Recruiting Update - Bobby Frasor

Article on a talented and intelligent point guard from Chicago who the Jackets are very interested in. Here is a picture of him.

Frasor shooting to top of the list
Brother Rice junior on colleges' radar

BY BOB SAKAMOTO
January 16, 2004

College coaches scour the country looking for a point guard like Bobby Frasor.

The 6-foot-3 1/2-inch junior who has led No. 4 Brother Rice to a 13-1 start has been a gym rat all his life, tagging along after his father, Bob Frasor, who coached at Eisenhower for 28 years.

Bobby has athleticism that enables him to dunk effortlessly, and he is among the most accurate three-point shooters in the Chicago area.

But it's his vision, unselfishness and affinity for setting up his teammates that has Kansas, Marquette, Stanford, UCLA, DePaul, Florida and Illinois calling.

He also is a tenacious defender who generally guards the other team's top scorer and ranks No. 12 in Brother Rice's junior class with a 4.5 grade-point average on a 4.0 scale.

No wonder Georgia Tech, North Carolina State, Notre Dame, Wisconsin, Purdue and Iowa State each have a scholarship ready for him.

"I don't really have any favorite yet," Frasor said of his college choice. "After playing in a lot of national [off-season] tournaments in front of college coaches and doing pretty well, I started getting a lot of recruiting attention."

Frasor is averaging 14.0 points, 6.5 assists and 6.0 rebounds, with a 5-1 assist-to-turnover ratio. With the Crusaders mired in a recent shooting slump, he is the only player who has increased his three-point shooting percentage.

"As good as he was last season, Bobby is a better shooter and decision-maker this season," Brother Rice coach Pat Richardson said. "He has real good instincts and can see the floor well. College coaches are excited about an athlete like him with good size as a point guard."

Nobody in the Chicago area stresses shooting quite like Richardson, who begins working with 5th graders on the mechanics of shooting at his summer camp. Because the Crusaders are rarely blessed with height and athleticism, Richardson attacks opponents from beyond the three-point arc.

Brother Rice was at its best in a mid-December victory over Riverside-Brookfield when the team made 19 three-point shots. The Crusaders hit 15 threes in a 32-point victory over Fenwick.

Frasor & Co. are headed for a three-point shooting match with No. 8 St. Patrick in the Feb. 21 McDonald's City-Suburban Showdown at Northwestern.

Drilling the three-pointer is the end result of what Richardson describes as a "team shot." A simple yet effective series of screens and cuts combined with timely passing provide open looks for three-point specialists such as Tim Harrigan and Dave Telander.

Frasor, who has come up through the Brother Rice system, also was blessed with good basketball genes. His dad played point guard at Wisconsin from 1969 through 1972.

"My grandparents kept a scrapbook with all the stories when my dad played at Wisconsin," Bobby Frasor said. "In looking through that, I could tell he was a pretty good player."

Good enough to still take his son one-on-one?

"We never really did that," Bob Frasor said with a chuckle. "By the time he was old enough to challenge me, I had torn my Achilles' tendon and couldn't go all-out. That was probably a good thing."

He retired from coaching two years ago to watch his son.

"I've had some great moments coaching," Bob Frasor said, "but Friday nights have never been filled with such joy and pleasure."