The ups & downs of recruiting and fans
Harrison Barnes
What shows a major difference between a coaching staff and a fan base? To me the answer is pretty simple, recruiting. Getting a recruit that the fans wanted will get any web board/blog/whatever else filled with buzz because of it, but the head coach and his assistants know that one recruit does not make a class and will be going after their next target instead of celebrating. On the other hand, when a sought after player decides to go elsewhere, the fan base will go from disappointed to sometimes utter panic because of it, while the coaching staff will do just as they would any other day, trying to find the next target for their program.
Why do I write this post? Simple, because there is a player out there who could prove my theory very well. Harrison Barnes, amongst the players in the 2010 class, is a 6’6″ small forward who is as good as you can get when it comes to the position. For a long time it seemed as though Duke was going to get his services in college, but of late that theory has been changing as North Carolina has caught up with their archrival in trying to lure Barnes to Chapel Hill. For a school like Duke, who (if any Blue Devil reads this) like it or not has been losing ground to UNC, getting Barnes would bring the fans to the highest of their glory, while losing him would bring them into pretty much a panic mode.
This is why Y2K and all the media outlets have made recruiting so accessible, so full of info, and so scary! That is why the die hard fans have gone from being a group that gathers on Saturday for a tailgate and in the winter for basketball season to people that almost can’t stop staring at their computer in order to find something that has to do with their team, their program. Anything and everything is now news and recruiting is all about “rumors”, and rumors make for so much talk and that just heats those die hard fans up more, looking for that “anything & everything” to fill their need for information.
Pick a player, any player that is an elite 5 star player that has about a half dozen schools he is interested in. Then start going around to each of those school’s web boards and see how differently they all see him. How each will have some “source” or some “rumor” about him going “here, there, anywhere”. And as you see the rumor mill spin you can see how the fans will go from roaring when thinking they are his top choice to laying down when thinking that they aren’t. Recruiting is a game, just one that lasts a lot longer than a football or basketball game. It’s hard to believe, but something like recruiting, that lasts all year in many ways can be so intense and hard core, but if you are a die hard fan that is the case.
So, as the days move along and Harrison Barnes continues to think about where he is going to go remember what I said about recruiting and how intense it is, because the day that this young man makes his decision you (and I) will be either very happy or not so much!
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AEM: You’ve made a very thoughtful and helpful post there. I’ll share that a good friend who is a long-time Tar Heel has said on more than one occasion that he longs for the days before the internet when we all were forced to live our lives in the offseason, awaiting the arrival of the Carolina Court sometime in the early fall, and then spend the next few boyhood days reading and rereading each and every article about the returning players and the incoming freshman. We were so innocent then – no idea what recruiting was but just informed after the fact – after the freshman had even enrolled and were in fall classes – that so and so came from such and such town in this and that state, with gushing quotes and anecdotes from his high school coach (there were no recruiting scouts and AAU coaches back then). Yes, even though there were some big storylines that made the pages of SI over the years – J.R. Reid comes to mind – I think our last year of innocense was the summer of 1991 when we’d read about Donald Williams and heard the story from his coach that Donald’s three-point shooting was so hot one game that “an opposing team took to fouling him as he got past half court – but Donald was shooting anyway and was making them!”
We had never heard of Donald Williams, save perhaps for a quick mention of his name from Dick Vitale over a game broadcast, but in that same class of ’91 was Michigan’s Fab Five and the buzz around their arrival marked the end of innocence. Recruiting steadily became its own spectator sport and the advent of AAU’s year-round schedule, the internet and chat rooms brought dramatic changes to our experience as fans.
I confess to enjoying some of the recruitment game – it is a window into people’s values and principles – but if I could ween myself of the desire to know who might be the next hero to don Carolina Blue and return to that time of innocence I would.