College Prospect Network, Texas Hoop Recruits, and Louisiana Basketball Report have joined forces to present the inaugural Battle for the Gulf. The event is a celebration of the rich basketball talent in the Gulf region, and will pit some of the best graduating boys and girls from the 2014 high school class in each state.

Location:

The Merrell Center in Katy will be the venue. It is an outstanding site for the game, which seats nearly 6,000 basketball fans. It is also the site of the annual Southland Conference Tournament and the Nike Classic in Katy every winter.

Tickets:

Tickets for the event can be purchased at www.merrellcenter.org/events

Details:

The main event will be the boys game at 3:00 PM on March 22, 2014. It will feature 24 of the best graduating seniors in the region, and will be televised, streamed online, and presented live on the radio. Other events include:

Friday (March 21, 2014) 

4:00 PM – 10:00 PM – Boys showcase and combine at Pasadena High School (TX) for unsigned seniors and all underclassmen who would like to be scouted and ranked by College Prospect Network (CPN), Texas Hoop Recruits, and Louisiana Basketball Report. The top two-four players from this combine will be invited to represent their state in Saturday’s game.

5:00 PM – 8:45 PM – Girls showcase and combine at Dobie High School (TX) for unsigned seniors and all underclassmen who would like to be scouted and ranked by College Prospect Network (CPN). The top two-four players from this combine will be invited to represent their state in Saturday’s game.

Saturday (March 22, 2014)

10:00 – 11:00 AM – Open Practice for the Girls Teams and Autograph Session for the Boys

11:00 – 12:00 AM – Open Practice for the Boys Teams and Autograph Session for the Girls

12:00 – 1:15 PM – Slam Dunk Contest and Three-Point Shootout

1:30 – 2:45 PM – Girls Texas All-Stars Versus Girls Louisiana All-Stars

3:00 – 4:30 – Boys Texas All-Stars Versus Boys Louisiana All-Stars

The doors will open at 10:00 AM for the public. Come meet the college stars of tomorrow and stay for all the festivities! The autograph sessions will be great for young children and youth teams who want to meet the players who are going to be household names in the near future.

Television:

The game will be aired live on CW 39 in Houston and WNOL 38 in New Orleans. For other markets, check your local listings.

Streaming:

The game will be streamed online on www.cwtv.com.

Radio:

Fans can listen to the boys game live on Sports Radio 610 in Houston or online at the station’s website.

For more information and to see the player commitments, follow College Prospect Network on Twitter @cpnsports.

Additional Resources:

College Prospect Network – www.collegeprospectnetwork.com – @cpnsports

Texas Hoop Recruits – www.texashooprecruits.com – @txhooprecruits

Louisiana Basketball Report – www.louisianabasketballreport.blogspot.com – @la_bballreport

One of the things we focus on at College Prospect Network is ensuring no recruiting violations occur on our website. We strive to maintain an environment where Head Coaches can give an Assistant Coach or scout access to the site without having to worry about them breaking a rule that can get the program in trouble. We also want high school and AAU coaches, parents and athletes to know that they are not going to make a mistake that may jeopardize the athlete’s eligibility.

(If you were looking for the NCAA recruiting calendar for football, click here.)

College Prospect Network’s messaging system follows the NCAA recruiting calendar but here are some of the important dates you need to know for September 2012:

Division I Men’s Basketball

• Quiet Period – Colleges are not supposed to have any contact with recruits from August 1st through September 8th.
• Contact Period – Beginning September 9th and extending through the end of the month, colleges are allowed contact within the typical NCAA rules. There are some exceptions and additional guidelines throughout the basketball season but these don’t start until October and November.

Division I Women’s Basketball

• Quiet Period – From August 1st through September 15th there is no contact allowed between college representatives and athletes.
• Contact Period – September 16th through October 6th is a contact where college representatives can reach out to athletes. This includes the weekend of September 28th through 30th when members of a college staff can evaluate prospects at non-scholastic (AAU) events.

 

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Division II Men’s Basketball

• Quiet Period – From August 2nd through September 6th there should not be any contacts between colleges and players.
• Contact Period – After September 7th colleges are free to call, text, email, and visit potential prospects in person. This period extends until the middle of October.

Division II Women’s Basketball

• The dates for the Women are the same as for the Men during September so please see the section directly above this one.

Division III Men’s Basketball and Division III Women’s Basketball

• There are currently no limitations on DIII programs but proposals are on the table to “tug on the reins“. The lone exception to this is that DIII coaches, regardless of the sport, are not allowed to contact athletes until their junior year of high school.

