Basketball Recruiting on the Nonprofit Margins

"For some reason, people think we're street agents and thugs," said Mitch Malone of the Texas Bluechips. "We're not thugs. The main group of guys who have done this for years have families and deeply care about the kids in their program."

All of the college coaches and all but one of the AAU coaches who confirmed the practice said they had never made or received donations because they believe them to be improper. The college coaches, many of whom said they lost recruits because they refused to make the donations, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared their statements would hurt their chances of signing AAU players. The AAU coaches refused to be identified for fear of being ostracized by peers.

All the sources agreed that the donations do not guarantee that a player will sign with a particular school.

"Donating to a foundation is like buying a raffle ticket where the prize is a car," one of the college coaches said. "If you buy the raffle ticket, it does not mean you definitely will get the car. But if you don't buy it, you have no chance. The other problem is, if you buy the raffle ticket, you don't know how many other raffle tickets have been sold. You may have one raffle ticket, and the guy next to you may have bought 30."

A prominent college coach, however, said a very large donation usually means the team is guaranteed to land all but the most elite players. "You could spend $75,000 in recruiting or $25,000 to guarantee that you will get a player. What's the better investment?" said the coach, who added that he had been solicited for donations six times over the past decade.

Some donations are more to maintain relationships than to secure players. One AAU coach said colleges must "neutralize" their surrounding territory by placating the AAU programs within their area by making donations. Without this sort of maintenance, schools from outside the area can swoop in and make stronger bids for players.

"It's a huge problem for coaches if you want to recruit the best players," one college head coach said. "It's something coaches would like to see go away, but we know that if it goes away, AAU coaches will just find the next thing to do, the next way around everything. The AAU coaches are street smart. The NCAA is book smart. Who wins that?"

The NCAA did not comment specifically on any of the circumstances described in this story. Erik Christianson, an NCAA spokesman, said "our rules clearly preclude boosters from being involved in recruiting prospects, and any evidence that suggests collusion between college coaches and boosters would be a concern."

The NCAA has documented one case of a coach making donations to an AAU nonprofit in exchange for recruiting help. Former Baylor coach Dave Bliss was found to have solicited boosters for at least $87,000 that was donated to a Houston AAU program and donated $28,000 of his own money to Texas AAU programs, according to an NCAA investigation in 2004.

The Post identified 45 of the top AAU teams in the country and found that at least 30 were set up as nonprofits, according to IRS records. Because tax laws do not require nonprofits to identify their donors, almost all of them don't, making documenting the frequency of the practice difficult. There's no way of monitoring how the donations are spent.

"In a lot of cases, these [players] don't see any money," one AAU coach said. "Some of the good coaches will put it back into the program, some may keep it for themselves. There are guys who don't have jobs. This is their full-time job."

The lucrative nature of the donations has prompted one AAU coach who didn't have a foundation to set one up. The AAU coach said that even though the foundation will not be finalized until 2007, he has commitments from coaches at four schools for a total of $100,000 in donations. Because of the contributions, he said he plans to give those schools preferential treatment in the recruitment of his players.