Paul Hewitt: Just one look at GMU was all it took

The decision was made. Paul Hewitt would not be coaching this season. The six weeks after his ouster at Georgia Tech left time for contemplation on how his 11 years in Atlanta unfolded. It was time, he figured, to take a look at TV work. His agent called three days …

Final Four run proves lucrative for VCU’s Shaka Smart

Shaka Smart signed an eight-year contract worth $1.2 million annually with Virginia Commonwealth University on Monday, nearly three months after leading the school to the Final Four. A copy of the contract obtained by The Washington Times shows how lucrative VCU’s unexpected postseason run was for the 34-year-old Smart. Smart’s …

First Four staying in Dayton for next two years

By Matt Norlander The one thing lacking in recent years with the NCAA tournament is identity. When it comes to venues, there’s consistency, but no personality. It hinders the TV product. All the floors look the same, with that black-and-blue, generic NCAA design. I hate it. So it’s refreshing the NCAA announced this morning that Dayton would continue to host the First Four for the next two seasons. At least we have something familiar, something good and proven and not so bland when it comes to NCAA tournament sites. Unfortunately, the floor’s bound to look the same. Dayton has served as the site that is essentially the appetizer to the monstrous opening weekend, and has hosted opening-round games since the field expanded to 65 teams a decade ago. Even though many were underwhelmed by so-called First Four in its first year, keeping the start of the NCAA tournament in the Gem City was the right call.

William and Mary’s Jonathan Grimes: The Musician And The Beast

2011 CAA Football Spring/Summer Feature Series By Zach Burrus, CAA Communications   The football player and the music major. It’s not often that these two worlds collide. It’s even more rare when the football player is the music major. Welcome to the world of William and Mary senior running back Jonathan Grimes, who tickles the ivory equally as well as he runs the pigskin. Grimes’ father had always wanted him to play the piano and signed him up for lessons at the age of seven. Grimes acquiesced but also held a burning desire to play football. His father planned to hold him out from the local leagues for another year, but Grimes was persistent and promised his father he would remain as dedicated to the piano as he was the pigskin. That promise continues to present itself 14 years later as the Palmyra, N.J., native has proven himself a true student of the piano and the game. In a world in which children often abandon music in order to focus solely on sports, it is not often a talent like Grimes surfaces in the collegiate ranks. His dedication to both his gifts has undoubtedly paid dividends in his first three years at the College. As the most decorated player in the history of the CAA with eight conference recognitions, Grimes has consistently asserted himself as a force on the field. The reigning CAA Special Teams Player of the Year and three-time all-conference selection led the league and ranked among the top-25 nationally with 135.0 all-purpose yards per game while ranking fourth in the CAA with 73.9 rushing yards per game. Grimes, who was named to the Walter Payton Award Watch List this past season, will open his senior campaign as the Tribe’s all-time leader with 5,445 all-purpose yards and inside the program’s career top 10 in rushing yards, rushing touchdowns, rushing attempts and kickoff return yards. When asked what he considers his greatest accomplishment, the focus turns away from himself and towards the team. He says, “The team’s conference championship this past year probably means the most to me. It was great for the team and the school. Everyone was very proud. That was a big moment.” It is this kind of humility and team orientation that struck a chord with Grimes’ teammates, who chose him as a captain for the coming season. He looks forward to his newfound role, explaining, “I’m really planning to be a leader and to lead by example. I want to represent the team well. I want my teammates to have their voices and opinions heard and to get a sense of what direction the team is headed. It’s important to get everyone on the same page and for everyone to be working hard towards one common goal.” This common goal is unquestionably a national championship. Few would doubt the Tribe’s ability to make a run at the title given the team’s abundant talent at essentially every position. Nevertheless, capturing the program’s first-ever national crown will involve competing at a high level against what is always a high level of competition in the CAA. According to Grimes, it also means “having a killer instinct and getting an early lead on teams. We have to take one game at a time because you can’t sleep on anybody.” Grimes obviously understands the importance of keeping things in perspective. It is this mentality that has led him to achieve a successful balance in life on and off the field. He readily admits the challenging nature of the College’s music curriculum, saying, “It’s not an easy major and you have to put in the work. But just like football, it’s my passion and I’m willing to make the effort.” That effort has extended beyond the classroom into the choir loft. Grimes, who has sung in church choirs since childhood and continues to do so today, has been around the church all his life. This is just another one of the values instilled in him by his hard-working father, a truck driver by trade. The future is certainly bright for Gregory Grimes’ son, who has long had aspirations of a career in the National Football League. So, while he will look to earn his degree and take his team to unprecedented heights this year, his focus must also be on taking himself to the next level as an NFL draftee. He explains, “I’ve wanted to be in the NFL since I was little. Since I have a shot, I’m going to try to do everything I can to work hard and stay healthy.” Given his musical prowess and passion, Grimes also hopes to follow in the footsteps of legends Herbie Hancock and Leon Huff to achieve what already promises to be a successful career in the music industry. “I would love to make music for a living and be a producer. I’ve already started making music with Tribe redshirt junior Kelly FitzGerald. We record stuff all the time. I’m really interested in making my own music and hope someone will end up liking it.” If his music is anything like the sweet rhythm Grimes has found on the field, there should be no question of liking it as it will surely amaze and impress. There is also no doubt that Grimes has found a harmony in his life between his two incredible gifts. He is a true chameleon (to borrow the name of Hancock’s timeless tune) who has struck a chord with his team, his professors, churchgoers, and Tribe fans alike.

