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Soderberg to assist at UVa


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Brad brought Kevin Lisch, Tommie Liddell, two legit top 100 players, and Marcus Relphorde, a legit swingman, to West Pine. Polk was an explosive top 150 player who could make threes in bunches. He blew out his knee as a junior and never could attack the rim after that. To make matters worse, he developed Steve Sax disease at SLU and couldn't make a perimeter shot. Darren Clarke was an athletic three star who was being recruited by Big 10 schools as a junior. We were lucky to get him. He scored 41 points in one of the biggest AAU events of the summer, injured his ankle as a senior and was an earthbound player at SLU. Dustin Maguire was a three star recruit who could shoot the lights out but got in Brad's doghouse for his poor defense.

If we had a deep roster, the team would have been able to withstand the players that didn't pan out. The problem was Brad never had more than 7 solid D1 recruits on the roster at any one time. So you had guys like Anthony Drejaj, who should have been your 10th man, playing 25 min a game. I would have liked to see if Brad could put together a complete roster recruiting to Chaifetz Arena but that wasn't in the cards.

This post is in an interrogative (not aggressive) tone, but I don't remember Lisch or Liddell being Top 100 guys. They were both outstanding recruits and performed at a Top 100-150 level for us, but were they really both ranked that highly coming in? I also don't remember Polk being rated that highly either. I seem to recall he was being seriously recruited by UNC for track until his injury. And I thought Maguire was going to be a decent player for us given that I had grown up playing against him at times, but he had some real issues with ball-handling, intensity, and of course defense.

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This post is in an interrogative (not aggressive) tone, but I don't remember Lisch or Liddell being Top 100 guys. They were both outstanding recruits and performed at a Top 100-150 level for us, but were they really both ranked that highly coming in? I also don't remember Polk being rated that highly either.

Unfortunately this thread is all that remains of the rankings from those days but here are some quotes:

http://www.billikens.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=3122

"Dwayne Polk was rated across the board in the 50s to 70s as a soph - and then he blew his knee out and fell completely off chart."

"After his junior year, Lisch was ranked among the top 16 point guards in the country by one recruiting service. In Illinois, Lisch was ranked as the fourth-best junior and the No. 2 guard on the www.highschoolelite.com site, and the sixth-best junior and No. 3 guard on the www.chicagohoops.com site."

" Eric Bossi of the insiders, now scout.com had Liddell rated as the 75th best prospect in the much more respected 2004 Class Post Summer Rankings."

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Polk was rated higher than that early in his HS career. Part of that was playing for Irons teams which were consistently overrated, but a lot was on merit. Polk was super fast, straight line as fast as Burns, Perry, Mitchell, McCall. He could really sky as a youngster but hurt his knee. He was getting looks from some big time programs before his knee injury but they all fell away after that. Polk was so slight and could finish at the rim with that jumping ability. When he lost that he became a one dimensional player, really just a spot up shooter. Polk at about 15 years old was a dynamo, what could have been, a st. louis version of Telfair. Instead he is a disgraced fired educator who plays for a low low level minor league basketball team.

No doubt West Pine killed any hopes for recruiting for many many coaches. Soderberg maybe most of all. Still he never had a plan. Even if his famed St. Louis Fab 5 class had come to fruition what kind of team would we have had?

Kramer Soderberg - Good NAIA player

Brett Thompson - Fair NAIA player

Scott Suggs - Oft injured average high major player

John Brandenburg - Poor low level D-1 player

I'm forgetting another 1 or 2 guys he wanted in that class but still. It would have been his big breakthrough and none of those guys panned out at all.

Also Drejaj is an underrated player historically. Walk on level talent but he made the most of it. He was a key player on some competitive teams and he made big plays on both ends of the floor. I'd take him on this team.

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Brad was here for 5 years and had a handful of NCAA tourney caliber players like Lisch, Liddel, Ian V, Ohanan, Reggie Bryant, etc. but it takes about 4 or more of those on any given team to actually make the tourney. We graduated no fewer than 7 such players from Conklin to McCall in the past few years.

Brad needed more quantity of these players and inexplicably he let at least 3 such local players slip through his fingers by not aggressively recruiting them. Passing, or only getting involved once the big boys got involved, on guys like Ahearn, Stemmler, Harrelson and some of the SIUC kids is why I consider him a poor recruiter.