NAIA, Junior College and NCCAA

There are virtually no restrictions on NAIA and NCCAA programs. The guidelines for junior colleges can differ depending on the state you live in so leave a comment below if you have a specific question and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

 

All of the dates listed above come from www.ncaa.org and are accurate as of September 2nd, 2012. If you want to know more about how College Prospect Network helps their member athletes and colleges avoid recruiting violations, you can use the Contact Us page on our website. We will usually respond within one business day but may need a little more time if your NCAA recruiting calendar question is very detailed or specific.

When we talk about building your recruiting profile, it can mean one of two things. Most commonly, we will be referring to your actual profile on College Prospect Network, ie. tips on how to upload a good video, what to write in your biography paragraph and what profile pictures get college coaches’ attention. We will also use the term from time to time to refer to your profile in more general terms, meaning the number of colleges who are interested in you, how good those coaches and scouts think you are and so on.

For this blog entry, we will focus on building your recruiting profile on College Prospect Network.

Some of this stuff may seem like common sense but we’ve seen too many athletes join the site and then immediately attempt to contact college coaches. That is a big mistake and it can give them a bad first impression of you. There are certain steps you should follow when building your recruiting profile so that you and your profile are prepared when a college coach finds you in a search.

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Step 1 – Finish Your Profile

When you get the email notifying you that you’ve been approved to join College Prospect Network, the first thing you should do is go to the “Edit Profile” page and add all the required information.

Here’s what you will need:

• Picture – This can be a head shot or an action photo of you playing your sport but make sure it clearly focuses on you. No friends or family posing with you.
• Physical Attributes – You need to know your: vertical, 40-yard dash, shuttle run, bench press max and squat max.
• Academic Attributes – Add this information if you have it: GPA, SAT and ACT scores, Class Rank and your intended Major in college. If you don’t know it or you haven’t taken the tests yet, then leave these fields blank for now. Do not guess! If you are wrong, it will look like you are intentionally lying and coaches and scouts will feel like you are wasting their time.

Step 2 – Add Game Film

If you don’t have game film, you should not contact any colleges. Game film is the first thing they are going to look for and they will probably not come back to your profile again, even if you put film up in the future. If you don’t have any game tape, make sure you get some as soon as possible and get it added to your profile page.

Just a few notes about building your recruiting profile with good game tape:

• For all athletes on CPN, your film has to come from a high school game! We will remove it if it’s from a summer league, AAU, combine or other event that is not sanctioned by the UIL. If you have good tape from other events, put it on YouTube and then write the link to it in your Bio section.
• For football prospects, you need a good highlight tape of your best plays. It should be at least 3:00 long but not more than 7:00.
• For basketball prospects, you should not post a highlight tape. Coaches want to see 5:00 consecutive minutes of you running the court, playing defense and moving without the ball in addition to scoring. Upload an entire game to our system using the “Manage Game Tape” page and you can use our software to create your 5:00 clip. If you have a good highlight tape, put it on YouTube and add the link in your Bio section.

Step 3 – Upload Your Schedule

Get your schedule for upcoming season and go to the “Add New Game or Event” page. Enter the date, time and teams correctly. Make sure you put the Home Team and the Away Team in the correct spots on the schedule because we provide college coaches with directions when they want to watch you play. You don’t want them showing up at your school if your game is at a different school.

** If you played varsity last year or the year before, you can upload those schedules too.

Step 4 – Add Your Stats

Once you upload your schedule you are ready for the season to start. After you play a game, log-in to College Prospect Network and add your stats for the game. Make sure you put the stats in honestly and correctly because your coaches and CPN will be checking what you enter. If you repeatedly put in incorrect stats, you will be removed form the site and your account will be blocked.

** You can’t add stats until after a game is over. If you can’t access a past game to add stats, check the game times and date that you entered and make sure it was entered correctly.

This should get you through building your recruiting profile on College Prospect Network. Now you’re ready to reach out to college coaches and invite them to watch your game film and check out your profile. We know that there is a lot to do but our college want to know that you truly care about being recruited. Our system rewards the players who work hard to use the website well and maximize their exposure.

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You should be glad that it takes a little bit of work because that gives you a chance to separate yourself from the other athletes on the site.

If you have any questions or problems with the four steps, use the Contact Us page on the website. We will help you fix the problem as soon as possible.

