Sunday, June 29, 2008

Hoops Recruiting - Another Hewitt Miss??

Virginia Tech's Seth Greenberg just landed a kid out of Tucker High School in Atlanta named Manny Atkins. He's a 6'5" perimeter player and an outstanding student. Prepstars ranks him a top100 kid. I ran across this article with the following interesting quote from his Tucker high school coach:

“He had offers from everybody,” Hartry said, “Coach [Paul] Hewitt from Georgia Tech called me as recently as yesterday, just wanting to know what he had done wrong, why he hadn’t landed the kid. He wanted to polish up on his recruiting because he had done something wrong.

“I think Manny just wanted to leave the state and, second of all, Virginia Tech was a great offer and the head coach up there came down and visited Atlanta. When the head coach takes time out to come and sits in your gym for 2 ½ hours and watch you play, that’s something special.”

Now, from an outsiders view, it seems that Atkins was about Hewitt's 4th or 5th choice at his position in terms of recruiting priority. I certainly don't know that for a fact, but it seems that guys like Glenn Rice, Brian Oliver, Noel Johnson and maybe a couple of others were higher priorities. Of course some of guys are cross-overs with different positions, so who knows. From a student-athlete perspective, Atkins looks like the perfect GT-type guy with a 3.8 GPA and makes academics a priority.

Well, no problem. Glad he found a place he wants to play. We'll move on to other guys (or continue to focus on the top priorities that have been there all along).

CLASS OF 2008?
As to any additions to the current class, I am hearing nothing that says we are "done", but we also missed out on some of the major guys who transferred elsewhere. Unless there's another Matt Causey-type guy in the woods, I haven't heard any other names bubble up. The fat lady may not be signing but she's warming up.