E-S-P-Y You Ain’t Got No Alibi…

We’re not into those overused, overtired, overwrought sports radio arguments about “what things mean.” Go discuss that stuff elsewhere with those of inferior intellect. So no matter your stance on the ESPYs, and your stance on whether or not it was a “great upset” that VCU made the Final Four, it’s nice that VCU (and the CAA) is getting ESPY-level recognition. Here is where you vote, once per day . All I’ll say is that this is the fans’ latest version of locker room and courtside “C-A-A, C-A-A” chants. Support it, because as the newly-minted Blaine Taylor likes to say: “we perform best with all oars rowing together.” Or something like that. Most interesting to me is two of VCUs competitors. Fabricio Werdum and Fedor Emelianenko apparently staged a classic MMA bout with Werdum upsetting Emelianenko. Now, Fabricio Werdum sounds like a poker player and Fedor Emelianenko a hockey player, but what do I know? And Blame’s upset over Zenyatta in the Breeder’s Cup? Perhaps that was earth-shattering but I don’t remember even agate type about that (and I follow horse racing…it’s about memorability, right?) Maybe Werdum and Emelianenko were actually the jockeys that day. (Side note: we’ll get back to serious stuff next week. It’s summer, so let’s enjoy a little levity, eh?)

Reggie Jackson Was Also #44…

Part of a Russian fairy tale is today’s thought: Go, not knowing where. Bring, not knowing what. The path is long, the way unknown. Since I don’t follow the NBA, can anybody tell me what year NBA GMs chose to stop drafting kids who can actually play the game–you know, kids who demonstrated through performance on the floor when the clock is running–for kids who may one day be able to play the game, if everything pans out perfectly? When did accomplishment and proof lose out to a twinkle in one’s eye? And when did the value of points, rebounds, assists–and other skill-based data in which the game is actually measured–get eclipsed by height and length and motor (but no discernible skill)? I’d like to know, becase I’m wagering there’s a correlation between that year and the year GMs began getting fired left and right. Admittedly, I don’t follow the NBA, but I can’t get past drafting a kid who played three inauspicious D-League games, and another who dominated the fierce competition in Qatar. This is especially salient after watching Jamie Skeen dominate two lottery picks on a big stage. Look, I can bite into the sweet organic Fuji apple in front of me right now, or I can wait until Monsanto sprays DDT all over the apple tree out back. The apple may be bigger and sweeter, or it could kill me. OK–off the soapbox. I’m just thrilled we’re a few days from not having to hear about the NBA and can focus on Why We Have It Better. Today, we simply wish our best to Jamie Skeen, Cam Long, Frank Hassell, Chase Allen, and every other ex-CAA player chasing his dream.

Harris Headed to Milwaukee; Jenkins to Golden State

NEWARK, N.J. — Long Island’s Tobias Harris was drafted by the Charlotte Bobcats at No. 19 but was dealt to Milwaukee as part of a three-team trade. The Bobcats sent the 6-foot-8 Harris to the Bucks as part of Thursday’s deal. The Bucks also received Charlotte forward Stephen Jackson, Bobcats guard Shaun Livingston and guard Beno Udrih from Sacramento. Harris, a Dix Hills, N.Y. native who spent one season at Tennessee, averaged 15.3 points and 7.3 rebounds as a freshman with the Volunteers.  Tobias was not immediately available until the trade was formally announced, but his father said they were pleased with the trade. “Bucks assistant Kelvin Sampson was the first coach to offer Tobias a scholarship in the 8th grade and now he will be coaching Tobias,” he said. “Tobias feels great. It’s a young team and Tobias will be a great fit.” JENKINS TO GOLDEN STATE Hofstra guard Charles Jenkins was selected by the Golden State Warriors with the 44th pick in the second round. Jenkins becomes the first Hofstra player chosen since Speedy Claxton was a first-round pick of the Philadelphia 76ers (20th overall) back in 2000. Claxton also played part of his NBA career with the Warriors . The last Pride player to reach the NBA was Norman Richardson (’01), who was a free agent selection of the Indiana Pacers in 2001 and played parts of one season for the Pacers and Chicago Bulls. Jenkins will be looking to continue his basketball career after graduating as Hofstra’s all-time leading scorer with 2,513 points this winter, ranking him second in Colonial Athletic Association history behind only David Robinson of Navy. He averaged 22.6 points per game this season on 51.7 percent shooting from the floor, while guiding Hofstra to a 21-12 final record and a 14-4 mark in the CAA, good for second place, its highest finish since joining the league in 2001-02. Jenkins also became only the third player to win the Haggerty Award as the top player in the New York metropolitan area for three seasons in a row, joining Chris Mullin of St. John’s (1983-85) and Jim McMillian of Columbia (1968-70). Follow Adam Zagoria on Twitter And like ZAGS on Facebook