When it comes to making a good impression on college coaches, athletes need to understand that their off-field behavior can be just as important as their on-field performance.

College coaches realized a few years ago that text messages are the best, most efficient way to reach the recruits they are targeting. The NCAA finally decided to cooperate earlier this year (2012) when they removed restrictions on text messaging and social media contacts to allow college coaches and scouts to send texts almost whenever they want. Of course, ESPN, Twitter, Facebook and every college recruiting blogger in the country immediately weighed in on whether or not colleges would be able to control themselves and be reasonable with their number of texts.

Oddly, we did not hear a single commentator or read a single article about the fact that so many texts could put the athletes in a position where they might say something that would damage their reputation and hurt their recruiting status.

Athletes, put the phone down for a second and stop to think about something: Even if you’re a blue-chip recruit, coaches are not just texting you; they are also texting your backup and your backup’s backup. That’s because they have been burned in the past by recruits who verbally commit and then back out last minute or get into legal trouble or don’t make the grades to get on campus.

In all honesty, they may even think of you as the backup and they may be sending texts to the guy they think is better than you are. You would never know.

College coaches are never comfortable until you are on campus, in uniform and playing in your first game. And probably not even then. In other words, just because you are receiving text messages from a coach doesn’t mean your scholarship is set in stone. That means making a good impression on college coaches with every text, phone call, tweet, Facebook post and email that you send them is vital to securing your scholarship offer.

So, here are some pointers to keep in mind when you are texting a coach:

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1. Do NOT use the “N” word or any other slurs.  – You may be surprised that we have to start the list off with this but you would not believe how many athletes use those words when conversing with college scouts and coaches. Athletes get comfortable with a particular coach and begin to think of him/her as a friend, rather than an authority figure. Coaches play this relationship up because it gives them an edge over other schools and, the next thing you know, the athletes starts to use language that they would normally use with their friends. The problem is, college sports programs get in huge trouble when a player says, tweets or posts something that can be construed as racist, sexist or insensitive so they are very wary of athletes who don’t know when to use certain language and when not to use it. Think about the fines and suspensions NBA players have received in the last few years because of inappropriate language. College coaches do not want to have the same thing happen to their program.
2. Try to spell things correctly and at least make an attempt at grammar. – This one is simple. You all know that players who don’t pass can’t play in games. It may be funny and acceptable for athletes to intentionally misspell words and use slang with their friends but it will make coaches feel more comfortable if they’re confident you can at least get a “C” if you have to write a college paper. (By the way, “conversing,” which I used in the previous paragraph is the correct word. “Conversating” is not a word.)
3. Do NOT talk about relationships other than a serious long-term relationship. – Locker room conversations should stay in the locker room. Tell your friends or your siblings but don’t mention anything about it to a college scout or coach. Even something trivial like, “Sorry I didn’t text you back Coach. I was on the phone with this chick.” can give that coach the impression that your priorities are not in the right place and that you are not dedicated to your sport as much as you should be. Just don’t mention it.
4. Don’t reply late at night. – Even if a coach texts you after 11:00pm, don’t respond until the morning. Some of them may just be testing you to see if you stay out late or if you’re out partying the night before a game. Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, wait until you wake up the next morning to respond.

To sum it all up, making a good impression on college coaches is easy if you treat every text message like a job interview. After all, that’s what it is. As we said about Facebook and Twitter posts, if you wouldn’t want your mom to read it, don’t send it.

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We won’t bore you with the entire story of how and why www.CollegeProspectNetwork.com came to be but there a few key elements of our service that make us unique. You’ll understand what we do and why we do it once you understand the people who started the website.

Here is the story and inspiration that drives our Vice President, Jacob Harris, to help as many deserving athletes as possible:

I grew up playing baseball. My father coached me every year until I was 12, when he and my mother split up. After he left I lost all desire to play baseball and decided just to concentrate on school and quit playing sports. Our family also went through a pretty significant change financially so my sister and I had to stop going to private school.

8th Grade was my first year in public school and it was a severe culture shock.

I went from being in a tiny classroom with eight other students in my class to a huge campus with over 300 students in my grade. I knew nothing about public school or how sports were organized so I signed up for regular P.E. classes. The thing is, I was already 6’1″ so it took the basketball coaches about half a minute minute to hear that there was a new tall kid at school.

They came and got me out of P.E., changed my schedule and put me into the off-season basketball class.

Now, I only include that first part to communicate two things to you: 1) I didn’t have a father in the house and my mother knew absolutely nothing about how recruiting or any of that worked, and 2) I had never played a day of basketball in my life. I was literally clueless about the sport until the coaches switched me into the basketball class.

