Recruits getting message from coaches
Through modern technology, athletes get the message from college coaches
Originally published April 16, 2006
"I had all these coaches complaining that they were sending me text messages and I couldn't respond to them," said Koufos, a high school junior from Canton, Ohio
At the coaches' behest, he went out and bought a new cell phone at a discounted rate of $100 - one capable of receiving their mini messages.
Now, the superstar from Glen Oak High said his Motorola receives between 40 and 50 fawning text messages a day - "a fair amount" of which he said have come from Maryland assistants.
It's a legal, modern way of communicating with young athletes that skirts the NCAA's limited number of phone calls allowed per week, but it's also a tactic that has interrupted classroom discussions, run up parents' cell phone bills and simply added another loophole into an already unscrupulous recruiting process.
The late signing period for basketball began Wednesday and lasts through May 17.
"Coaches don't even call anymore," Koufos said. "They send messages and say, 'Hey, call me.' If they can get around the rules, that's pretty nifty I think."
Dave Sollazzo, defensive line coach and recruiting coordinator for the Maryland football team, said it's necessary because of the NCAA's stringent limitations on communication with recruits.
"What we're doing is no different than what anybody else is doing in the guidelines of the NCAA," he said. "We're doing what we have to do to stay in the ballgame with any recruit, especially a top recruit. In this day and age, the way recruiting is going, any edge you can get within the guidelines of the NCAA, obviously you're going to take advantage of it."
For now, the NCAA doesn't have a problem with it, but several groups - including the Women's Basketball Coaches Association - have already proposed eliminating text messaging and are likely to do so again in the late spring or early summer.
Text messages are currently considered "electronic transmissions," and lumped together with e-mail, instant messenger and even facsimiles. The only rules are that text messages cannot be sent to recruits until Sept. 1 at the beginning of their junior year in high school. For men's basketball, the date is June 15, after their sophomore year.
"There is definitely an acknowledgement that the intent of the rule and the application of it are very different," said Crissy Schluep, an NCAA spokeswoman. "We probably will see changes coming in the near future regarding correspondence."
Finding a loophole
Maryland assistant coach Keith Booth chuckled at the memory of the technological trend used to recruit players when he was in high school: beepers.
"You never really knew who it was until you called back," Booth said. "You compare that with now. I can automatically text a kid and say, 'Hey, it's Coach Booth. Good luck with whatever tournament you're in.' I can stay in constant contact. We can go back and forth, and even have a conversation. That's a good thing if I'm in an airport, or he's on a bus, I can send him a quick good luck. That really means a lot to kids."
Maryland has joined a long list of high-major programs seeking Koufos, who has also caught the attention of North Carolina, Michigan State, Illinois and Ohio State. He shared some of the messages still in his phone (it holds up to 200), but declined to say which coaches sent them:
Great talking to you yesterday. Keep thinking about (our school). It's a special place where we can do special things together. Think of a national championship.
Another coach asked about his fracture.
Is your foot healing up pretty nicely?
There's a way around the NCAA's rule limiting basketball coaches to one phone call per month through July 31 to juniors like Koufos. It reads something like this:
K-squared, hit me on my cell when you get a second.
There's no rule against Koufos calling them.
"I'm sure coaches use it to get players to call them," said Maryland women's basketball coach Brenda Frese, whose staff recently purchased Nextel's Blackberry 7100 I for its instant messaging capabilities. "They'll text me and ask if it's a good time to call me, around my schedule. Sometimes they might think are they bothering you, so they text you to see if you're around."
This week is the NCAA's "quiet period" for football, meaning the coaches can talk to the players only when they visit campus, and the "evaluation period" is April 15-30. Starting Sept. 1, football coaches can call high school seniors once a week.
Basketball coaches can call high school seniors twice a week.
Sollazzo said the text messaging helps establish a relationship with the players when the NCAA prevents it. Football coaches are allowed to call high school juniors only once in May.
"We don't get enough time to really find out what these kids are all about," Sollazzo said. "That is so important in recruiting because here at Maryland, we're going to recruit kids from good families that are character people. You can't find that out in one visit.
"Obviously right now is a big push time for us to get the scholarship out there," Sollazzo said. "As important as the time is, it's difficult to do what you've got to do because you really can't communicate with the prospect."
Koufos said he keeps his phone on silent mode and checks his messages in the hallways between classes.
Emery Wallace, a forward from Roanoke, Va., who committed to the Maryland women's team in June, learned that lesson the hard way - in math class last year.
"My phone was on vibrate and I was in the front of the class and [the teacher] heard it," Wallace said. "I was like, 'It's a college coach, it's not one of my friends. You can't take my phone away. ... This is my future.'
"At first he was like, 'You're lying to me,'" Wallace said. "I said, 'Mr. Matthews, yes they are, I'll show you.' He couldn't believe a college coach was texting me."
And it took a moment for her father to digest the first phone bill. Then he switched the plan to include up to 2,000 text messages.
"I started out at 500 text messages and I was going way over that," Wallace said. "He was not too happy."
Which is one of the reasons Frese said she isn't thrilled with the concept.
Like Booth, Frese said she and her assistants will not send text messages to recruits while the athletes are in class, and that she finds the process to be "one of the most intrusive forms of communication."
"I've heard coaches will text all day long," Frese said. "It's totally legal. You can do it 24 hours a day, seven days a week if you want.
"You pick and choose your moments," she said. "We're not overkill with it by any measure. We probably stick to e-mailing, IM, and letter-writing even more than text messaging because text messaging is so limited and scripted. It's more if they had a great game or something you saw and want to be able to instantly send it."
And now players like Koufos are equipped to instantly receive them. His plan? Unlimited text messaging. His mailbox, though, might be full.
