College Recruiting: NCAA Facing High-Tech Woes
By JOHN E. HOOVER World Sports Writer
It is trying to police text messages and other forms of modern communication.
Technology, it seems, is limited only by the imagination.
It is not, at this time, limited by the NCAA.
A long time ago, the NCAA placed limits on the number of phone calls a college recruiter could make to a prospective recruit. But a long time ago, there was no such things as text messaging, instant messaging, video conferencing or MySpace.com.
What in the name of Buck Rogers has happened to recruiting?
“It’s constant,” says Terrance Toliver. “But I think it’s a good thing.”
Toliver is one of the nation’s top football recruits. The wide receiver from Hempstead, Texas, has narrowed his choices down to Florida and LSU, and with the Feb. 7 national signing day approaching fast, his cell phone must be emitting a continuous chirp of message alerts.
“Mine vibrates,” he said. “But sometimes you like it, sometimes you don’t.”
High-profile recruits today are bombarded by coaches. The proliferation of electronic communications has taken recruiting way beyond the boundaries of letters, phone calls, in-home visits and official campus visits.
Oklahoma Gatorade Player of the Year Gerald Jones, a quarterback at Oklahoma City’s Millwood High School who has given a verbal commitment to play wide receiver at Tennessee, received two text messages during a recent interview in San Antonio. He said the interruptions were out of control before he committed, but have slowed down.
“I swear,” he said, “it was at least 4,050 text messages a day. Yeah, I just got one, but it’s probably a girl.”
Arizona’s Delashaun Dean told the Arizona Star last year that he rang up an $800 phone bill from text messaging with coaches during his recruitment. Many calling plans don’t charge for incoming texts, but some do.
The NCAA last summer considered legislation to control text messaging. Sounds easy. It’s not.
“With the improvements that we’ve made in technology, and as quickly as those improvements are occurring,” said Scott Williams, Oklahoma State’s associate athletic director for compliance, “it’s made it more and more difficult.”
Williams said one solution brought up by compliance officers was to do away with text messaging altogether.
Another was to simply apply a daily window in which coaches can text their prospects. The latter was defeated. The former is still being considered.
“But somewhere in the middle, that’s going to be nearly impossible for us to monitor,” Williams said. “When you get that (coach’s) phone bill with all those text messages on there, half the time you can’t tell where a text message is going to or where it’s coming from, and then you have to try to figure out, you know, if you can only do it from 4 to 8 o’clock in the evening, and it depends on (which time zone) the prospect’s at — that would have been a compliance nightmare.”
These days, recruiters can make one phone call a week to each prospective student-athlete.
And just like the old days, prospects receive unlimited letters and pamphlets in the mail. But they can also get unlimited e-mails, text messages and instant messages.
“I even get phone calls at school,” Jones said. “But I don’t answer ‘em.”
Some recruits even have their own Web sites on which they provide updates on their recruitment through daily Web logs, or blogs. It is here, as well as on social networking Web sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com, that recruiting in the electronic age is at its murkiest.
If a football or basketball recruit has his or her own Web page, the NCAA strictly forbids any contact from anyone who qualifies as a booster — that is, anyone who has ever made a tangible or intangible gift to a particular university, athletic department or program.
The hard part: some sites are bogus, operated by a player’s fans or friends (or enemies). And in this cyberworld of online identities, almost everyone who creates a screen name remains anonymous.
How would the NCAA ever prove that a local car dealer with financial ties to a school was logging onto a recruit’s Web site and promising him his pick of the lot?
Williams said he and his full-time compliance staff of six couldn’t monitor such a thing because many personal sites have a restricted network of members only, and he’d have to apply to become a member on each recruit’s Web site just to read what others are saying.
If he found any red flags, he’d have to verify identities of those who wish to remain nameless.
“It’s difficult,” Williams said. “You just have to do the best you can educating your boosters and letting them know, ‘Hey, this is not permissible activity, you cannot do this, you cannot initiate conversations through these community Web sites. You should not be posting recruiting statements or posting messages to kids through the message boards encouraging them to come here. Leave the recruiting aspect to the university.’ “
Williams said the same goes for the coaches and, to a large extent, the recruits.
“We’re trying to educate and monitor,” he said, “but in the end, we’re trusting the people that we provide the information to to go out and do the right thing.”
John E. Hoover 581-8384
john.hoover@tulsaworld.com
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