For whatever reason, I took to it pretty quickly though. I stumbled around on the 8th Grade B Team for my first year, started on the Freshman A Team the next year and, by my sophomore season, I even dressed for a couple of varsity games. This is at a Texas-5A school, mind you, the largest classification in the state. I grew to love the sport and became a gym rat but I put all my time into working on my jump shot (40 percent from the three-point line by my sophomore year) and offensive versatility and no time into working on defense, rebounding, or getting my name out to college coaches. I just figured that, if I could score, colleges would find out about me on their own.

Wrong.

By my senior year, I was pretty skilled offensively and, as I expected, the letters and calls started coming. However, they were from tiny schools in Texas that I had never heard about, not from The University of Texas or Duke or Connecticut. I was confused and angry because I didn’t understand why I wasn’t getting interest from top-tier schools. I had no idea that there was an entire culture of camps, showcases and tournaments where top players played.

I knew nothing outside my high school games and the mid-level AAU scene in Texas. It never occurred to me that college coaches and scouts simply cannot make it out to every city, not to mention every school. They can’t talk to every coach and player and, even if they could, that would be an incredibly inefficient way to find quality players.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and all the new scouting websites and blogs out there have made it a lot easier to be seen than it used to be but athletes still don’t know how to promote themselves, interact with college coaches and set themselves up for success.

I didn’t know any of that when I was in school and I am determined to make sure the new generation of athletes have a better understanding of the recruiting process than I did.

Luckily, my grades and test scores were very good so I had some options outside of basketball. I didn’t think it would be a big deal if I gave up basketball. I was offended that I didn’t have offers from big-name programs and decided to “hang ’em up” but I ended up regretting it.

Looking back, it was pretty impressive that I had only played basketball for a few years and I still had offers from some schools. If I had it to do again, I would have taken one of those offers and continued my playing career. Maybe I could have transferred to a top-tier program by my junior year and eventually played overseas. Maybe I would have stayed at a smaller school and graduated with a free college education instead of the student loans I am still paying off. The fact is, I don’t know what would have happened because I didn’t know how to maximize my exposure.

I want to help under-recruited athletes avoid the same mistakes I made. Regardless of whether they are Division I-caliber players who are only getting offers from small schools or NAIA-level players who are being completely missed, these athletes deserve to know and understand their options. Nobody should miss out on an opportunity simply because they aren’t experts at navigating the promotion and recruiting processes.

But, if we’re going to help athletes maximize their exposure, we also need to provide a quality product to colleges. One that they will use repeatedly. www.CollegeProspectNetwork.com is quickly becoming that.

In only six months of operation we have over 300 legitimate prospects, roughly 200 high school and AAU coaches and twenty-something college programs using the site. We are growing every single week because we understand what colleges need to see and what athletes need to do and know. We truly offer a unique service for high school athletes, their parents, their coaches and the college programs who need them.

Best of all, our website is completely and totally free for the athletes and their high school or AAU coaches! And the subscription for college programs is basically the lowest amount we could charge and still cover all our bills. We truly are here because we want to help the under-recruited players and the colleges who need them, not to squeeze money out of parents and athletes who don’t have the knowledge they need.

How many other recruiting services can say that?

– Jacob Harris

I’m not going to post my email address here to avoid spam but, if you want to contact me, please use the Contact Us page on our website. I will respond within 24 hours most of the time.

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When we speak to parents and coaches, one of the first questions they ask us is inevitably, “Should athletes be on Facebook and Twitter?” Unfortunately, we’ve all heard the stories about high-profile recruits getting into hot water because they post or tweet something inappropriate but does that mean that it is a bad idea for your son/daughter/team to be on Facebook or Twitter?

As with most things, it all depends on the person.

According to http://www.onlinecolleges.net, 80 percent or more college programs use social media to connect and communicate with potential recruits. That means those websites can be an outstanding tool for athletes to raise their profile and get more colleges interested. But, if the recruit has even one lapse in judgment, the consequences can be great.

As a parent or coach, if you have to ask yourself, “Should athletes be on Facebook or Twitter?” when you think about a particular student, then the answer for that student is probably, “No.”

The risks can sometimes outweigh the reward, especially for high-profile recruits. Athletes who are already receiving attention from Division I programs don’t have as much to gain from having a Facebook or Twitter profile. It is true that those programs use social media sites to connect with recruits but, if they want a player badly enough, they will find other ways to communicate with that recruit. For example, the NCAA recently deregulated rules and restrictions governing text messages and phone calls.

