bwba announcement

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SoCalHoops High School News

Branch West Branches Out,
Gottlieb Gets Web Address--(March 4, 1999)

There are a lot of names in SoCal that when you hear them you think, "college basketball recruiting." David and Dana Pump are names that come to mind; Dinos Trigonis of Belmont Shore is another. Dave Benezra and Mark Mayemura of Rockfish and Recruiting USA/SoCal also are prominent, and there are about a dozen others as well, among them Dart Stamps of TPI, Elvert "Kool-Aid" Perry of Inland; Elaine Carlyle of IEBP, Issy Washington of Slam-N-Jam, and Rob Ichart and Rich Goldberg of American Roundball Corp (ARC), Pat Barrett of SCA. There are a lot more than that, and we don't want to offend any of our friends out there, but you get the point. . . .there are some names which automatically are associated with Southern California Basketball and college recruiting.

There's another name that's usually associated with the recruitment of high school basketball players for Division I, II, III and NAIA college basketball: Those of you who follow recruiting both here in SoCal and nationally probably already know about Bob Gottlieb and the Branch West Basketball Academy, affectionately known as BWBA. Bob calls it "The Academy," but whatever you call it, Gottlieb has been a fixture around Southern California basketball for more than 20 years. He runs both an instructional school on Sundays in Orange County (the Academy) and also coaches and sponsors elite high school teams which participate at the big exposure tournaments, such as the adidas Las Vegas Big Time, the Double Pump Best of Summer, the Slam N' Jam NIT, and other events. During the fall and spring, BWBA also sponsors a team which participates in the Rockfish Spring League and the Slam-N-Jam League. In the fall, BWBA usually enters a team at Dinos Trigonis' Long Beach Fall Hoops Classic, and at the Double Pump Shootouts. In short, Division I college recruiting is BWBA's business, and Bob has a pretty decent track record.

For the past year, we've been talking on and off with Bob about getting him connected on the internet and putting up a website for BWBA so that more players can get exposed to his programs. But here at SoCalHoops we barely have enough time for our own stuff, and for one reason or another we haven't had the time to devote to yet another enterprise. So Bob hooked up with Greg Swaim of MidwestBasketball (who's sort of the DoublePump of Oklahoma, if that's a fair analogy) and Greg has staked out BWBA's own little slice of cyberspace. If you're interested in checking out the new BWBA internet resources at the MidwestBasketball site, here's the link. We'll also be providing several links throughout SoCal Hoops where appropriate (e.g., SoCal Youth for leagues and teams, etc), so you'll be able to find out about BWBA when and where you'd like.

MidwestBasketball, Swaim's site, is mostly for subscribers, but it appears (as should be the case) that the BWBA portion of the site is free and can be accessed without any passwords. If you visit there, you'll find separate pages for BWBA's various sections (seniors, underclassmen, summer travel teams, etc) which feature information like the following:

About Bob Gottlieb: This is the section which tells you a lot about Bob Gottlieb. There you'll learn that:

Bob Gottlieb has experience as both a head coach and assistant coach at the NCAA Division I level. Gottlieb was the head coach at Jacksonville for two seasons and at Wisconsin-Milwaukee for five seasons and has over 100 wins as a head coach at the Division I level. He also was an assistant under legendary coaches like Eddie Sutton at Creighton, Tex Winters at Long Beach State, Ralph Miller at Oregon State and Jack Hartman at Kansas State. Gottlieb has been involved with college coaches directly since 1969, first as a college coach for 15 years, secondly as an AAU coach for 15 years and lastly in representing athletes in the Branch West Academy for the last 6 years.

There's more, but you can check it out for yourselves. There's also a section called BWBA Academy, which describes what the Academy is all about:

The Branch West Basketball Academy is a year round personal training center in Orange County, California that has helped literally hundreds of prep players fulfill their goal of getting a college basketball scholarship. It is also the home of three BWBA sponsored summer basketball teams that tour the country and play in the various prestigious recruiting events that are attended by hundreds of college coaches from all levels around the country. Branch West also assists young athletes in the marketing
and promotions that are crucial in getting a college basketball scholarship.

The BWBA Section of MidwestBasketball also has a section on BWBA Alumni who have gone on to play Division I basketball, where you'll find the following information about BWBA's efforts to place players with D-I teams:

Coach Gottlieb has helped dozens of college players (several are now in the NBA) around the country enhance their skills. Here is a partial list of players that have been involved with BWBA over the past several years and where they attended college...

Chris Burgess (Duke), Eric Chenowith (Kansas), Kevin Augustine (Southern Cal), Mike Vukovich (Cal-Santa Barbara), Billy Knight (UCLA), Vincent Okotie (San Diego State), Daniel Bobik (Brigham Young), Caleb Gervin (Louisville), Davis Lalazarian (Notre Dame), Doug Gottlieb (Oklahoma State), Reuben Douglas (Arizona), Nate Hare (Southern Cal), Marquis Poole (Washington State), J.R. Henderson (UCLA), Chris Johnson (UCLA), Miles Simon (Arizona), Josh Greer (St. Mary's), David Bluthenthal (Southern Cal), Mike McDonald (Stanford), Jamal Mosely (Colorado), Brandon Beeson (Cal-Poly San Luis Obispo), Isiah Cavaco (Yale), Brad Gloger (Columbia), Spencer Gloger (Princeton), David Hamilton (Auburn), Sean Wink (Sorthwestern), DeAndre Moore (Vanderbilt), Chris McMillan (Wyoming), Bryan Scoggins (California-Irvine), David Castleton (Rhode Island) and Matt Hermes (IUPUI), Mike Wozniak (Cal-Poly Sand Luis Obispo), Ali Ton (Davidson) and Joe Riccio (Bemidji State).

There's also an extensive listing of players from outside California who've played with the "BWBA Showcase" team at the adidas Big-Time Tournament over the last seven years, which is really too long to list. If you want to check it out, here's the link. The BWBA internet connection also has a "signup" form for the Academy, and for the BWBA traveling teams. Just fill out the form and poof, it will be submitted via e-mail to Bob. But as the forms for the summer traveling team state, (and we quote): "***Only prep players who are starters on their varsity team should apply." Of course, not all the forms have the same warning, so even if you're not a varsity starter you might want to send BWBA information about yourself anyway.

We talked briefly with Bob yesterday about the website, about BWBA in general and his new connection with Greg Swaim's site. Bob says he's also going to function as a correspondent for MidwestBasketball on the "for pay" portion of the site, where the recruiting tidbits and information is posted daily by Greg, and of course this makes a lot of sense, since Bob also happens to spend a fair amoumt of time back in Oklahoma watching his son Doug, who now plays for Oklahoma State as the starting point guard.

Gottlieb was also excited about getting back into the college coaching game again in the form of a Fall Exposure team which will be made up of former Division I players who will travel the country during the early pre-season playing several of the major college teams, in effect acting as "tune-up" teams for the colleges, much like the four Pump-N-Run college teams which have traveled the country for the past few years. Bob will coach the team; no word on who the players will be, but we're willing to bet that there's at least one game scheduled with Ok. State.

Finally, Gottlieb also told us yesterday that he's going to be expanding his BWBA Academy, and apparently later this spring, around May, BWBA will be expanding into the San Fernando Valley with a version of "The Academy" there, which will be put on jointly with Double Pump, Inc. We're not quite sure yet about any of the details, or where it will be, who the coaches will be (since Gottlieb obviously can't be in two places at once), but as soon as we know, we'll let everyone in on the details. In the meantime, if you're interested in contacting Bob Gottlieb about any aspect of BWBA, you can reach him via e-mail at brwest2@aol.com