Saturday, November 14, 2009

A new way to recruit

For the last couple of year the world of recruiting has started to change. Instead of players keeping their views on their recruitment underwraps, players are taking all of the their thoughts to the public, while others are coming up with tech savy ways of announcing which programs they will play for.

St. Patrick's Guard Kyrie Irving has been at the front of using social media during the process. Irving, who has signed on to play at Duke, has been keeping people up to date with his views with his twitter account. In October, Irving let the world know that he was hanging out with fellow top recruit Tobias Harris at Kentucky. In addition to the twitter, Irving also has a ustream channel that he takes questions from different fans. The twitter aspects of recruiting appears to be growing with 2010 basketball class: Will Barton (Memphis), CJ Fair (undecided), Josh Shelby (undecided), and Kendall Marshall (North Carolina) all have accounts, some of them are open to the public while others are protected. These few just show how much social media is growing when it comes to recruiting.

On Friday, Harrison Barnes took announcing his college pick to a different level. After giving a speech about the final six six schools that were involved in the recruiting process, Barnes said he would Skype the college coach that he was committing to after a couple of seconds Roy Williams face popped up on the screen. I guess the days of just picking a hat up and putting it on are almost over.

Social media is continuing to grow and over the next couple of years many other top high school players wilil be turning to social media.

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