What a difference a year makes! At this time last year, UD hoops fans like me who follow recruiting were swimming in tons of information. Best of all, the vast majority of it was free. 12 months later, after the dot.com shakeout, finding recruiting info without a subscription fee attached is “hard damn work” as Wesley Snipes said in “White Men Can’t Jump.”

The following is a guide to the best free recruiting sites. However, before we examine the living, let’s do a post mortem on some of the dearly departed.

Sites No Longer with Us

FlyerHoops.com
Boy, do I miss this place. Not just because I used to occasionally write for them, but because the Message Board was such a vibrant place, filled with Flyer Fans who were into their hoops, big-time. Joe Lombardi worked his butt off on the site, as did Greg Bilotta (before he entered the real world) and a bunch of folks behind the scenes. A lot of the contributors like Pete Waleskowski, The Hometown Coach, Joe Sutherland and others are trickling onto to UDPride, but it’s not the same, at least not yet. My hope is that once the season arrives, so will all of the old FlyerHoops.com regulars.
Insiders Report

This was a great site that followed recruiting on a national basis and always got the scoops. Mike Sullivan has morphed IR into RivalsHoops.com, but there is only one small free section…for the good stuff you have to pay. A related site, JucoJunction also went bye-bye, but the Message Boards for both sites survive on RivalsHoops. Other Rivals sites like Fast Break Hoops and Rivals 100 weren’t so lucky.

HoopsTV
This was a really high-class site, from a tech standpoint, probably too much so, because that stuff costs money. It was written the way Stuart Scott of ESPN talks and that street jive baller-speak got a little old for my ears, but then my ears are old!

OffTheGlass
It wasn’t that great of a site, but what kills me is that someone else bought the URL and it’s now a website for a window company!

All-Star Report
This was Bob Gibbons site on Rivals.com. It has morphed into BobGibbons.net. It’s still free, but Bob seems to have lost a step-not as much info and not as timely in its delivery. That may be because Bob wants to sell you a membership or one of his printed reports. All of which goes to show there is no such thing as a free lunch in the recruiting world anymore. One pain-in-the ass feature of BobGibbons.net is that it won’t let you hit the ‘back’ button…it traps you on the site. Nice touch, Bob!

Favorite Current Sites

UDPride (www.udpride.com)
Hey, a little self-promotion never hurts, right?

John Huston’s Page (http://members.aol.com/johnh86395/private/hoops.html)
I use this web page as a “portal” to all of the basketball sites. Go here and it’s like MasterCard: everywhere you want to be. And from a UD recruiting junkie standpoint, nobody does a better job of tracking all the irons in Ollie’s fire than John does at this address: http://users.aol.com/johnh86395/private/recruits99-00.html. You da man, John Huston…and I don’t mean the pro golfer!

UDHoops (www.udhoops.com)
First stop on John Huston’s page, because they’ll probably already have sniffed out all of the articles from the DDN and other sites for me, so I don’t have to. The Message Board has started to pick up in activity, which is a good sign.

Atlantic 10 Message Board (http://www.voy.com/14222/)
Be prepared to be abused, UD fans. A few of our more vocal brethren have gotten shellacked on this site by fans of other member schools. Home of WH, probably the most knowledgeable A-10 fan on the planet. He’s like Joe Lunardi of ESPN.com “Bracketology” fame, without the St. Joe’s bias. WH is, instead, a Umass fan, which is okay with me, ’cause I’m from MA. It’ll heat up once the season starts.

Prep Spotlight (http://www.prepspotlight.com/)
Vince Baldwin and Jon Stovall abandoned the sinking Rivals.com ship with what used to be called MidwestHoops.com and took on the name of Vince’s magazine, Prep Spotlight. Vince lives in MI and Stovall in OH, so they know our part of the world and the players that OP is most likely going to be pursuing. The Message Board is finally up and running, altho the only way to link to it is from the Home Page-the links on the story pages tell you it’s still “under construction.” It’s all free and it’s all good. Vince also sells Prep Spotlight in magazine form, but there’s no pressure.

Fans Only (http://interact.fansonly.com/recruiting/column_new.cfm)
Constantly updated, totally free site, a true rarity in today’s web world. One nice feature is that they continuously recalculate how may of the Top 100 prospects have committed to schools. Not much on depth, but each listing does provide a link to a player profile, as well as a link to a listing of that school’s signees.

Prepstars (http://www.wiredsports.com/)
Updated fairly often. More national in scope than Prep Spotlight, so for that reason it’s not as useful. Brick Oettinger has started writing for them-he just finished a series on the top 35 prospects in the US at each of the 5 positions. Brick picked UD recruit James Cripe as the #35 center, so the Brickster knows whereof he speaks.

HoopScoop (http://www.hoopscooponline.com/visitors/scoop.html) or (http://kyconnect.prepstar.com/TodaysNewsb.phtml)
Clark Francis has been at this a while. Some people say he has his own agenda… others say he has a tendency to write about players he has never seen. He was one of the guys who had Brooks Hall fall off the face of the earth in his HS rankings once Brooks decided on UD. I have included 2 links: the first is to Clark’s site and the free ‘taste’ he provides every day; the second to KYConnect, which prints some of the Members-Only stuff for free. One of my co-workers bought me a membership to Clark’s site for Christmas 2+ years ago-I’m still waiting for it, Clark!!!

BlueChipHoops (http://bluechiphoops.com/index.html)
Dave Telep is yet another refugee from Rivals.com. Dave, I have a couple of new words for your vocabulary: free, gratis, no-charge. Can you please give us some info for free beyond the occasional ‘bone’ about some kid that UD fans don’t care about? The Message Board is pretty active and Dave actually grants you access without charge. What a guy!

All I can say is that unlike last year, I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of Street & Smith’s College Basketball yearbook in early October. In 2000, for the first time in 25+ years I was in no rush to get my hands on S&S…thanks to the web, I figured I knew more about the guys UD was recruiting and who they had signed than S&S did. That’s not the case this year.