The current July schedule is exhausting, but its the players that get hurt the most

It seems like every summer, there are endless debates raging about the problems with the way that the NCAA has built the framework of the recruiting process.

The are the NCAA's complicated and, at times, trivial rules and regulations regarding how a coach can contact a recruit. There are the never-ending line of runners, middle-men, and agents that act as the go-between for college coaches and the players they are targeting. There are the shoe companies, the AAU teams that they sponsor, and the continuous flow of untraceable cash changing hands in back-room deals.

All of that gets thrown into the blogosphere's crock-pot each and every July.

But as much as anything, the issue that gets the most play is the schedule the NCAA has established for recruiters. In July, there are 20 days -- two 10 day periods each summer -- where college coaches are allowed out on the road to evaluate prospects. In theory, this works out well. There are a multitude of camps and AAU Tournaments that provide coaches with one location to see a huge number of players. In terms of efficiency, its great, especially for the programs that can't afford a private jet to take them from location to location.


In practice, however, the results are far from perfect.

Think about it like this: for 10 straight days, these coaches sit in gyms that may or may not be air-conditioned for up to 15 hours a day trying to evaluate the talent level of kids they'll be lucky to see play a handful of times. That doesn't sound tiring, but its incredibly draining. Is that really the best way to determine what level of college basketball a kid is capable of playing?

But the issue that doesn't get nearly enough publicity is the fact that these players -- the kids that are trying to play their way into a scholarship -- are forced into a situation where they play an obscene amount of basketball in an incredibly limited amount of time.

The way a typical AAU Tournament is scheduled is that each team participates in pool play, typically getting two or three games in one day to determine what tournament they go to -- the winners of the pool are entered into one tournament, the second place finishers another, etc. The next day, tournament play is kicked off. If you continue to win, you end up playing two or three more games. On the third day, the tournament finishes up, usually with the semifinals and finals being played.

If your team makes the finals of a given AAU Tournament, it means that you played as many as eight games in the span of three days. And as soon as a team finishes their last game in a given tournament, they hope into their cars or vans or buses and head off to the next tournament.

Or the next skill camp.

All in the name of exposure.

I was at the West Virginia Jam Fest this past weekend, which took place on the final days of the first live-period this July. Believe me when I tell you, these kids were dead. The Hoop Heaven Elite won the West Virginia Jam Fest, and according to a member of that team -- Alex Mitola, a point guard committed to Dartmouth -- they had played 17 games in the previous six days.

Jaren Sina is a top 50 recruit in the class of 2013 and the star of that Hoop Heaven Elite team. He's currently committed to Alabama. And there were times in the three games that I watched his team play where it was clear that this kid was the best player on the floor, but I left with the feeling that there was no way he was going to be able to play in the SEC. Its not necessarily because he isn't good enough, but Sina's game is predicated around his ability to shoot the basketball. I'd guess that he shot 35% on the weekend.


In reality, could we have expected anything else? Sina was coming off of a two-week stretch where he went from the LeBron James Skills Academy to the Hoop Group Elite Team Camp to the Hoop Group Summer Classic to the West Virginia Jam Fest. His legs were dead. If he wasn't already committed to Alabama, how much would he have impressed coaches that didn't get to see him play until the end of that stretch?

The same thing happened to Amile Jefferson. Jefferson is being recruited by everyone in the country, which pretty much what you would expect when a player is ranked 21st in our consensus recruiting rankings. But he did little to stand out this weekend at the West Virginia Jam Fest, looking like nothing more than a skinny, 6'8" kid that spends too much time on the perimeter and not enough time around the rim.

Luckily for Sina and Jefferson, they don't need the exposure.

Every college coach in the country knows who they are.

But for the kids that aren't as well known nationally, they get put at an incredible disadvantage by being forced into logging this many minutes over this short of a period of time. And the coaches that are recruiting them are backed into a corner. They are asked to work through exhausting hours to try and evaluate players that are even more tired.

The other issue that arises is these players essentially have a month straight where they do nothing but play basketball games. They aren't getting any better. They aren't working on their jump shot or their handle or their post-game. They aren't learning the fundamentals of help-side defense. They are simply playing games and trying to impress scouts.

The current schedule needs to change, and many expect that it will by July of 2012. If the NCAA was smart, they would keep the same number of days, but break it up into five four-day periods, spanning Thursday-Sunday. Three of those weekends would go in July and two of them would be used to bring back the April live-period.

That schedule would not only afford players -- and coaches -- time to rest between the exposure events, but it would also give these players time where they are able to spend a couple of hours doing ball-handling and shooting drills without worrying about killing their legs for their third game of the day, which tips at 9:45 pm.