Recruiting becomes more a kid’s game

Solve this problem:

If 6x - 3 = 39, what does x equal?

Consider this debate:

It's a weekend night, and you and a fellow 15-year-old are choosing between watching "Night At The Museum" and "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer," choosing between Ben Stiller and Jessica Alba. Yeah. Tough one.

These are normal things that tend to roll through the wandering mind of an eighth-grade boy. Math homework. Hot women. Whether it's possible to form a chain of 10 straws from which to drink your milk at lunch. If you should pull a prank by pouring salt in the teacher's coffee.

Michael Avery is likely thinking of other things today, like why all the grass turned blue in Lexington, Ky. Avery attends middle school in California, where between learning which states weren't part of the Confederacy and what the heck any of that Jane Austen stuff means, he plays basketball well enough to have already accepted a college scholarship. He must really have it together. I'm hoping within four years to finally decide what I want to be when I grow up.

Avery still isn't sure what high school to attend but has verbally committed to following those four years with his enrollment at Kentucky. It's not a new concept, college coaches offering full rides to kids who can tell you more about how Zoey and Chase were finally reunited in the season finale than anything about what it takes to compete at the Division I level.

It is, however, as amusing as ever.

Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie -- obviously under more pressure to win than anyone imagined, even in that hoops-insane state -- watched the 6-foot-4-inch Avery play at a youth basketball tournament in Ohio recently. Watched him for two games. Watched a kid who didn't even start for his team and yet reportedly followed with a scholarship offer a few days later, one Avery can take advantage of at about the same time the first term ends for our soon-to-be-next-president. That's the first time any of this would be binding on either side.

"Isn't that crazy?" said UNLV coach Lon Kruger. "I don't have a problem with it. If the kid feels good about it and the parents feel good about it ... shoot, when you think of the world's problems, this certainly isn't one of the bigger ones.

"Where I waffle with it is, I would want my son to have the normal high school experience, to go through the process, to just be a normal high school kid. To already have committed and know where he's going to college -- that's not normal."

Kruger has never offered an eighth-grader and says he prefers a different recruiting approach, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't answer the telephone to some talented kid who has yet to attend a day of high school but can shoot the lights out and projects to grow much more in stature and skill.

It's a rising trend in a game where recruiting services charge hundreds of dollars for sinking low enough to rank the nation's top sixth-grade players, most of whom usually dribble fairly well in those hours they aren't watching "SpongeBob SquarePants."

Southern California coach Tim Floyd seems to offer one eighth-grader per summer now. He defends it by saying if he doesn't take such initiative, another coach will, and it's true others have. Seventh-graders have been offered scholarships because, hey, if you don't know exactly where you want to attend college 60 months before signing a national letter of intent, how focused on your game could you truly be?

It's so impractical on countless levels, just impossible to take any of it seriously. Coaches might be able to look at body frame and instincts and genetics, and closely predict how good a 15-year-old might become, but they can't forecast injuries or work ethic or so many other variables that could wreck a kid's pursuit.

Heck, most coaches can't be certain they still will be employed at the same university when the player arrives, if he ever does. It's always an interesting story when someone so young commits (Avery was held back a year and is the age of most high school freshmen) and makes for some nice press clippings for families and gives parents something to brag about, but that's it.

"This is the direction we are moving," Kruger said. "I'm not sure we'd do what others are doing in these cases, but it's certainly their option."

And why not, with the kind of glowing recommendation Avery received last week from a high school coach in California to local reporters: "He's got great tools for an eighth-grader."

Problem is, he could be talking about basketball or the kid's Algebra calculator.

Ed Graney's column is published Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. He can be reached at 383-4618 or egraney@reviewjournal.com.