Penn State
basketball's
stunning success recruiting
DMV region
could mark dawning of a
new age
ALL-MET ELITE
JOSH REAVES
OAK HILL ACADEMY
MOUTH OF WILSON VA.
ARTICLE COURTESY
OF
PENNLIVE.COM
DAVID JONES
Rightly, Penn State football's recruiting prowess under James Franklin has been a hot topic lately. But that's a brand that, even under the weight of NCAA sanctions, is well-established, able to float on its own almost no matter the storm.
What's been going on lately with Penn State men's basketball recruiting is, in another realm entirely. In comparison, it is nothing short of astounding.
This is a program where prior regimes never really attempted to mix with college hoops' big boys on the recruiting trail in the fertile urban areas of Philadelphia, let alone the adjacent Delaware/Maryland/Virginia area around Washington, D.C., known in the trade as the "DMV."
Well, that is very clearly changing. PSU's fourth-year coach Patrick Chambers brought with him his Villanova-partner Keith Urgo as an assistant when he arrived in 2011. He welcomed aboard another member of the Jay Wright mafia last year in Dwayne Anderson. And together, they are attracting talent from the region never before seen at Penn State.
Energizer bunnies Chambers and Urgo laid the ground work by inviting groups of players and coaches up from well-known DC-area AAU teams to visit the Penn State campus through 2011-2013. The visits didn't immediately pay dividends but gave players and their parents a look at the surroundings, made it familiar and showed them that State College wasn't Mars but a doable 3-hour drive to a large and scenic campus.
Then, the young, charming and comfortable Anderson bolstered those relationships and finally got a pair of 4-star recruits to meetings with the closer Chambers.
In the past few months, Penn State has gained verbal commitments from 4-star rising-senior off-guard Josh Reaves, 4-star rising-junior power forward Joe Hampton and 3-star rising-senior small forward Deividas Zemgulis. All are from the DMV. Hampton played for Hyattsville's DeMatha High before transferring to Oak Hill Academy in nearby Fairfax, Va. He joined Reaves who'd transferred from Paul VI High in Fairfax. Zemgulis is from Leonardtown, Md.
Add in Philadelphia 4-star rising-senior power forward Mike Watkins who committed last summer and suddenly Penn State has a core of talent among two classes unlike anything in the program's history.
"They hit a couple of home runs," said Maryland-based Tom Strickler of the National Recruiting Report, a coaches-only service that tracks prep talent. "And that's a nice trifecta with the Lithuanian kid [Zemgulis]. They can all play on the floor together if you do it right.
"And they got in with some elite AAU programs at the same time."
The importance of that: If the recruits sign and find happiness and success at Penn State, they will be the best recruiters any program can have. An AAU pipeline could follow; that's the gravy train for any established program.
During the perpetuity of PSU basketball's existence, the DMV might as well have been the DMZ. Penn State coaches simply didn't attempt to battle Georgetown, Maryland, Virginia, Virginia Tech or any of the other urban-campus I-95 corridor schools there for blue-chip talent. The great AAU programs were considered foreign turf, insular societies unreachable by an outlier football school located up in the central Pennsylvania mountains.
That has changed in a big way. When he arrived, Chambers immediately targeted his old Nova stomping grounds of Philadelphia to some modest success. But in the meantime, he and his staff were building relationships in the mid-Atlantic, as well.
"Our formula from the very beginning was: We're all Northeast guys," said Urgo, 34, a DC native who coached at Gonzaga High there and played at Fairfield in Connecticut. "We've maintained our relationships with very good AAU programs.
"Instead of attacking one or two kids the first two years, we wanted to use our relationships to get groups of kids to visit just to get them and their parents familiar.
"We're younger than some staffs. Coach Chambers understands marketing and branding and he's full of energy. We knew that, no matter whether other staffs avoided the DMV, that we could go in there and recruit nationally with the Penn State brand."
chambers-anderson.jpg
Chambers loved Anderson as a player when he helped Jay Wright coach him at Villanova (here during the 89-69 NCAA tournament rout of UCLA in 2009 at the Wells Fargo Center) and is loving him just as much as his newest PSU assistant.
Villanova Univ photo
When Chambers persuaded Anderson to retire from European pro ball last summer and settle down to a coaching career concurrent with his July 2013 marriage, those DMV connections only strengthened.
"They're teaching me and grooming every day," said Anderson, still a mere 28. "People thought I was crazy to retire so early. I came to the interview thinking, 'I'm not going to take this job. I'm too young.' But something's different in the air up here at Penn State."
Anderson grew up in Silver Spring, Md., and played for the DC Assault AAU giant, now known as DC Premier. He knew well Keith Stevens, the CEO of another area heavyweight, Team Takeover, who recruited him in middle school.
Where other PSU staffs didn't have the intimate connections, this one did. They never considered not recruiting the DMV.
"There's so many players, too many players," said Anderson. "We all have connections in that area. We don't have a fear of going up and down I-95. It's not like we're going to some random place we don't know."
And it's been a perfect time to attack the region. It's fair to say the area's traditional heavyweights are amid a lull. Though Tony Bennett's UVa program won the ACC last year and is at an apex, the others have plateaued.
Georgetown is still showing up in the tournament but has been a continual disappointment lately under John Thompson III. The Hoyas missed the NCAAs last year and were upset by double-digit seeds in each of the previous four (2010-13).
Maryland has missed the last four consecutive NCAAs, the first time that's happened since the confluence of the Bob Wade and Gary Williams regimes (1989-93) wracked by NCAA probation. Five of last season's top eight scorers have transferred and Mark Turgeon is on the ropes entering his fourth season, depending on a highly-regarded freshman class to float the Terrapins through their first season in the Big Ten.
Virginia Tech, once a recruiting factor in the region under Seth Greenberg and former PSU assistant James Johnson, has fallen on hard times and just made a coaching change.
Meanwhile, Rutgers and Maryland's new Big Ten membership and clearance of the BTN on East Coast cable rosters means area recruits and their parents are starting to think of the once exclusively Midwestern league as a viable option.
It's fair to say Penn State is pouncing on that opportunity.
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