A First Thought on Wake’s Hoops Class
The cavalry is on its way, or so I’ve been told. The question I have concerning the reinforcements due to arrive at Wake for next basketball season is once the calvary gets here, will it be riding Apache helicopters or spavined mules?
Coach Jeff Bzdelik and his staff are proud of the six-man recruiting class that signed last week, and they have every right to be. To land a class that some have ranked as high as Top 10 in the nation coming off a disaster like last season was an impressive accomplishment. Retaining assistant Jeff Battle, who has been on staff long enough to see six fellow assistants come and go, was critical. Won’t it be something if we look back in two or three years and see that one of the most important figures in Wake basketball in the early 21st century turns out to be Jordan Battle? If Jordan wasn’t going into his senior year of high school here in Winston, I don’t know if Battle could have resisted joining his fast friend Ed Cooley at Providence. I’m not sure if Battle knows either.
What I like about the class of guard Codi Miller-McIntyre, forwards Aaron Rountree, Devin Thomas, Arnaud Moto and Tyler Cavanaugh and center Andre Washington is that it should fill some needs—of which there are obviously many. My question about the class is are there going to be any All-ACC caliber players in the bunch, the kind of player like a Rodney Rogers or Randolph Childress or Tim Duncan or Chris Paul or Jeff Teague or James Johnson or Al-Farouq Aminu who can make Wake a substantially tougher team to beat the day they arrive? One good friend opined recently that this is not the 1990 class, but to judge any haul in Wake history to Dave Odom’s class of Rogers, Childress, Trelonnie Owens, Marc Blucas, Robert Doggett and Stan King (two Hall-of-Famer, four starters) is patently unfair. The hope has to be that it’s not a class of 2009 which entered Wake as one of the most highly-touted in the nation but ended up providing one good season and one really good season from Aminu and, to date, little else. Initial reports suggest that Miller-McIntyre is the best bet to make an immediate impact, but we’ll all see in about 12 months.
Recruiting is a crap shoot, but what I’ve noticed is that over the years it has evolved, in the minds of many, from being a means to an end to an end itself. Instead of providing players to win games, the mere recruitment of blue-chip talent is often seen as an accomplishment worth hanging a hat on. To change gears to another sport at another school, I’m convinced that’s why so many down at that school in the general proximity of the geographic center of the state were so intent on keeping Butch Davis around as football coach. It wasn’t the number of games Davis won, it was the raft of NFL talent he was able to bring in. I’ve debated the issue with the closest people in my life, and some remain convinced that if he had remained Davis would have been able to mold all that talent into a national contender. Maybe, maybe not. But the bottom line is, he always found a way to lose at least five games, with one of them always being to N.C. State.
But back to basketball at Wake, the immediate impact of the latest recruiting class is that it has given the Deacons’ fans something to set their cap on, the promise that tomorrow will be better than today. There was no such lifeline that I could see in the angry, churning whitecaps of last season. Now if the Deacons are losing to say a High Point or UNC Wilmington, fans can grab the rope and keep from going under.
Hope can be a powerful tonic.