National Collegiate Athletic Association
NCAA News Archive - 2000
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The NCAA News
Brian Ellerbe, men's basketball coach
University of Michigan
Detroit News
"Our philosophy is every year you have to recruit -- you can't get into looking two or three years down the road. You have to recruit the best possible student-athlete at that particular time. You can't see a talented player who's a good enough student to get into your school and say, 'Oh, wow, we can't recruit him because he may not be around more than a year.' I just don't think that's the mentality you should have. ...
"The key is that the kids you recruit, you hope they want to be educated because we're in the education business."
Jim Harrick, men's basketball coach
University of Georgia
Memphis Commercial Appeal
Discussing proposed changes in the basketball summer recruiting calendar:
"I don't think (the Division I governance bodies) know why they changed the rule. They're legislating against young people who haven't even started in college yet. It's crazy to think they can eliminate camps and the AAU. It's like, 'I'm going to close Nordstrom's because I can't stop my wife from shopping.' It's like the teen-age driving syndrome. A few drivers give so many teen-agers a bad name. AAU basketball, except for maybe about 20 bad coaches, is very good. ...
"The whole idea of summer recruiting is the cost efficiency. AAU coaches go to every nook and cranny of the country, find the players and bring them to us to watch. We don't have to go to them. It's amazing. There were 21 players from the state of Georgia last year in camps, and I saw all of them in two weeks."
Tubby Smith, men's basketball coach
University of Kentucky
Memphis Commercial Appeal
"When I broke in the business as an assistant at Virginia Commonwealth in the late '70s (before there was a summer recruiting period), I remember during the season, I was only at six of our games out of about 30 because I was on the road recruiting. You never develop as a coach, and you get the label of being a recruiter. That's what we're about to revert back to."
Nolan Richardson, men's basketball coach
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Memphis Commercial Appeal
"Maybe now, you won't have to talk to an AAU coach or other guys out there to get to a kid. Because right now, a kid's high-school coach means nothing. A kid's parents -- if he has parents -- don't mean nothing. I'm for any rule that hopefully gives the high-school coach a voice again in the recruitment of a kid."
Athletics marketing
Deborah A. Yow, director of athletics
University of Maryland, College Park
Street & Smith's SportsBusiness Journal
"We're doing whatever it takes. At times it gets a little dicey in the sense that you can border on being tacky by having too much. But if the choice is to be a little tacky or to cut sports, we will opt to be a little tacky and keep our sports."
John D. Swofford, commissioner
Atlantic Coast Conference
Street & Smith's SportsBusiness Journal
"In today's world, (corporate involvement) has become commonplace. It's appropriate, it's necessary, it's helpful and in some ways it can extend beyond athletics where relationships with corporations can help in job opportunities for students."
James S. Jackson, professor
University of Michigan
Street & Smith's SportsBusiness Journal
"Today's athletics director is in a situation where you're maintaining the values of a university setting while at the same time running for what many universities has become a big business. The ways I might go about maximizing profits may not be the ways that I'd go about maximizing the experience of an intercollegiate athlete.
"That's the reason I think that people's experiments of bringing in (administrators) from the outside may not necessarily be the wave of the future. It is big business -- but it's also the university's business. And there are certain aspects about the university that are very hard to learn."