NCSA College Athletic Scholarships Blog

Tara VanDerveer is one of the most respected and successful woman’s basketball recruiters and coaches of all-time.  She has won two National Championships and coached the 1996 Olympic team.  She is one of seven coaches to win more than 700 games.  Needless to say, she know what she is talking about when it comes to basketball recruiting.  Scout.com asked her how much stock Stanford put into the ratings that are blasted across the Internet.

There are several groups that rate high school prospects, such as HoopGurlz, Blue Star, and ASGR, or give out awards, such as the Parade or the McDonald’s All-American selections. Do you follow those ratings? How much stock should fans put in these rankings and awards?

We just get names. So many of the things you look for in a recruit are not measurable. So much of it is the kid’s maturity, the person’s ability to deal with being away from being home, which I guess is maturity too. We look at the names and then we do our own evaluations. We don’t really pay much attention to it. I mean Val Whiting was third team something-or-other and led our team to two championships. The kids this year, Ros (Gold-Onwude), Jill (Harmon), and Morgan (Clyburn) laugh about the fact that none of them were McDonald’s. We don’t really put any stock in that stuff to be honest with you.

Yet another coach who uses lists to identify prospects but evaluates players on their own.  How do you get on a list?  One way is to enroll with NCSA and enter our Recruit-Match Database.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 3:44 pm and is filed under College Basketball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.