SoCalHoops Recruiting News

Sr. Centers: Hoop Scoop Ranks
Top California Players--(Oct. 4, 1999)

Each spring and fall we publish our own SoCalHoops lists of the "Best of the Best. . . ", in which we identify those players (grouped by position and graduating class), whom we believe are among the best college prospects coming out of SoCal; we also include other players, i.e., the "Next Best. . . " and the "Rest of the Best. . . " and so on.  At SoCalHoops we've avoided using numerical rankings, because by and large, we cling (foolishly perhaps) to the belief that it's awfully difficult to distinguish between, for example, the "No. 2 player" and the "No. 10 player" at any given moment and probably not really important to most college coaches either.  We've found it more useful to simply note that there are groups of players who really stand out above the rest, guys who are clearly D-I-capable players, or who have the potential to become good college players at some level. 

Of course, every now and then there are players in a class who stand out so far above the rest (e.g., DeShawn Stevenson in this year's senior class) that it just begs for someone to call him "No. 1". And so, the lists which rank players by number begin to appear, and people who do such rankings (some for a living) have been doing this "numbers" thing for many years, so somebody is paying attention to them (which is why we say that perhaps we're being foolish for not using a numerical ranking system).  Bob Gibbons, Mike Sullivan,  and Clark Francis are among the guys who rate and rank players and they are constantly refining their national lists; of course there are those who create such lists on a regional basis (Greg Swaim in the Midwest, PacWest Hoops here on the West Coast, and others) so it's safe to say that by not listing players by numerical ranking, we're definitely in the minority among those who follow college recruiting.  

Which brings us to the point of this article:   We were intrigued the other day when Dinos Trigonis called us to alert us to the new lists which the HoopScoop was going to be publishing "soon" with regard to California players. We were pleased to find the lists when we visited the HoopScoop's subscription area (if you're not a subscriber, you'll have to pay to become a member, but the price is cheap and well worth it).  Of course, Clark can't actually get out to see everyone to evaluate them, but he did get to the West Coast regularly this year, and in addition to making the usual pilgrimage to Vegas for the adidas Big Time Tournament and the Nike Summer National Championships, he was probably the only East Coast guy to come out for the Long Beach Fall Hoops Classic.   In addition to actually seeing lots of California and West Coast players this year, Clark has also gotten some assistance from Joel Francisco, a regional scout for colleges, and directly from Dinos Trigonis, who in addition to the many events he runs and the Belmont Shore travel team he puts together, also publishes a scouting service, Fullcourt Press.  And besides that, he also tell us that he likes reading our stuff here at SoCalHoops.  So the least we can do is reciprocate. 

The California player rankings that you'll find at the HoopScoop's subscription site are a continuous, single list broken down only by class (they do take up at least seven pages though) and they list each player in order of the HoopScoop's preference, which in the case of the senior class is from Player No. 1 (which was not surprisingly, DeShawn Stevenson) to player No. 117.  The list also contains rankings of 106 juniors, and about half as many sophomores, and very small group of freshmen, and it's even got some "rankings" for 8th, 7th and a few 6th graders (we suspect that Clark got these names from some of the better known youth coaches, since we're pretty sure he hasn't been to many of events featuring players that young, but then you never know).

We're not going to post up Clark's entire ranking lists here in their original form, especially since the list is located on the HoopScoop's subscription-only portion of the site, and after all, getting subscriptions is how Clark makes a living.  Really, you should definitely support his efforts if you're not doing so already.  But enough shameless hucksterism.  While not simply taking his lists and posting them here, we have used some of the HoopScoop's numerical  rankings for the senior class (No. 1-  No. 117) as a starting point; we've reorganized all the players, listing them by position instead, so that we can see who HoopScoop likes at each position.  Using the HoopScoop rankings, we've also further subdivided the players into "SoCal" and "NorCal" groupings, and given them the rankings they'd have if the HoopScoop had used that criteria (based on their overall ranking at a players' position) among players from a particular region of California.  It would, of course have been possible to have further subdivided into "San Diego", or "LA" or "Fresno", etc., but you get the idea.  Oh, by the way, we've continued to insist, as the CIF does, that Fresno is in the Southern half of the State of California (and hence in SoCal for these lists), even though any third grade geography student will tell you that Fresno is a whole lot closer to Northern California than it is to San Diego. . . . So for our purposes in the lists which will follow, Fresno is in "SoCal".   Hey, if you don't like it, talk to the CIF about it.   

As you can see, the majority of the players that the HoopScoop included for ranking have come from Southern California, and there are probably a ton of good players in this year's senior class who were left off their lists (we can think of a few, including Casey Cook from Sacramento, Guy Beahm from Willow Glen up in San Jose, and several others who apparently didn't make it), but then there were also a lot of SoCal guys who didn't make the HoopScoop rankings either.  And the point is that this isn't the "SoCalHoops Rankings" list,   but HoopScoop's.   Our point instead is  to present some of the HoopScoop data and their preferences in a different format.     Again, we don't necessarily agree with all of the numerical rankings,   and don't know that it matters whether we do, because whether a player is No. 1 or No. 117, there's little doubt in our minds that virtually every player the HoopScoop has ranked or listed has the potential to be a college player, most at the Division I level somewhere, and probably 10%-20% of the players should be considered elite-level D-I players.

If you want to see the full, unexpurgated and unrefined list (which includes players in all the classes and all positions), you'll have to get a subscription to the HoopScoop.  The price is small and you'll get a ton of information daily, much of it the kind you can't get anywhere else. Like it or not, Clark has been writing about basketball recruiting for more than 20 years and it's what he does for a living, so he must be doing something right.

We've already featured the HoopScoop's rankings for the senior point guards,  senior shooting guards, senior wing forwards, and the senior power forwards. 

The senior centers is the last of the position categories for this class, and since HoopScoop only ranked players from SoCal among the top centers in the state, we've only assigned an "overall California Rank by position" in addition to noting where in the overall HoopScoop scheme of things each player fits, although we would have probably included Jair Veldhuis as a center more than a true power forward had we been compiling the lists, but then we weren't.  So here they are, the senior centers:

Senior Centers--HoopScoop/Fullcourt Press Rankings--SoCalPlayers Only

 
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