Coach‘s Corner appears sporadically at Outside the Huddle. The author Bob Lapadot coached for 28 years. He spent the last 12 years of his coaching career as the girls basketball head coach at Garrett, where he went 193-91 and won three Sectional titles and one Regional title.
Coaching basketball has become a year long job in many ways, and recruiting definitely fits that category. You deal with it – in some way – with coaches or your players, all year long.
I believe helping your players be successful in any and all aspects of their life is your number one responsibility as a coach. If a player wants to further their playing career in college, and they want your help, I believe you owe it to that player to do whatever you can to help.
I think this help comes in many ways. Some will take extra time out of your day, some will happen during the off season, and some will correlate directly to your practices and games.
I also believe there is a very fine line between helping and hurting a kid in recruiting. You have to promote individuals while still building a team. You have to make sure a kid plays for their teammates and not just for a scholarship. Most importantly, you have to be honest. You have to be honest with college coaches and with your players.
Lying to either is probably the best way to ensure a less than favorable college career for your player.
I have been very blessed over the years to have great players that were good enough to be recruited at all levels of college basketball, from D1 to D3 and NAIA. I have also had players that wanted to play other sports in college, and those who didn’t want to play in college. The first thing I owed them all, was a chance to be as successful as possible at the high school level, as a team.
With the recent run of players that have been recruited from my teams at Garrett, the thing that was most surprising to me was how many college coaches mentioned the lack of involvement from high school coaches in their players recruitment. They said that many coaches were leaving it up to the kids and AAU coaches to find schools and get recruited.
My involvement and communication with college coaches was always acknowledged and appreciated by those coaches. Did this take more time? Absolutely. Finding coaches contact info, sending emails, making calls, and sending film were all things that weren’t part of a “normal” day of coaching.
In the offseason, I would attend AAU events and try to talk to coaches, see what they were looking for, and point them in the direction of my kids. I once met a coach, during the summer, in the lawn and garden section of Lowe’s to talk about a player. This obviously takes time not set aside for practices and games during the season or the summer.
I never saw a problem with this though, I was asking these kids to give everything to our program, why would I not return the effort? It seemed like the natural thing to do. I had many parents of players from other programs talk to me about how they wished their coach would do the same for their daughter. Again, I felt like I owed this to our kids, and I think they knew I was invested in their future as much as they were. I truly believe this type of investment allowed me to coach our teams as hard as I did.
The balance of helping kids get recruited is just as important on the court as it is off.
You are ultimately there to win games and let kids have the best high school basketball experience as possible. I always told our kids that the best way to be seen by college coaches was to win. If you win enough and put yourself on the big stage, coaches will find you and see you. The big stage is also something a coach can achieve through scheduling and we tried to do that when appropriate. College coaches want to see your kids against the best competition possible. Playing great teams is also good for your team’s growth.
The next thing I stressed was you have to play the game the right way. You have to be unselfish, you have to be a good teammate, and you have to excel in your role. There are many reasons why kids get scholarships other than being the team’s leading scorer. Too many kids and parents lose sight of that. Teach kids to accept their role and excel at it and you’ll make the team better while helping the kid look as good as possible in recruiting.
In 2021-2022, when we were #2 in the state and made it to the semi state, all of our original starting 5 were being recruited to play college basketball. Three ended up with college basketball scholarships, one got a D1 volleyball scholarship, and the fifth unfortunately suffered a season ending injury, and although she still had offers, chose not to play in college.
When you have a team like this, how do you win at the highest level and still showcase your players? You get them to excel at their role and try to be the best there is at that role. If you are getting recruited to be a point guard, be the best point guard you can be. Do the things that point guards do. That helps you and helps us. If you are being recruited as a post, then dominate the post on both ends of the floor. That helps the player and team. All of this goes back to playing the game the right way, and we stressed that all the time. I think our teams at Garrett displayed that by good they were on defense, how unselfish they were on offense, and how the main goal was always to win the game together.
Lastly, I think you have to demand excellence from your best players.
You have to push them, and challenge them, and not let them coast. College coaches want to see that a kid can be coached, that they can handle adversity, that has been held accountable, that can be a great teammate, and that plays the game the right way. A talented player that shows those characteristics is a very recruitable player, and all of those can be stressed and coached on a daily basis.
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