The Saline Reporter
A Heritage Newspaper
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Recruiting gone mad
Jerry Hinnen
PUBLISHED: May 1, 2008
This won't surprise anyone, but sometimes it's worth repeating: this truly is a brave, brave new world we're living in, ladies and gents.
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The latest sign for yours truly came last week, when I needed to double-check the spelling of Battle Creek-Lakeview star tennis player Mimi Remynse's last name after her team appeared at the Saline Invitational. I plugged "Mimi Battle Creek Lakeview girls' tennis" into Google.
I got the handful of news results I needed to confirm the spelling as expected, but I got something else, too. Namely, Remynse's page at www.tennisrecruiting.net, part of "The Tennis Recruiting Network," who rate Remynse a five-star tennis recruit and rank her No. 44 in their national rankings for the girls' tennis Class of 2011.
Yes, 2011. Remynse is a freshman, but that hasn't stopped TennisRecruting.net from compiling a "Tennis RPI" rating and detailed records for her play this season. For instance, apparently she's gone 10-2 against TennisRecruiting.net four-star recruits, with one of the losses a 2-6, 2-6 defeat to Canton, Ohio's Jasmine Lee on June 23 of last year.
I know that this kind of attention wouldn't be unusual for a blue-chip boys' basketball or football recruit, and that tennis' extensive club season makes tracking the performance of future prospects easier -- and more worthwhile -- than in other sports. But still, has recruiting madness really taken such hold in the sports world that it's necessary to track the results of a 14-year-old tennis prodigy with the same precision we would the movements of a nuclear submarine?
Apparently, yes. And I don't use the term "recruiting madness" pejoratively, since it may be on its way to an appearance in psychiatric textbooks and psychology journals after the strange case of Kevin Hart.
Hart, whose story you may be familiar with, was a senior offensive lineman at Fernley High School in Reno, Nev., who this past February arranged for a press-attended, schoolwide assembly to announce his commitment decision. As is the current style for big-time recruits, Hart placed Cal and Oregon baseball caps on a table before pushing aside the Oregon hat and donning Cal's to deafening applause from his classmates and coaches.
One major problem: When word of Hart's "commitment" reached Cal, the Bears claimed they hadn't recruited him. Neither had Oregon. Despite Hart's having told local press and recruiting Web sites that he'd received offers from several Division I programs, no one had, in fact, offered him. After initially claiming that he'd been duped by a mysterious middle-man who'd been arranging his recruitment for him, Hart confessed to police that's he'd made up his entire recruitment "process" from wholecloth.
"I wanted to play D-I ball more than anything," Hart told the press. "When I realized that wasn't going to happen, I made up what I wanted to be reality."
Making up this new reality meant, of course, that Hart was avoiding the actual reality that there was no possible way his ruse would hold up, no realistic outcome where we wound up not embarrassing the school and community that had supported him wholeheartedly and bought his lies hook, line and sinker.
Kevin Hart wanted to play the part of the sought-after, press-conference worthy recruit so badly that he went ahead and played it anyway, regardless of the disastrous consequences in reality. Self-deception on this kind of scale might not be full-blown neurosis, but it's probably not far off, either.
Hopefully, this will be both the first and last documented case of "recruiting madness." But I'm not optimistic. The lavish, over-the-top attention paid by the media to blue-chippers isn't showing signs of slackening anytime soon, chiefly because of the insatiable demand for that coverage from college fan bases increasingly desperate for the next big thing, their favorite program's next savior.
We're going to continue being assaulted with stories about the Terrelle Pryors of the world until fans decide they don't care whether their team lands Terrelle Pryor.
It's not reasonable to expect sports fans to quit caring about recruiting completely -- particularly when multiple studies are showing that there's a rough correlation between recruiting success as measured by Internet gurus and on-field success, depressing as that is to admit -- but I think it's fair to maybe ask if sports fans should stop their hyperventilation over athletes who can't vote or even drive a car in some instances. We don't need more breaking stories from Rivals.com. We don't need more Terrelle Pryors. We certainly don't need more Kevin Harts.
Because if it gets any worse, and Mimi Remynse is at a courtside press conference three years from now picking a Stanford tennis racket over a Georgia tennis racket, it might be time this brave new world we're in when it comes to high school sports maybe really isn't preferable to the old one after all.
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