Rumor Confirmed…

Draft talk, assistant coaching moves, and the Nationals managerial situation all take a back seat to today’s top news story. For the first time since “oh I don’t know, the 1970s–maybe 30 years,” Blaine Taylor’s upper lip is naked:

The recruiting reporter who wasn’t

On April 19, a recruiting analyst named Jonathon Paige wrote the first post on his new blog, Summer Hoop Scoop. That post came with a modest announcement : After a seven month hiatus and brief retirement, I am back. A lot of you followed me last summer on the website and twitter. I originally thought the yearly AAU circuit grind might be a bit much moving forward, but I just couldn’t hang up the kicks and notepad. With that, Paige soon got down to the business of finding and breaking recruiting information. He quickly amassed around 500 Twitter followers, and several mainstream college basketball reporters, assistant coaches and AAU personnel were among them. His site’s popularity grew. His news dispatches were cited in blog posts — including by some of the more popular team sites in the college hoops blogosphere — and his insights were debated and bandied on many a message board. The problem will all of this? Jonathon Paige doesn’t exist . He’s a fake, a fraud, the figment of an imagination. In a blog post on Summer Hoop Scoop yesterday, “Paige” — who signs the bottom of the post as “Troll,” an ode to Internet mischief-makers the world over — revealed his site, Twitter account, and everything else about the persona to be an elaborate ruse. But why? Why make up recruiting news? Why create a false identity? In his own words (seriously this time): When a recruiting “source” brings good news to a fan base, it is instantly credible and plenty are willing to defend the source with recollections of previous information provided that proved correct. When a recruiting source brings bad news, it is open season. “Never heard of this guy”… “probably some opposing fan base’s blogger” …. “I doubt he knows what he is talking about.” In short, fans believe what they want to believe. So, out of boredom and sincere interest in the relationship between the internet, recruiting services, and consumers, I created Jonathon Paige. The execution was easy enough. Troll “immediately” tweeted news from trusted recruiting sources, including ESPN’s own Dave Telep. He trolled message boards and “broke” any scant recruiting information floating around in the collective ether. He closely read the dispatches of recruiting analysts at summer tournaments and camps, then regurgitated that information in slightly different ways. He just flat made stuff up. And, when in doubt, he used language that seemed to appeal to fan bases’ specific sensibilities: When in doubt, use lots of language that appeals to specific fanbases (Example: Carolina fans love the words “family atmosphere” and Duke fans like to talk about “silent verbals” while Kentucky fans love to hear about John Calipari “going to work.”) In a remarkably short period of time, Mr. Troll’s hunch was proven correct. When he tweeted positive rumors about a recruit leaning toward a certain school, fans of that certain school were quick to adopt the information, while fans of competing schools angrily dismissed it. Blog posts cited his news with and without attribution. Message boards blew up. Some asked who he was; others defended him for getting things right in the past. If Jonathon Paige tweeted that a recruit was “leaning towards” school X, there would be multiple re-tweets and messageboard posts by fans of that school about the news. If another school in the race for the same recruit saw the tweet and it was brought up on a messageboard, the source and news would be summarily dismissed in short order… until something more positive came out a week later of course. And then came the coup de grace, one last “test” of the big joke’s ability: Breaking a big-time commitment rumor. Troll decided to see if a fictional Twitter account could convince people that elite 2012 recruit Kaleb Tarczewski  was leaning toward North Carolina, even though his parents favored Kansas. Then, “Paige” called Tarczewski to UNC, even though the recruit was currently visiting another team’s campus. Some folks took the bait. Of course, this post is not written to chastise the media or bloggers or message board creatures or any of it. The Internet is a trust-based place, and it’s not like people are going to assume someone spending his months writing and blogging about recruiting is really a fake. I didn’t see Paige’s work until today, but could I have followed him? Sure. Nor do I believe this is necessarily an indictment of the media at large. Sure, there are elements in there: Where news filters exist, what sources can be trusted, who to believe and why — mass media continues to grapple with these fundamental challenges as the Internet changes the way we consume news and opinion. Troll’s experiment proves how difficult the business of recruiting news really is. Rumors are everywhere. Sources are, too. The ability to separate the real from the fake — the actual news versus the “my buddy heard so-and-so is coming to campus tomorrow, woooo!” — has never been more difficult. Throw in the fact that this news is about 16- and 17-year-old high schoolers unschooled in media management and prone to changing their minds, well, no wonder it’s so hard to figure out what’s really going on. And that was true even before Mr. Troll started making things up.

