Regionals Double As A Meat Market For Bigger Schools

A lithe and lanky guard plays possum along the baseline, waiting for a teammate to post up on the opposite block. When the shot caroms high off the rim, he takes a two-step jump - up, up, up - to snare the rebound a few inches above the iron and jam it down.

Four rows up in the bleachers at Christianson Gymnasium, a coach smiles and shakes his head.

“Now watch everybody look in their program,” he says.

This is what they discover: Travis Hansen, 6-foot-5, hometown Orem, Utah. Freshman.

“Now look at all the pens come out,” the coach says.

Dozens of them. A Papermate commercial. Along the downstairs back row, leather folders perched on the knees of college basketball’s Ted Macks jiggle under the stress of frantic note-taking.

Welcome to recruiting’s silent auction.

The Region 18 tournament of the National Junior College Athletic Association has come to North Idaho College for the weekend, featuring some of the best players you never heard of.

So let’s start with the people you do know:

Mississippi State. BYU. Colorado State. Sonny Smith, who while at Auburn coached Charles Barkley and Chuck Person, from Virginia Commonwealth. Henry Bibby, whose USC team plays in Pullman tonight. Joey Meyer of DePaul, due in Friday.

God bless it, but the State B was never like this.

NIC coach Hugh Watson stopped counting when pass requests reached 20 - and that’s just from NCAA Division I programs.

Houston. Kansas State. Austin Peay. Pepperdine …

They are here to check out the Lost Boys of basketball, whose various - sometimes microscopic - flaws left them nose-against-the-glass the last recruiting go-round.

Grades not good enough? SAT too s-a-d? Too short? Trying to get over a bad basketball marriage at some big school?

Then this is the place to be seen.

“It’s about talent - finding the right pieces,” said Pepperdine coach Lorenzo Romar, apparently short of a piece he hasn’t been able to pick up on the rebound from the Pac-10. “We need a guy who can really shoot it from the outside. There’s a player here who isn’t the most athletic guy, but he fits a need for us.”

Except he’s already committed to another four-year school. So Romar keeps looking. So do others.

Drake. Weber State. Portland. Long Beach State …

The meat-market atmosphere - at Wednesday’s afternoon session, the college coaches may have outnumbered the civilians - makes it easy to forget that the participants are playing for something besides their futures: a trip to nationals. Which is why three of the four games were as intense as anything seen on ESPN2; indeed, Scenic West champ Eastern Utah and history’s best eighth seed, Southern Idaho, staged the snazziest athlete-on-athlete matchup seen in these parts all winter.

Sure, there’s juco basketball in Spokane, too, but the similarity is in name only. The eight teams here at NIC have athletes from 29 states and five foreign countries, and nobody from Selkirk.

Just don’t buy a ticket looking for a guy who’ll make the extra pass, or expecting Packerish overcoaching.

“We could slow the ball down and look more organized,” admitted Watson, “but with the players you get here, you’ve got to be able to push the ball up and give them a little freedom on the offensive end. People recruit for offense. You’ve got to trick ‘em into playing defense for you.”

And somebody will. Eastern Washington. Gonzaga. Idaho …

In fact, not only is EWU coach Steve Aggers here, but look who’s sitting next to him - former Eastern coach Bob Hofman. And across the gym is another ex-EWU coach, Joe Folda, like Hofman a Division II coach in Colorado.

“If John Wade was here,” Aggers cracked, “we could have a team picture.”

Gonzaga, too. Jeff Reinert, an old floor-burner from the ‘80s, saw his Utah Valley team survive an overtime scare from Dixie. Watching from behind his notebook was another ex-Zag, Lennie Parham, now an assistant at Drake.

So who’s being recruited? Jared Peterson and Danny Bower of Ricks have already said yes to BYU. Eastern Utah’s 6-6 bruiser, K’Zell Wesson, can take his pick if the NCAA decides he has two years of eligibility left. CSI’s Travon Broadway can play in Peoria, if not New York. And the best player in the tournament may be UVCC’s 6-7 freshman Silester Rivers, though the zebras had his number memorized.

One who signed early was Rivers’ teammate, Leif Nelson, a massive 6-11 center who will play next year at Washington State.

“I wanted it out of the way - I didn’t want to worry about who’s looking at me and who’s not,” he said. “If I would have waited, I probably would have been over-recruited by people trying to fill voids. Now I can come to a tournament like this and just play.”

Watson’s job of trying to get NIC to nationals is complicated by his second job - “my obligation,” he calls it - of trying to get his sophomores placed. Todd Myles and Cameron Banks have settled on Mississippi State and Idaho, respectively.

And meanwhile, Watson keeps an eye on next year. He pulls a wrinkled fax out of his desk drawer showing some recruiting service’s top 100 high school seniors. At No. 43 is Nick Irvin, a high-scoring guard from Chicago whose brother, Lance, is an assistant at DePaul - and just happened to spend Tuesday night at The Resort of Hugh Watson.

“I told him last night,” Watson said, with a wink, “that he was sleeping in Nick’s bed.”

And with that, we put away our pens. , DataTimes MEMO: You can contact John Blanchette by voice mail at 459-5577, ext. 5509.

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