EAGLES SELLING PROGRAM WITH VIRTUAL RECRUITING
Using ACC, Boston as incentives
Boston College women’s basketball coach Joanna Bernabei-McNamee is recruiting remotely from a better place.
The mechanics of recruiting blue-chip athletes has become a quarantined cyberspace struggle due to the global COVID-19 pandemic that shut down college campuses across the country in March.
BC competes in the ACC, a Power Five conference, where basketball programs battle for the top high school and AAU prospects as fiercely as they do on the court.
With a ban on person-to-person contact in place until the end of July, the traditional methods of traveling to a recruit’s family home and official and unofficial visits to campuses have been replaced by Zoom conferencing, phone calls and text messages.
“Now we have to do it in a virtual setting,” said Bernabei-McNamee. “Now it’s more about us talking them through how great it is and showing them pictures and showing them videos.
“We’ve made a little video that we would have normally shown them when we would do a home visit. We show them what Boston
College and the surrounding community is all about.”
BC’s academic programs and proximity to Boston are important recruiting tools, but selling the basketball program falls on the head coach. Up until last year, the BC program was a tough sell.
BC went 7-23 (2-14 in the ACC) in the 2017-2018 season under former coach Erik Johnson. The Eagles improved to 14-16 (3-13 ACC) the following year under BernabeiMcNamee — an improvement, but not a game-changer. That left Bernabei-McNamee recruiting on a promise and a plan, not a proven track record of success.
“I think our first year being here recruiting we had a lot confidence in what we were saying but it was like on that hope and belief system,” said Bernabei-McNamee. “Meaning, the players we were
talking to had to hope and believe that we could get it done, that we were going to lift the Boston College basketball program into a winning program,that we were going to do it with class and character and that it could be done.
“But the big part of that was that they hoped and believed it could be done and to trust us.”
Bernabei-McNamee is recruiting from a much stronger position after the Eagles’ successful campaign last season, their strongest showing since joining the ACC in 2005.
BC finished 20-12 and 11-7 in the ACC, its most conference wins since the 2004-05 team went 10-6 in the Big East under the late Kathy Inglese, who won 273 games in 15 seasons.
The Eagles finished tied for fourth with Florida State and Virginia Tech and registered a teamrecord six ACC road wins. A highlight of the season was a 6-2 stretch in February that included five consecutive ACC wins.
BC completed its first series sweep against Notre Dame and registered a once unimaginable 9375 beatdown of North Carolina.
After starting the ACC tournament as the No. 6 seed, the Eagles recorded wins over Clemson and Duke before falling to eventual champion North Carolina State in the semifinals. They also notched RPI-enhancing wins over Miami, Syracuse, Duke and Florida State and were a lock to make the NCAA tournament before the pandemic lockdown went into effect.
Bernabei-McNamee was named ACC Coach of the Year while center Emma Guy made first team Allbecause
ACC, the first BC player to do so since Carolyn Swords in 2011. Bernabei-McNamee now has the winning program in place to begin building for the future.
“After this last year we got the momentum, we got the swing of that and we did what we said we were going to do,” said BernabeiMcNamee. “That increased that trust factor. Now they don’t have to use their imagination to envision
they saw it happen. They didn’t have envision what we ourselves were saying, they got to see we are going to be successful at this level.”
Unlike the top tier men’s program that can experience extensive turnover to the NBA, women’s programs generally stay intact over the long haul. One big recruiting class followed by layers of support can turn any ACC team into a contender.
BC goes after the same high school and AAU players that appear on the radar screens at Duke, Notre Dame, Wake Forest, Pittsburgh and Syracuse. Two or three key signings can change the power alignment in the ACC.
“The competition is really fierce and I think as a staff we have a set of guidelines for what we are recruiting and what we are working toward,” said Bernabei-McNamee. “There are a couple of things and we use the word grit. I want a gritty athlete and we never leave out the word student because they have to want to be good students.
“Why else would they choose Boston College as a great academic institution over someplace else? I look at them valuing the great education coupled with playing in the best conference in the country. That’s what I call having your cake and eating it too.”
The momentum Bernabei-McNamee talked about is starting to show. The Eagles class of 2020 includes guards Kaylah Ivey and Josiah Lacey and forward Sydney McQuietor, the 21st-rated class in the nation — up 10 spots in the rankings from the year before.