High-profile recruits run a much smaller risk of saying something inappropriate when they know that they are “texting” a coach or scout than they do when they are posting or tweeting things for public consumption.

Under-recruited athletes, on the other hand, need social media websites to reach out to as many college programs as possible. However, even when it comes to them, the answer to, “Should athletes be on Facebook or Twitter?” is not necessarily, “Yes.”

Mid-level recruits are walking a fine line when it comes to recruiting. There is a much larger pool of prospects who are good athletes than there are great athletes so things like academics, work ethic, character and leadership play a vital role in a college’s decision on which player to give a scholarship offer. In other words, high-profile recruits have to do something pretty bad in order to lose their scholarship offers and options. Mid-level prospects can post or tweet something that really hurts their chances, even if it is seemingly innocent.

Take, for example, two 6’4″ power forward with comparable athletic attributes, grades and stats. A smaller school may be interested in both, even though they are under-sized for power forwards. But if one of them tweets something like, “Coach is making us workout with the football team this week. Man, this is some bull.” that can be enough to give the other player the edge.

If a 6’9″ power forward says that same thing, he is still 6’9″; if a 6’4″ player says it, coaches will think he does not have the work ethic, weight room habits and drive to make up for his lack of height.

Because of the possible pitfalls of social media, we advise all high-profile recruits we speak to, especially if they are in the ESPN 150 or a comparable listing of the best players in the country, to limit their public posts and tweets. If they want to use the sites, they should opt for private or direct messages if there is any chance the post will reflect negatively on their character. Once they are enrolled at a university and have talked to their college coaches about the good and bad aspects of those sites, they can resume regular use of the site as long as they keep the guidelines their coaches prescribe in mind. We also tell mid-level recruits and all under-recruited athletes to talk to their coach about what they should or should not post.

A good thing to keep in mind is, if it’s something the athlete would not want their mother to read then it should not be posted anywhere online.

Of course, some prospects are more likely to say or do something that will look badly. Those players should probably pass on those Facebook and Twitter completely. Instead, have athletes promote themselves on a social media site that is built specifically for athletes and does not give them the opportunity to post or tweet something that will hurt their recruiting.

www.CollegeProspectNetwork.com is made specifically with these situations in mind. Our site has all the benefits of social media but there are no public posting or commenting areas for the athletes to say something they will regret. We are also currently working on adding a commenting feature that will allow for sharing and posting through previously-composed texts that cannot be altered. That feature should be available by the end of November 2012.

So, “Should athletes be on Facebook and Twitter?” Maybe and maybe not. But they should all be on College Prospect Network.

For more information about our service, use the Contact Us page on our website.

We received a message from one of our athletes yesterday asking if it would hurt his chances of being recruited if he moved schools between his junior and senior years. Of course, we do not know the details to every situation and we certainly cannot speak for every coach and college in the country but, generally speaking, it should not make a big difference.

The fact of the matter is: If you can play, colleges will want you.

But there are some things you should think about when you ask yourself, “Does transferring my senior year hurt my recruiting chances?’ We will run through the considerations here to give you an idea of the research you need to do before you transfer schools.

*Before we get started, let us start by explaining that we are assuming that all things are equal when you transfer schools. We are not considering transfer from a small school to a nationally-renowned program or the other way around. We also assume you are not moving schools because of athletics, as that is disallowed in most states. We are working under the assumption that you are moving purely because of something like: your parents got transferred at work or maybe just bought a new house in a different part of town. But back to the material…

