Tinkle a big star: Top teams court Montanan

MISSOULA – At the rate that media guides and recruiting letters keep coming in, the Tinkles are going to need a bigger house.

Joslyn Tinkle, the 6-foot-3 daughter of Montana men’s basketball coach and former Ferris basketball player Wayne and wife Lisa, is a popular girl. Dozens of games in high school and at AAU tournaments, which have honed some serious basketball skills, have made it that way for the junior from Big Sky High School.

The byproduct of that is a recruiting battle that has heated up well before college coaches can even speak directly to Tinkle, who averages 19.8 points a game for the 4-2 Big Sky Eagles. As evidence, Joslyn produces some 40 media guides, all from Division I schools. Then there are the three, three-ringed binders filled with personal letters and notes from all over the country.

Maryland. Georgia. Rutgers. Stanford. Oklahoma. California. All those schools want Joslyn Tinkle to play for them. All six are rated in the Top 10 in the NCAA.

“I was in shock for a while,” said Tinkle, who’d been warned that once coaches could send out letters to juniors on Sept. 1 that the mail box would be full. “It was a little overwhelming.” The process began years ago, when Joslyn Tinkle became a self-described gym rat. You can make an argument for genetics – Wayne and Lisa stand 6-10 and 6-3, and scored 2,970 points between them for UM – but Joslyn’s blue-chip status is just as clearly a product of her hard work in the gym.

The personalized cards from recruiters can be a riot – “Tinkle, Tinkle, little star” reads a letter from Oklahoma – and mother and daughter marvel at the penmanship of a Stanford assistant, and the overall time coaches put into writing their recruits.

The pluses are there are no phone calls allowed until spring and text-messaging is not allowed at all, though the NCAA could reverse a recent ban on texting at its convention.

The minuses? Well there is the little matter of narrowing down all these choices to five official visits, and then those down to a final one. Joslyn leans toward making a decision ahead of her senior season at Big Sky High. Whether she’ll head to the Pac-10 or Big 12 or stay home and play for her parents’ alma mater remains to be seen.