla.

"We are the one sport that the high school coach still matters," Saban told reporters. "Until this satellite issue came up, you still had to go to the high school, go through the high school coach, the players came to your campus if they were interested in learning and developing or interested from a recruiting standpoint. Now, we're doing what we've done in every other sport that we complain about every day -- AAU basketball and all this."

Club sports have grown in popularity, particularly in basketball and soccer, where games are plentiful and the competition is keen. But it is inconceivable a college coach at any level would bypass or ignore high school coaches, teachers and counselors who can best assess an athlete and his character.

The month of June is a busy time for many high school football players, who flock to summer camps for additional training and exposure. Ohio State coach Urban Meyer said camps are fine, but echoed Saban's viewpoint that a player's actions during the school year with his team are vastly more important when it comes to recruiting.

"Don't worry about (all the camps)," Meyer says in a video posted on a Buckeyes' website. "I have parents ask all the time, 'should I send him to that camp?' Sure, if you have 80 bucks to blow.

"Here's where you start: Go make your high school coach so proud of you that he's going to tell the college coach, 'Take him.' How cool is that? It's real simple. Don't complicate things."

Satellite camps weren't an issue until Jim Harbaugh took over at Michigan and began treating the events like an NFL tryout camp. After an initial backlash, some coaches in the SEC have embraced the idea of searching the country for a few recruiting nuggets. Arkansas coach Bret Bielema recently returned from a satellite camp in Florida, where a former Razorback assistant was the host.

A headline in this newspaper read 'Florida satellite camp pays early dividends for Hogs', which is debatable considering Arkansas offered only one scholarship from a group of 300 athletes. Bielema and other coaches will decide for themselves whether participating in a satellite camp halfway across the country is worth the time and money.

But there's no question the characteristics and ability a player displays during the school year outweighs how well he performs during a two-day camp in the summer. In football at least, high school still matters.

"I have to go to this 7-on-7, do this, do that," Meyer says in the video. "I've got a better idea. Go become a great high school football player on your team. Go become a captain. If you're a captain of your high school team and you're talented enough, you've got a great chance of being here. If you're very talented and you're not a captain, I'm going to find out why, because something's not right."

Sports on 06/19/2016

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