Adams: Wonder boys are still just boys

A baby rolls a ball across a playpen, and a basketball recruiter wonders: “Is he the real deal?”

Don’t laugh. At the current recruiting rate, coaches might soon be including kindergartens on their travel itinerary. Basketball has become a young man’s game. And it’s getting younger by the week.

Last week, an eighth-grader committed to play basketball at Southern Cal. The week before, a ninth-grader committed to play at the University of Kentucky.

In some circles, those prospects would be referred to as recruiting veterans. Take Clark Francis’ circle, for example. For several years, he has been rating sixth-graders for Hoop Scoop recruiting services.

If you’re obsessed with college basketball, you might be wondering: “Why wait till the sixth grade?” New Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie, whose basketball obsession is well documented, apparently subscribes to the early-is-better theory.

Gillispie told Lexington Herald-Leader sportswriter Jerry Tipton he hopes to launch a Junior Elite Camp, which would attract outstanding young basketball players to campus. By “young,” he means 9-year-olds.

“You’re not as much evaluating at that age as developing relationships,” Gillispie told Tipton.

But would you want to build a relationship with a 9-year-old who is projected to grow no taller than 5-foot-9? Or how about the kid who keeps bouncing the ball off his sneakers? Does a college basketball coach want to bond with him?

Even if a coach devotes every waking hour to basketball, he can’t afford to waste time building relationships with basketball babies whose games will never progress beyond the toddler’s stage. So never mind what Gillispie said. It is about evaluation.

I gave it a shot two weeks ago while a youth basketball camp was under way on the University of Tennessee campus. When a kid injured himself on a fall, I questioned his durability. When he regained his footing a few seconds later, I gave him high marks for resiliency.

A stocky player with a nice shooting touch reminded me of Pearl Washington, the former playground legend who played point guard for Syracuse in the mid-1980s. But suppose the young Pearl prospect grows out more so than up. How do you know?

Jimmy Hyams was a sports phenom in Natchitoches, La., long before he became a talk-show host on the Sports Animal. A 10-year-old Hyams once rushed for more than 100 yards against a team of eighth-graders. A year later, he was the MVP of a state baseball tournament for 12- and 13-year-olds. At 12, Hyams scored 17 points in a high school basketball game.

A small-college coach watched him in a football practice and told the high school coach he might be interested in recruiting Hyams. The high school coach informed him Hyams was in the seventh grade.

Hyams was 5-6 when he was 9, and 5-9 at 12. Almost 40 years later, he’s still 5-9.

Tony Jones, the associate head basketball coach at UT, isn’t enamored with the evaluation of grade-schoolers, no matter how tall they are.

“It’s bad for the profession,” he said. “I’ve never seen a guy in the sixth grade that you would say, ‘Boy, he’s a can’t miss prospect.’ ”

“Chris Webber is the closest I’ve ever come to that but he was in the eighth grade. He was 6-7 or 6-8, big and strong. You might see stardom in a 14-year-old. But at 11 or 12, you’re in a guessing game.”

Guessing on teenagers is hard enough.

A couple of years ago, high school freshman Cordell Passley committed to play for UT. He withdrew his commitment after his older brother, Tony, transferred from UT to Southern Indiana.

Even if Cordell hadn’t changed his mind, the Vols would have had second thoughts about signing him. In January, he was suspended from his Pike County High School team in Indianapolis and plans on transferring to a prep school for his senior season.

The Vols might be less likely to take an early, early commitment in the future, according to Jones, who said, “We’ll do a little more soul searching and a little more background evaluation.

“Going into the 11th grade, that’s the optimum time for colleges to accept verbals, and not before. I think the NCAA should do something about it.”

After hearing that, I didn’t bother telling him about the next Pearl Washington I saw at the Stokely Athletics Center.