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SoCal Prep Recruiting Report & News

Midnight Ramblings on Harrick, Madness Redux
and Harvard-Westlake Girls--October 18, 1997

SoCal Prep Girls Basketball Preseason No. 1 Pick

Not a lot is written about SoCal girls' high school basketball on the Internet. Oh sure, a few local papers cover it and so does the Times, and the coverage is getting better. So we thought we'd offer a preseason No.1 pick (well actually it's someone else's, but we won't say who's--just remember though, you saw it here first): Harvard-Westlake girls' basketball. Don't ask us who or why yet, and be sure not to ask us yet about who's on the team. All we can say is you'll find out soon. . . stayed dialed in.

Harrick Anyone?

The Boston Globe today was reporting that Jim Harrick is doing just fine at URI , thank you. He's apparently having no trouble recruiting either. At Friday's Midnight Madness, he had some of the top recruits from the Northeast in attendance, including Brooks Sales, a power forward from Northwest Catholic in West Hartford, Conn., who has also visited Seton Hall last week and Villanova.
Also in attendance was Kenyatta Moore, from Paul Robeson High School (great name!) in Brooklyn, N.Y. Harrick already has gotten verbals from Caleb ``Tip'' Vinson, a 6'-3" guard from Connecticut, and Tavorris Bell, of Hempstead, N.Y, a 6'-5" forward attending school in Mass., at Winchedon. Tavorris is rated by some of the services as being a top 50 player.

Harrick was reported to have said that he wants to build URI into a top 25 program (gee, what a surprise). According to the article, there were about 5,000 people at the MM event, the "largest ever". Sounds like the Pepperdine event. Poor Jim, builds a program up, returns it to prominence, wins a National Championship, makes one mistake on an expense report, and suddenly he's back at Pepperdine again. Well, it could be worse, he could still be unemployed.

Big Bummer for SW Missouri

Speaking of Midnight Madness, I can't imagine a worse place to have been than at Southwest Missouri State, where shortly before the festivities really got underway, one of the students (not a player) who had been participating in a 3-on-3 contest on center court, collapsed as he was leaving the court to return to the stands. A crowd of about 900 watched as paramedics spent 45 minutes working on Saun Ross, 19. A doctor who was in the stands and worked on him with the paramedics said that he had no pulse and was not breathing before he was taken to the hospital. The student was pronounced dead shortly after midnight. About an hour before the scheduled midnight start, the PA announcer told the crowd the event was being cancelled. Not a very auspicious start for Steve Alford's program. Our condolences to the family of the unfortunate student.

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