He’s spending less time on the summer domestic recruiting trail than Pastner and assistants Julian Schwartz and Anthony Wilkins, yet he’s not completely off that hook.
Reveno is scouting in in Las Vegas now, at an Under Armour/AAU event, and will take a flight back to Atlanta Sunday morning, “do some laundry,” and jump a plane that evening for Europe, where recruiting international players is different than in the U.S.
For all of the coaches hopscotching tournaments to see prospects, the NCAA prohibits in-person conversations between coaches and student-athletes at these events worldwide. The rules fluctuate with regard to conversation by phone and e-mail, but there is no talking to kids while at these tournaments and camps home or abroad.
Evaluating international players is more difficult than those domestic because while the NCAA allows in-person evaluations from September-April at “scholastic events,” internationally, “They don’t have high school teams [internationally, for the most part]. They play for club teams,” Reveno said. “There are no scholastic events.”
The NCAA does not allow coaches to evaluate young players at club events.
So, watching them when they play for national teams and at summer camps where players are unaffiliated is the only way to go.
That’s why Reveno in early July was at the FIBA U17 World Championships in Rosario and Sante Fe, Argentina, and last week he was at the NBA Academy Games & Basketball Australia Prospects Camp in Canberra, Australia.
Next up: his third foreign continent of the summer after last summer recruiting in The Ukraine, The Netherlands, Canada and Spain.
If the Jackets draw close enough to a prospect, maybe Pastner will fly international, too, to help close a deal.
“If we make progress with someone, I haven’t found a place coach Pastner won’t go,” Reveno said. “But . . . you could maybe get away without doing the in-home visit with the parents because now by rule . . . you can fly the parents over [for the official visit] and they want to see where you’re going to take care of their kid.”
Parents and kids want to see what’s different, much like international ball is different with rules that don’t match those of the NCAA.
That actually causes few problems in evaluating players from abroad, but the general selflessness of international players does.
Internationals tend to play the game more like just about every coach would prefer every one of his players would, yet that makes it difficult at times to evaluate — in limited viewing time — how talented a player might be vs. how efficiently he may play the game.
Here, Reveno offers a few ironic chuckles.
“U.S. players are taught to utilize their athleticism whereas European players are taught more to utilize their skill; he’s harder to gauge,” the coach said. “In the U.S., you go to an AAU game and before the game is a dunk contest. When they’re playing with a national team, they’re playing with a stricter coach who maybe wants them to do a certain thing on a play. They’re playing less selfish.
“We say that we want less selfish players, but we also want to see players do something. It’s a definite Catch-22. I texted back to coach Pastner and said, ‘He looks pretty good. I wish he’d just go out and try to get 50 points . . . “
So, it’s easier to predict that international players will be good teammates than it is to predict if they’ll be good players.
It’s different, though, recruiting international basketball players to Georgia Tech than recruiting international tennis players or swimmers, of which the Jackets have several.