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Polk was rated higher than that early in his HS career. Part of that was playing for Irons teams which were consistently overrated, but a lot was on merit. Polk was super fast, straight line as fast as Burns, Perry, Mitchell, McCall. He could really sky as a youngster but hurt his knee. He was getting looks from some big time programs before his knee injury but they all fell away after that. Polk was so slight and could finish at the rim with that jumping ability. When he lost that he became a one dimensional player, really just a spot up shooter. Polk at about 15 years old was a dynamo, what could have been, a st. louis version of Telfair. Instead he is a disgraced fired educator who plays for a low low level minor league basketball team.

No doubt West Pine killed any hopes for recruiting for many many coaches. Soderberg maybe most of all. Still he never had a plan. Even if his famed St. Louis Fab 5 class had come to fruition what kind of team would we have had?

We all know how Soderberg discussions end on this board so I'm not interested in having that conversation. I only brought him up to get to a more fundamental issue, IMO, which was West Pine. Romar couldn't field a complete roster either despite being a top-notch recruiter. Not dealing with the West Pine issue stunted the growth of this program for years. An $80 million arena is awesome but even a $20 million practice facility could have turned the tide in some Romar/Soderberg recruiting battles. We could have been a winning program a decade ago. A little trip down memory lane:

2001 Class

We were finalists for Chicago point guard Jason Straight. Straight was the backup plan to Travis Diener. We were the best midwest program to offer him but instead Straight opted to go to Wyoming where he became an all-conference player.

2003 Class

We were finalists for Peoria small forward Marcellus Sommerville. We lost a recruiting battle to the 2nd year coach of a mediocre program (Bradley). This should never happen. And if we had a better product to sell, it wouldn't have.

Finalists for Marcus Heard, an athletic wing forward from Springfield, IL with a decent jump shot. He committed to a loaded Depaul squad were he rode the pine until his senior year, when he finally broke into the rotation. Not a make or break recruit but this is the caliber of player that should be playing 20 min a game, not Vas'shun Newborne.

2004 Class

Finalists for Matt Shaw who chooses a better program at the time, the Salukis. You think playing with Jason Straight and Marcellus Sommerville, two all-conference caliber players in a better conference, would have been a more attractive option instead? Maybe.

Instead of transferring to Illinois and languishing on the bench, maybe Illinois State's big man Marcus Arnold comes to SLU instead. The coach who recruited him to Illinois State, Anthony Beane, had moved on to a better job at SLU.

2005 Class

Instead of Kevin and Tommie being seen as saviors, they would be the final pieces to the puzzle. A mid-major power is born. Maybe Lafayette small forward Matt Lawrence jumps on the bandwagon. He's another local kid who could have been a star in the A-10 rather than a role player in a Power 5 conference.

And we weren't players at all for promising two star recruits on the east coast because they'd never heard of us. There were no Reggie Agbekos or Jermaine Bishops on those Romar/Soderberg rosters. The only east coast kids we could get were transfers.

The program is in a much better place now. But the big money boosters could have made this happen a long time ago, for a lot less money.

Edit: Putting Sommerville in right class

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3star - on the Sommerville thing. If you're talking about his HS recruitment, he went to Iowa. If you're talking about when he was at SWIC, he was a lock for Bradley. There was literally 0 chance he was going anywhere but the hometown school.

Plus BU Facilities at that time mirrored West Pine.

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3star - on the Sommerville thing. If you're talking about his HS recruitment, he went to Iowa. If you're talking about when he was at SWIC, he was a lock for Bradley. There was literally 0 chance he was going anywhere but the hometown school.

Plus BU Facilities at that time mirrored West Pine.

That was the central point of my post. What if our facillities and rosters were clearly superior to the mid major programs we were competing against?
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Rewriting history to suggest a principal reason for soderberg's failures here was west pine gym seems like a stretch to me. Particularly given that it was known we were moving to chaifetz during the later years of his tenure and our recruiting got worse the further into his tenure we went.

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That was the central point of my post. What if our facillities and rosters were clearly superior to the mid major programs we were competing against?

My point was that Sommerville was a lock for BU before he left Iowa.

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Polk was rated higher than that early in his HS career. Part of that was playing for Irons teams which were consistently overrated, but a lot was on merit. Polk was super fast, straight line as fast as Burns, Perry, Mitchell, McCall. He could really sky as a youngster but hurt his knee. He was getting looks from some big time programs before his knee injury but they all fell away after that. Polk was so slight and could finish at the rim with that jumping ability. When he lost that he became a one dimensional player, really just a spot up shooter. Polk at about 15 years old was a dynamo, what could have been, a st. louis version of Telfair. Instead he is a disgraced fired educator who plays for a low low level minor league basketball team.

