Watching all this were 500 or so college coaches looking for their next meal ticket. But those guys, with their deer-hunter squints and their promises of love, honor and free tuition (until you tear an Achilles tendon), were the relatively benign figures. To their midst has been added a new group of scavengers: amateur coaches and so-called street guys, who, as Providence College coach Peter Gillen puts it, want “to get their hooks into the kids.”
The dueling Las Vegas tournaments–Nike’s National Prep Basketball Championship, in its 22d year, and Adidas’s Big Time Classic, in its first-featured 259 teams and more than 2,000 players from 30 states and four foreign countries. Elsewhere two weeks ago, kids were playing in Winston-Salem, N.C., at the 17-and-under AAU nationals, and at the Slam-N-Jam invitational in Long Beach, Calif. If this sounds like a lot of hoops for a non-basketball season, wake up and smell the liniment. There is no non-basketball season anymore. “Summer” prep basketball now encompasses “blue chip” players and “touring teams” from nearly every large city playing in one camp after another. Some of the same kids who started camp in Hampton-Sydney, Va., in early June will finish their season in Boston in September.
“We’ll end up playing over 100 games,” says Leo Papile, the bronzed, ponytailed coach of the Boston Amateur Basketball Club, which hasn’t been home in a month. “You think traveling with 10 teenage guys across America in 100-degree temperatures is easy? Some want to look at mountains, some want to sleep, some want to watch ‘Howdy Doody.’ Hey, this is no picnic.”
The NCAA has only itself to blame. New recruiting rules have sharply limited college coaches’ access to a star prospect. If the kid wants to be seen, now he has to play during summers when coaches can watch. “A terrible vacuum has been created by the NCAA between a deprived society [mostly inner-city, black youth] and higher-learning institutions,” says Rutgers coach Bob Wentzel. “We used to be able to shoot baskets with the kids and get to know them.” The access is limited during the summer, too. In practice, if a college recruiter wants to approach a kid, he works through his summer coach or one of the street guys. Some of them are born altruists; others are looking to parlay their friendships into a college coaching job or an agent’s fee when he signs on with the pros.
Last summer at Nike camp Kevin Garnett from Mauldin, S.C., just happened to play for a coach from Farragut High School in Chicago. Last fall Garnett moved with his mother from South Carolina to an apartment in Chicago, where he played for Farragut. In June Garnett announced he’d skip college. He was drafted by the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves; his contract should be worth millions.
“Garnett’s whole life was changed after he came to basketball camp,” says Sonny Vacarro, who invented the Nike summer season before switching to Adidas. “For better? For worse? We don’t know yet.” Nor do we know how the future will turn out for Schea Cotton, a precocious rising junior from Los Angeles, the next phenom, who has already switched schools three times, played for disparate club teams from L.A. to New York and was once flown to Nike headquarters in Oregon to consult about shoes. As an eighth grader.
In Las Vegas, not all of the games were on the court. Tom (Ziggy) Sicignano, a onetime Adidas salesman who coached a Nike team, accused supporters of the New York Gauchos team, which played in the Adidas league, of “kidnapping” two of his players. “These players are mine since 10 years old. I’m in their homes. Everybody knew everybody,” Ziggy said, defending himself in a couple of tenses. “Their families know how to spell my last name.”
As it turned out, the players left without playing for either team. “There’s a lot of slime out there preying on kids, warehousing them,” said Ziggy, who also had an answer for why he kept wearing his Adidas stuff while coaching in the Nike tournament. To wit: “So? I’m not owned by any stinkin’ body.” Would that all of summer basketball could repeat that mantra.