Shaka Answers The Unanswerable…

As many know, preparation for this year’s Blue Ribbon guide is underway. So you understand the process, I talk to each head coach ’roundabout this time–last year’s wrap up, this year’s look-ahead and such. We have an extended conversation about players, points of emphasis, and program-related items. There’s a shorter, catch-up call in August just to make sure everything is in order, and to see if there’s anything notable that changed over the summer. It works well because heavy lifting can be completed in July, and all that’s left in August is obtaining the most recent news possible for publication. (Except the schedule, which is a PITA.) So anyway, I was fortunate to sit down with Shaka Smart on Friday, and before we got into the usual flow of the interview there was a question to ask him that’s been nagging me since mid-March. We know of the burned calendar on March 1 . Fun story, no doubt, thinking about Smart singeing his arm hair in an attempt to motivate his kids to forget about a bad month of basketball. However to me, that was an outward expression of something bigger. While it makes for a great story, the calendar burning serves to illuminate a deeper transformation. Something happened that first week of March that was not normal; bigger and better than any outward motivation. You don’t go from losing four in five games–and three at home when you’d lost three home games in last three years combined–to the Final Four without something important happening. Was VCUs Final Four run the manifestation of the power of momentum? Four talented seniors “figuring it out?” As always, Smart’s response didn’t disappoint. You ask him a question, you can expect a thoughtful answer: “Every team, under the surface, has a certain potential to be the best it can be. Great is such an overused term, but for us ‘the best it can be’ was great. But every team has that somewhere deep down, and there’s a variety of reasons that are outside the understanding of most fans, there’s a variety of reasons your team doesn’t play at that level. Winning is about so much more than talent. If winning is about talent and potential we wouldn’t have been there. We weren’t a top four team in terms of talent or potential. Neither was Butler. Going back to March 1 there was an understanding–on our part as coaches and the players–that there was a potential to be at our best with our backs against the wall. Our guys worked hard leading up to the (CAA) tournament, but sometimes you need something to happen, something to spark the emergence of your team back to greatness. Drexel, defensively, was better than any other team we played in the (NCAA) tournament. People kept telling us about Purdue, and Florida State, their defense. But I kept saying we’ve played tougher defenses during our conference season. So Jamie makes the shot. That provided a spark. Overall, for our program, we were able to utilize it as a spark. To build on what we’ve done. Then the Mason game was the beginning of what happened for the rest of March where people doubted us and talked trash. It was the precursor. They had won 16 in a row, most by double digits. They were playing as well as anyone in the country at that point. When they talked that trash we were able to get (our players’ minds) away from how good Mason is and onto the ‘let’s show these guys.’ Everything clicked. The magnitude of the ODU game maybe caught up with us, the time period between the end of the Mason game and beginning of the ODU game. I have a great deal of respect for ODU but it was not so much ODU as it was us. I think we got caught up in (the stakes and the rivalry) a little bit and that led to the slow start. We battled back and that went a long way towards getting us in (to the NCAA tournament). We needed all that, every possession of that game, to show our resolve and ability and how good we can be.” Once VCU was selected the stories came easily. Jamie Skeen sitting alone eating during the Selection Show. Freshman Rob Brandenberg coming to the rescue during a sloppy first half against USC. Rodriguez-to-Burgess, and Brandon Rozzell talking smack to the Kansas bench after his three put VCU up 17-10. But I think there’s still more to it, the riddle every coach spends idle moments trying to answer. Burning calendars, opposition quotes, and every other motivational technique is designed to get to that unknowable place, to tap into that under-the-surface potential Smart was referring to. Coaches see it in small bursts, both individually and collectively, and it grinds on their peace of mind: What is it that produces the beauty of the 13-2 run, or the five-game winning streak? It’s happened in the past so the capability is there. How in the world do we tap into that more often? Sometimes, the simplest of questions are also the most profound. They lack a tangible answer even though one exists somewhere. For coaches, it’s figuring out how the 12 young men who play on Your Team can mesh preparation with execution to the best of their ability. It’s frustrating for everyone to see great highs and forehead-crinkling lows? But honestly, for you, the fan, isn’t that part of the beauty of college basketball?

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