McCarty understands dark side of recruiting
As the NCAA recruiting scandal rages on — a phrase that could be cut from the pages of newspapers in dozens of years — the issue is hitting fairly close to home for a Celtics assistant coach.
Louisville is among the prominent schools targeted in the bribery case, in which money from a sneaker company was funneled to recruits, and the matter has already caused the university to remove Rick Pitino as coach.
Walter McCarty was on Pitino’s staff for three years and finds it quite plausible that Pitino, the former coach of the Celtics, was not entirely aware of the violations. And he went on to offer a look inside the recruiting process and just how the moving pieces generally work.
“From my experience with Rick, I would say he was not involved in these things,” said McCarty, now in his fifth season on Brad Stevens’ staff with the Celts. “But I haven’t been there for seven years. I haven’t been around, so I can’t say anything for sure. But from my experience with him, being in those recruiting meetings and working for him, no. Never.”
McCarty does, however, understand that head coaches are ultimately responsible for what goes on in their programs.
“It’s tough, man. I understand it,” he said. “He is in charge of that program, and that’s just the way it falls. Unfortunately you have to have guys on your staff who you trust and are loyal to you and are going to do the right thing. And it’s unfortunate if they don’t.
“But what you have to know, too, is that a lot of the head coaches don’t really do much recruiting. It’s almost all the assistants. The assistant will say, ‘Hey, coach, I’ve got this kid and I think he can help us in this way. I think you should come see him during the recruiting period.’ They may go watch him two or three times and try to get him to come on campus for a visit, and then you try to get a home visit. A lot of times, it’s the assistants dealing with the AAU coaches and the high school coaches and the families. You only bring the head coaches in to seal the deal. So the head coaches, it’s their program and the kids have to come play for them, but the recruiting is done mostly by the assistants.
“I’ve been there,” McCarty went on. “I’ve been in those recruiting meetings. I’ve been through all this stuff. As a player, I went through it. So I know how it goes and how people pass a lot of judgment who just read papers and who just listen to people. A lot of the media people that are talking, they’ve never been on a recruiting trip. They don’t know how it works.
“A lot of coaches say, ‘I didn’t know this was going on.’ Me being there, I can understand how he might not know, because I’ve been through it.”
McCarty then detailed the template for assistant coaches to bend and even take a sledgehammer to the rules, and, not surprisingly, it’s based on self-interest with far less regard to the consequences for the school.
“Some guys, when they’re recruiting, they’re eager to impress,” said McCarty. “You know, ‘I want to be the No. 1 recruiter. If I’m the No. 1 recruiter in the country, guess what? I’ll get bigger paychecks. Guess what? I’ll get my own program to run.’
“So a lot of guys put a lot of pressure on themselves to do things, and sometimes it’s not always the right thing. And who suffers for it? The head coach.”
McCarty said he was aware of the money people lurking in the recruiting stream, but he adds that he avoided them and that the cleaner path wasn’t difficult to navigate.
“You see all those guys, but I never really had to deal with them,” he said. “I mean, you hear stuff on the road. You hear guys saying, ‘Hey, I want to recruit this kid. Who do you have to deal with? Who’s helping this kid make his decisions? Who’s the contact for this kid?’ Then you hear, well, he’s this and this and you have to go through this guy. This is what they want or whatever. Once you hear that, you get out. You get away from that.”
During his time at Louisville, McCarty played a key role in the recruiting of players such as Gorgui Dieng, Chane Behanan and Chris Smith.
“I think it just depends on what you’re looking for,” he said. “I always went after recruits that I knew were honestly interested in our school. I was not going to recruit kids I knew I couldn’t get or posed some type of problem. I just wanted to get good guys who fit in, who understood that we worked hard and wanted to become really good basketball players.
“So I didn’t have to deal with that other stuff. I think any time you try to get in that recruiting war, there’s just a lot of pressure and trouble. I went after who I thought we needed, guys who could help us in our style of play. I had free rein to recruit who I wanted to recruit.”