Stakes have been raised in the Washington area recruiting landscape for college basketball

Charlottesville — With two years of high school remaining, Nate Britt, a talented point guard at Gonzaga College High, already has scholarship offers from Virginia and Georgetown. Virginia Tech is also courting him. And he and his father recently spent a day at Maryland meeting with new Coach Mark Turgeon.

He called his recruitment, in a word, competitive.

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Personal Post

The region’s college basketball programs have long recruited the same high school prospects, but rarely have they all been so well equipped to do so at the same time. An eventful offseason saw four schools — Maryland, George Mason, George Washington and Navy — hire new head coaches and several schools hire assistants with local ties or recruiting acumen — or both. All this for one goal: secure talent in one of the nation’s most fertile recruiting areas.

“You look at the people who have been put in place, you are going to have some recruiting wars in the D.C. area,” said Steve Turner, Britt’s coach at Gonzaga. “There will be some battles for kids to stick around. It is a good thing for an area that is a hotbed for basketball.”

‘Dream team’

The tone of this recruiting arms race was set by Turgeon, who assembled a staff that includes Scott Spinelli, an assistant under Turgeon at Texas A&M; Bino Ranson, an assistant at Maryland under former coach Gary Williams; and Dalonte Hill, who was the nation’s highest-paid assistant at Kansas State. One summer league coach called it a “dream team” of assistants.

“The race is on,” Clark Francis, editor of the national recruiting publication Hoop Scoop, said recently. “How do you get the local kids to stay home? Maryland has done this. Does Georgetown need to do something else? It’s an interesting scenario now. It’s not a given one school is going to be better than the other at this point.”

It did not take long for Georgetown to make a move. On Wednesday, Georgetown announced the return of Kevin Broadus, an assistant and successful recruiter under Coach John Thompson III from 2004 to 2007. Broadus will serve as an aide to Thompson and will not be allowed to conduct off-campus recruiting visits.

But recruiting battles will be far from a two-school duel. Virginia Tech’s hiring of assistant Robert Ehsan should benefit the Hokies because Ehsan built relationships with prospects and summer league coaches during his six-year stint on Williams’s staff at Maryland. Justin Anderson, a Montrose Christian small forward, said he felt such a comfort level with Ehsan that he was tempted to commit to Virginia Tech after he reneged on his oral commitment to Maryland following Williams’s retirement.

That Anderson, the nation’s 23rd-ranked prospect by Rivals.com, instead pledged to play for Virginia speaks volumes about the Cavaliers’ recruiting efforts. Speaking at Virginia’s John Paul Jones Arena, where he competed in last week’s National Basketball Players Association top 100 camp, Anderson said he was going to de-commit from Maryland no matter whom the Terrapins hired as head coach because his allegiance was to Williams. And now it’s to Virginia Coach Tony Bennett.