NCDS: Jay Price, Asst. Coach - Illinois

One of the most important jobs of a college basketball job is to recruit. It is the lifeblood of the program. You must bring in good, quality players in your program that also meet the needs of your team. Recruiting is like shaving. If you do not do it every day, people will notice! Everyone talks about the July recruiting period, but that is only one-twelfth of the time we recruit! It is during the season that it can become hectic.

We are allowed 130 man-days to recruit per academic year. That is basically from the middle of August to the middle of May. One person out is equal to one day. So if we have three people out on a given day that counts as three days. There are certain months that we know we will spend more days. In September when we can contact, or talk to perspective student-athletes, we will use a lot of days. There are some times that we will have three coaches at the same place or maybe three coaches at three different places. During this period we are also engaged in on campus workouts with our current players and on weekends we have official visits. We always try to have at least three coaches back for workouts, so we have to schedule accordingly.

During the season it gets very difficult and tricky in terms of scheduling. I am very lucky to work with one of the hardest working head coaches in the country. Coach Weber will go out recruiting on every single day off that we have. We are required to take one day off per week and on that day Coach Weber will go out recruiting. We have to take care of making sure that coach sees every PSA that he needs to see during the year. There also are days when we will practice, and Coach Weber will then head right from our gym to a high school game.

As for the assistants, we recruit as much as we can. Each assistant has certain opponents that we scout, so prior to one of our scouts we are at practice the entire time. The other assistant will usually go out on the road and recruit. For a road game I will normally try to meet the team at the site. This can lead to some interesting travel experiences.

For example, prior to our game at Ohio State on Feb. 22 I had gone to Iowa to recruit. I was flying from Iowa to Columbus and was planning to arrive in Columbus in plenty of time for our 11 am shootaround, but that for sure did not happen. We landed late at O’Hare and missed my connection. Well sort of missed it. It was still at the gate but American Airlines would not let me on it. They did offer to fly me to LaGuardia and then to Columbus. I did not feel that was a good idea for obvious reasons. I tried to rent a car to drive, but no cars were available. I tried to fly to Indianapolis and drive, but again, there were no cars. Finally I was able to go stand by to Cincinnati and then rented a car and arrived in Columbus in time for our game. This is one of many travel nightmares, but I would not trade them for anything else in the world.

Recruiting is paramount and during the season it can be difficult to schedule, but it is something that we pride ourselves on being as many places as we can be as often as possible.

After wrapping up the regular season last weekend, we are looking forward to going to Indianapolis for the Big Ten Tournament. We play our first game against Michigan on Friday afternoon. This is an exciting and important time of year for our team, and we are anxious for the opportunity to begin postseason play. March Madness is here!

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