In April, Villanova’s male basketball coach Jay Wright feared that the coronavirus pandemic would harm his ability to recruit players from next year’s high school class.
Since the coaches were unable to see the players in person or have them visit their campuses that month, Wright was unsure how he and his staff could properly evaluate the athletes.
“If it affects us and hurts a little, so what? Suck it. A lot more important things are happening in our world right now, ”Wright said in April.
Three months later, her fears seem almost picturesque.
After two recent verbal engagements, Wright and his staff now have four committed seniors on the rise and thus the No. 1 recruiting class by 2021, according to recruitment website 247Sports.com. They include players who might start in the future: point guard Angelo Brizzi from Virginia, shooting guard Jordan Longino from Pennsylvania, small forward Trey Patterson from New Jersey and big man Nnanna Njoku from Delaware. Under Wright, Villanova has won two of the last four NCAA championships, and these players are eager to be part of the growing tradition.
“We don’t have AAUs this year and we would normally be traveling and focusing on games,” Rutgers High School Patterson said Tuesday in a telephone interview. “But because of the pandemic, me and my family have had more time to talk to schools and evaluate programs, so I think that accelerated the process.”
During a typical summer, Patterson and many of the top high school prospects would be playing this month at the Nike Peach Jam in North Augusta, South Carolina, or at other events across the country trying to impress coaches and attract deals. of scholarships.
Now, with tournaments largely canceled as the virus and NCAA impose a deadline to recruit until August, Patterson verbally pledged on June 18 and plans to sign his letter of intent in the fall.
Several other schools are also benefiting. Baylor, Butler, Ohio State, Southern California, Louisville, Michigan and the State of Florida each had three players committed to 2021 as of Wednesday.
“What really fueled the entire recruiting process is the pandemic because children are not sure if they will ever be able to make paid visits to these schools, so they have had these virtual visits,” said Tom Konchalski, a recruiting expert since long time. he said in a phone interview. “Obviously, that doesn’t give them an idea of the team, the campus, the coach, the players and the whole culture of the school as if they were visiting when the school was really in session. But it’s better than nothing “.
Jeff Ngandu, a Canadian big man from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, became engaged to Seton Hall in May for the 2020-21 season without having visited the New Jersey school. Saquan Singleton made a similar commitment in April 2020 to New Mexico outside of Hutchinson (Kan.) Community College. Both kept in touch with their future training teams through video conferences and phone calls.
“Unfortunately, I couldn’t see the visit, but I felt the love and connection,” Singleton said.
Jordan Riley, a rising senior guard at Brentwood High School on Long Island, got engaged to Georgetown on Friday after a one-hour visit to the school this month with his father, Monty. They were unable to see any students or meet with the basketball team because the campus was closed. They didn’t even let Georgetown coach Patrick Ewing and his staff know they were on campus.
However, the visit, along with Ewing’s daily recruiting message, was enough to make the 6-foot-4-inch, 185-pound guard promise to the Hoyas over Kansas, the state of Florida, Connecticut, and St. John’s. He had visited St. John’s and UConn, but was unable to visit the other campuses.
“I saw the campus, I saw what I liked, and I’m ready to go there,” Riley said of Georgetown.
Monty Riley said he wanted to speed up the process because he was overwhelmed with calls that he normally would not have received in a non-pandemic year.
“There were too many phone calls,” said Monty Riley. “One day I received 30 phone calls. And I’m working.I made him shorten his list and made him continue from there.
Rising older adults and new college students are not the only ones engaging during the pandemic.
Emoni Bates, the No. 1 prospect in Michigan’s class of 2022, verbally committed to the state of Michigan last month, more than two years before he played his first game of college basketball.
That could change if Bates is reclassified in the 2021 class. And if the NBA’s over and over rule is negotiated collectively by 2022, Bates, who has been compared to a young Kevin Durant, could enter the NBA draft in 2022 and skip college entirely. You could also drop out of college and earn money by entering the G-League pro pathway program for elite prospects.
For now, however, his college decision has been made.
“The pandemic had no influence on the timing of our state of Michigan decision,” Elgin Bates, Emoni’s father, said in a text message. “We chose to let what we have been thinking about since seventh grade right now be known. There was no point in waiting or wasting time recruiting anyone. ”
Michigan State got a second promise in the junior class this week when center Enoch Boakye verbally engaged with coach Tom Izzo’s team.
Some college coaches and others in the game believe there could be another downside to these initial commitments in addition to players changing their minds before officially signing. They are gearing up for more transfers, an interesting prospect considering that there are already more than 1,000 players on the NCAA transfer portal.
Patterson feels that early engagement will help Villanova and her future teammates in the long term, giving them more time to get to know each other and understand what they expect of each other.
“It is good that we are almost done with our class now and we have an opportunity to build relationships with each other for the next year before we go in and build a relationship with the coaches even more,” he said. “So everyone is more or less on the same page.”
