At sinking UNO, summer recruiting proves to be anything but Easy

Joe Pasternack's problem starts to become evident when he answers the main men's basketball office number at the University of New Orleans in mid-June. A typical Division I head coach has buffers against this sort of contact: secretaries, managers, graduate students, video coordinators, basketball operations staff, assistant coaches. His friend Josh Pastner, at Memphis, has 16 other staffers listed on the school's website. Pasternack is alarmingly uninsulated. I'm calling with a personnel question, because all of his players from 2009-10 have been released from their scholarships as the Privateers leave the Sun Belt Conference and begin their transition to Division III. There's no delicate way to ask it: Do you have anyone left?

"One kid, and one assistant coach," he says. "But they're both still being recruited away."

With a year left on his own contract, Pasternack needs to find an entirely new team, capable of competing as a D-I Independent, by the time classes start on Aug. 23 -- without being able to offer any scholarships. He'll repeat the same four words all summer, on the phone, in gyms in three states and on the way into a Target store to buy a BlackBerry charger to keep calling people about prospects; in his office at UNO, in his living room in Old Metairie, and at a new-age Cajun dinner before ordering a shrimp-and-alligator sausage cheesecake appetizer: "We've gotta get players."

He'll never say it in the leisurely cadence of native New Orleansians, although he is one; he'll say it with the hyper-intensity of a 33-year-old head coach who attended Indiana University in the mid-1990s for the sole purpose of student-managing under Bobby Knight, and considers that his formative basketball experience. "You came to work with your hard hat on every day there," Pasternack says.

This will be a hard-hat kind of recruiting period. Since 2000, only one other D-I school, Birmingham Southern, has lost its conference affiliation and begun a transition to D-III in the same year -- and it decided to suspend men's basketball for that season.

***

At the outset of the NCAA's 2007 summer evaluation period, the coaching community's upper crust was watching top recruits at Nike's LeBron James Skills Academy in Akron, Ohio. Pasternack was there with his boss at Cal, Ben Braun, when they heard through the rumor mill that Buzz Williams had bailed on UNO after just one season for an assistant's job at Marquette. Pasternack, a runner-up for the UNO gig in '06, called athletic director Jim Miller and was asked, simply, "When can you start?"

Coming back to rebuild in the wake of Katrina -- which had ruined his childhood home just off the 17th Street Canal -- seemed like a noble idea at the time. In just their second game of that '07-08 season, Pasternack's Privateers upset No. 21 North Carolina State on the road, and went on to finish with 19 wins, their highest total in 11 years. "I thought we had turned the corner," he says, "but after that, there was just so much ..."

So much what? Uncertainty, for one, and upheaval. Enrollment had plummeted from around 17,000 students to 10,000 after the storm, and a lack of student fees and state support led to a multi-million-dollar shortfall in the athletic budget. In May 2009, a campus-wide vote to raise student athletic fees failed. On the same day, without warning to Pasternack, a letter went out to athletic departments nationwide advertising that his players were available due to the fact that UNO "is unsure of whether the Department of Athletics will continue at our institution." (He subsequently lost freshmen Jahmal Burroughs and Jacolby Pittman, as well as top juco recruit Greg Hill.) In November, chancellor Tim Ryan made the announcement that the Privateers would seek a transition to D-III, and Pasternack lost his final class of scholarship recruits. (The best one, three-star shooting guard Ronald McGhee, from Baton Rouge, called to cancel a press conference scheduled for the next day. He's now at North Texas.)

The transition process will take until 2015-16 to complete. it was such a controversial move that Miller resigned in the lead-up, and is writing a book about his battle to keep UNO athletics afloat, tentatively titled Where The Water Kept Rising. "Someone, someday," he says, "is going to regret moving to D-III."

When I join Pasternack on July 6, near the three-year anniversary of his hiring at UNO, he's a long way from the LeBron camp, at a showcase hosted by scout Kenn Littlefield in Jonesboro, Ga. It's in a four-court health club on a stretch of tired strip malls, about a 15-minute drive south of the Atlanta airport. The club shares a building with a business specializing in automobile window-tinting and custom rims, and cards advertising these services will be left under many of the attendees' window wipers.

