Posted on Sun, May. 11, 2008

Too early too much for most kids

By John Clay

HERALD-LEADER SPORTS COLUMNIST

John Clay

Let's push Billy Gillispie to the side, for a moment. We're not blaming the Kentucky basketball coach for offering a scholarship to a 15-year-old. His job is to win games. He gets paid $2.3 million a year to do exactly that. Those are the times in which we live.

To win games, Gillispie needs players. To get players, it doesn't hurt to be first, and it doesn't hurt to have the name of your school in the public eye, just as Kentucky's name has been out there in the news after accepting a commitment from Michael Avery.

Two weeks ago, no one knew the name Michael Avery. Now that's changed. Avery is an eighth-grader who lives in California. He plays basketball. He's not the next LeBron James, or even a home-state hero like Damon Bailey. But he caught Gillispie's eye during a travel-team tournament in Ohio. Fearing USC might offer Avery a scholarship first, as Coach Tim Floyd has done before, Gillispie beat the Trojans to the punch. Avery accepted.

A national debate erupted. Southern Cal offers an eighth-grader a scholarship and people see it as a Trojan publicity-grab in a UCLA-dominated town. UK does it and, as Andy Staples of Sports Illustrated.com asked, "How could Kentucky -- college basketball royalty -- stoop to offering a scholarship to an eighth-grader?"

The key word there is "stoop."

Gillispie put up his best defense Saturday during a 30-minute news conference with local reporters. He said recruiting is "very, very competitive." He said evaluations have to be made earlier. He said there are no guarantees, just as there is no guarantee an 18-year-old senior will have his high school game translate to college competition.

Asked if he thought this new trend was good or bad for the sport, Gillispie said, "It's just different."

Different in a negative way, I'd say. Many of Gillispie's points are valid, but you still can't shake the feeling that this somehow cheapens the game. It turns coaches into speculators, not recruiters. It turns kids into commodities instead of individuals. In a world in which we ask kids to grow up too fast, it accelerates the process.

Moreover, as Jim Haney, himself a former coach and now director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, told USA Today, "It just gives fuel to that whole perception that coaches are out of control ... that coaches are trying to sign kids when they're born or all they can think about is recruiting."

Coaches are always going to push the envelope. They're the little kids who are always trying to see what they can get away with. They bothered recruits to death with visits, so the NCAA had to limit the number of visits. They bombarded recruits with text messages, so the NCAA had to limit the number of text messages.

The thing now is video conferencing. Asked if he was into that yet, Gillispie smiled, and said, "You have to be aggressive."

But what we're talking about here is not aggression, but balance. You wonder if Michael Avery really knows what's ahead for him. He will no longer be referred to as, "There's Michael Avery, college prospect," it'll be "Michael Avery, the kid who's going to Kentucky." If he is balanced enough and mature enough to handle that, good for him.

But most are not. And anything that encourages more 15-year-olds to follow suit isn't good.

Ask professional tennis how it worked out when 15-year-olds were turning pro to play on the tour. Ask the NBA how it worked out when most every high schooler was trying to go directly to the "Association." In both, the negatives outweighed the positives. Reform was called for; a return to balance required.

Now, in its own way, college basketball has to ask itself if diving head-first into the kiddie pool is really a case of academic institutions trying to help kids. Or is this college athletic programs trying to help themselves?

More importantly, is this really the direction a great game wants to go?

Common sense tells us no.