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Am I currently being recruited? – If so, colleges will continue to be interested as long as you continue to perform. It really doesn’t matter where you’re playing if they are already interested.
2. How helpful is my current coach? – If your current coaching staff is very helpful, especially if they have a member of the staff devoted specifically to recruiting, then you should be glad to be in your current situation. Don’t take it for granted; not all coaching staffs are as helpful.
3. How helpful is the staff at the school you’ll be attending? – Do some research. Many schools post stats of how many college players they produce each year, etc. However, many coaching staffs who are very helpful do not post these stats so you can’t go purely off an internet search. Call the school and ask the coaches how many colleges call and visit them in a typical year and which coaches they are connected with. Don’t be afraid to call a local college program for your sport and ask them what they know and think about the coaching staff at the school you’re considering.
4. Do the use College Prospect Network? – Obviously, since we are writing this we are going to be biased but the thing about http://www.CollegeProspectNetwork.com is that we require some information from your coaches before we can approve your application to join our site. Even though it only takes about 3-5 minutes for a coach to register on our site and help their athletes get recruited, some coaching staffs are not willing to do that little effort. That will give you an idea how willing they will be to help you when a school calls and asks about you.
5. Will you play? – Keep in mind that you don’t have to be just a little better than the players you are hoping to replace; you have to be much, much better. The coaching staff at the school you’re considering has been working with the athletes they have for at least three years and they have developed a trust and working relationship with those players. That means you have to win the job without question or you may not get the playing time you were receiving at your previous school.
6. Can I do anything about it? – If you have to move because your parents are moving or there is something else that you cannot avoid, then you have to make the most of the situation. Don’t be afraid to call the coaches and let them know you are coming and that you fully intend on winning the starting varsity job at whatever position you play. Do your homework first, though. If they have an All-State running back and you’re a running back, then tell them you intend to beat out (the current player’s name) but that you also return kicks or play slot receiver. The same goes for basketball. If you’re a PG and the school has the PG spot secured, tell them you’re a shooting guard who can also play point.

More than anything, keep these two things in mind: “First impression is everything,” and, “Be careful what you wish for.” If you’re situation is good at the school where you are now, then do your best to stay there and maximize your opportunity. If you have to transfer, make sure you make a great first impression. Tell the coaching staff you are coming before you arrive and make it clear that your intention are to win the starting job and play well for them.

Also, make sure coaches from both staffs know when and why you are leaving and that they both remember you. You have a chance to have great feedback from two different coaching staffs and help from them to be recruited so you have an even better opportunity than most to find a college where you can be an impact player.

So, to recap, we can’t provide a comprehensive answer to, “Does transferring my senior year hurt my recruiting chances?” But we want to make it clear that you must always do your best to impress every coach at every stop that you come across. Keep in mind that you never know who is watching.

If you have any questions or would like more specific answers, you can leave a comment here and we will do out best to answer it promptly. You can also send us a message at www.Facebook.com/CollegeProspectNetwork or tweet @cpnsports.

The Gonzaga Bulldogs were muscled out of the 2012 NCAA Tournament in Round 2 by Jared Sullinger and the Ohio State Buckeyes but they left a note for under-recruited athletes on their way out. Junior guard Mike Hart saw 15 minutes of court time in the game after getting 17 minutes and scoring five points in their Opening Round win over West Virginia.

When Hart arrived on campus he had come to terms with the fact that his days of competitive, meaningful basketball were behind him. As he explained it to OregonLive.com earlier this month, the fact that he is now on the team had as much to do with pure luck as it did with his work ethic and ability to play the game.

As that article explains, he went to Gonzaga to study business but just so happened to room in the same residence hall as the highly-touted Andy Poling. Poling invited Hart to pickup games against some of the other freshmen recruits and, from there, he found his way to monitored scrimmages, open gyms and, finally, the Zags’ roster. Hart has continued to work hard and last season he even received a one-semester scholarship, which he gave back this season to make way for incoming freshmen. I’d say he’s done pretty well for himself, as far as under-recruited NCAA basketball players go.

If you’re familiar with the Zags roster you may be wondering what happened to Poling. Perhaps ironically, he has since transferred to Seattle Pacific University while Hart is helping the Zags win NCAA Tournament games. My point is not at all to take a shot at Poling, because he seems to be perfectly happy at SPU, it is simply that even coaches as intelligent as Mark Few miss guys who can help their teams more often than they find them.

Hart was a local product and 2nd Team All -Metro League member coming out of high school so you would think it would have been a no-brainer for the Zags to at least put in a phone call. But they didn’t. Instead, they found him half by luck and half by giving him a shot to practice with the other guys in his class.

I wonder how many other under-recruited NCAA basketball players are out there in open gyms and on high school rosters but aren’t going to room in the same residence hall as Andy Poling…

If you think you have what it takes to be the next Mike Hart – or even better – join College Prospect Network. Our website is designed specifically to increase exposure for under-recruited athletes so you don’t have to depend on the same luck that Hart needed. Mention it to your favorite coach as well because we need one of your coaches (it doesn’t have to be your Head Coach) to register on the site in case a college wants to see more game film or has questions about you.

Also, follow us on Facebook and Twitter to read more inspirational stories about under-recruited NCAA basketball players and football players and to keep up with the events we will be attending.