In recruiting parlance, most of the players here are "availables" -- fresh high-school graduates or junior-college sophomores who've yet to receive a scholarship offer. They've paid $120 each for three days of scrimmaging in jerseys with "The Hoop Dream" printed on the front. It's a nice euphemism. This is where desperate players go to be seen by desperate coaches.

While watching a game in Jonesboro, he leafs through a packet of mostly unknown players' names and contact information that cost $100 at the door. "Normally, in July, you're just babysitting kids for next year," Pasternack says, explaining that elite teams have done the legwork to ID and engage with elite players long before their final summer on the circuit. "Coach K watching five-star guys at LeBron [camp] -- that's not recruiting. This is recruiting."

NCAA rules forbid Pasternack from talking about specific prospects, so I ask him what he's looking for, in general, in the packet.

"Right now," he says, "I'm looking for Louisiana area codes: 504, 225, 337."

Louisianans pay in-state tuition, which is half as much ($10,000) as the out-of-state fees. Unfortunately, the camp roster is light on those area codes.

Dorian Smith, a 6-foot-4 forward from Georgia who averaged 6.8 points at Pensacola State (Junior) College last season, is having the best game of any player on the court in front of Pasternack. After Smith hits two more threes in succession while a row of coaches -- coaches with scholarships -- look on, Pasternack winces and says to no one in particular, "We're screwed."

After the game, I find out from Smith that he attended an Advanced Skills Camp at UNO a week earlier, and the Privateers are actively recruiting him. "I'm just waiting for word from the coach," he says. "You're OK with paying your own way there?" I ask. "Oh, no." he says, apparently unaware of the extent of UNO's limitations. "I would need some kind of scholarship."

Pasternack's plan is to invite the best availables from Jonesboro, as well as those that his lone remaining assistant, William Lewit, scouted at events in Baton Rouge, Tulsa, Okla., and Reading, Pa., to another Advanced Skills Camp at UNO in early August. A list of needs on a hypothetical depth chart Pasternack is carrying include "Athletic 4/5," "shooters/scorers," and a point guard: essentially, everything.

Braun was the coach who gave Pasternack his first job, as a video coordinator, when he was 22 years old and fresh out of Indiana. "Joe has always been relentless," Braun says. "He was begging me so much for the job that I told him, 'If I hire you, will you stop calling me?'" Pasternack hasn't stopped being impatient. On the second day of the Jonesboro camp, once he has a list of around 15 targets, he calls Lewit. "Bill, we can't wait until August to do this skills camp," he says. "Kids will make decisions by then. We've gotta do it earlier. We've gotta get players."

***

The headline on the front page of The Times-Picayune on July 23, two days before UNO's rescheduled, second Advanced Skills Camp, reads: SHIPS LEAVE SPILL SITE AS STORM THREATENS. The catastrophic BP oil spill has dominated local and national news for three months, and now Tropical Storm Bonnie is on the way, forcing a delay in the drilling of a relief well. Problems are begetting problems. Pasternack calls and asks if I'm following the storm. "Parents and kids have been calling me non-stop," he says. He's worried that the camp could unravel. But by Friday night, Bonnie dissipates over Florida, and by Sunday, 40 players show up at UNO's Lakefront Arena.

"I'm sure a lot of you know our situation," Pasternack tells attendees during a mid-day info session. When he finishes explaining UNO's plight, he says, "What that means is, we have a lot of spots open."

Two former Alabama walk-on guards that stood out at the Jonesboro camp are here: Brandon Canady and Chris Dixon, who played high-school ball together in Montgomery. Canady made zero appearances for the Crimson Tide in '09-10, but he's brilliant in the camp, hitting 70 percent of his threes in four games. (He says that Lewit told him, "I don't like you -- I love you. I bet you wish girls said that to you.") Brandon Knight, a point guard who played with Smith at Pensacola State and averaged 4.6 points last season, looks worthy of being recruited, as do two other former juco point guards, Tyson Roach (from Southwest Mississippi Community College) and Bryce Kemp (from Fort Scott Community College).