No doubt West Pine killed any hopes for recruiting for many many coaches. Soderberg maybe most of all. Still he never had a plan. Even if his famed St. Louis Fab 5 class had come to fruition what kind of team would we have had?

Kramer Soderberg - Good NAIA player

Brett Thompson - Fair NAIA player

Scott Suggs - Oft injured average high major player

John Brandenburg - Poor low level D-1 player

I'm forgetting another 1 or 2 guys he wanted in that class but still. It would have been his big breakthrough and none of those guys panned out at all.

Also Drejaj is an underrated player historically. Walk on level talent but he made the most of it. He was a key player on some competitive teams and he made big plays on both ends of the floor. I'd take him on this team.

Drejaj carried us to a big comeback win over Iowa in the NIT out at the St. Charles arena.

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Nobody would argue that Lisch and Liddell were very good recruits. The problem Brad had was that he was always coming in second and as his time at SLU continued he got even better coming in second thus leaving us with 2-3 schollies a year not filled. Couple that with the bad signings he had and of course his tenure at SLU was going to play out the way it did. To say that Brad was a terrible recruiter is not accurate but to try to rewrite history to show that he was a good recruiter here is also not accurate. When you get 50% decent players and 50% bench warmers then you get what Brad got record wise.

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Drejaj carried us to a big comeback win over Iowa in the NIT out at the St. Charles arena.

One of my first very clear memories of billiken basketball was Drejaj's corner 3 at the buzzer to win. I had been to a lot of games before that one, but that's one that stands out in my memory

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Nobody would argue that Lisch and Liddell were very good recruits. The problem Brad had was that he was always coming in second and as his time at SLU continued he got even better coming in second thus leaving us with 2-3 schollies a year not filled. Couple that with the bad signings he had and of course his tenure at SLU was going to play out the way it did. To say that Brad was a terrible recruiter is not accurate but to try to rewrite history to show that he was a good recruiter here is also not accurate. When you get 50% decent players and 50% bench warmers then you get what Brad got record wise.

Brad had a bad recruiting philosophy. If he had 3 scholarships available he would only offer his top 3 choices instead of targeting and offering his top 6 or 8 targets. When he stayed in the hunt for the top ones to the end and came in 2nd, he was left scrambling without a plan B.

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Brad had a bad recruiting philosophy. If he had 3 scholarships available he would only offer his top 3 choices instead of targeting and offering his top 6 or 8 targets. When he stayed in the hunt for the top ones to the end and came in 2nd, he was left scrambling without a plan B.

I'm not sure where you're getting your information but offering his two-three top targets for each scholarship was pretty much Brad's standard operating procedure. Lee Humphrey and Colin Falls for example, were both offered and passed before Darren Clarke and Tim Morris got offered the scholarship. And before Clarke got hurt a few months later, that looked like a pretty good get.

If anything Brad's initial offers were a little too ambitious, not too few. Instead of offering future Notre Dame and Florida recruits, his primary targets should have been underrecruited, quick, smallish guards who can handle and shoot. Instead of offering future Indiana and Missouri power forwards, his primary targets should have been 6'6 post players and 6'7 stretch 4s. His plan B should have been his plan A. The downside is he would have been tagged as a poor recruiter if those recruits hadn't panned out. As it stands he's been tagged as a poor recruiter anyway because he picked fights he couldn't win.

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I'm not sure where you're getting your information but offering his two-three top targets for each scholarship was pretty much Brad's standard operating procedure. Lee Humphrey and Colin Falls for example, were both offered and passed before Darren Clarke and Tim Morris got offered the scholarship. And before Clarke got hurt a few months later, that looked like a pretty good get.

If anything Brad's initial offers were a little too ambitious, not too few. Instead of offering future Notre Dame and Florida recruits, his primary targets should have been underrecruited, quick, smallish guards who can handle and shoot. Instead of offering future Indiana and Missouri power forwards, his primary targets should have been 6'6 post players and 6'7 stretch 4s. His plan B should have been his plan A. The downside is he would have been tagged as a poor recruiter if those recruits hadn't panned out. As it stands he's been tagged as a poor recruiter anyway because he picked fights he couldn't win.

You basically made KM's point there. If brad had 1 scholarship to give he'd offer it to a kid way out of his league, then only after that kid passed would he move to the next, and down the line. He had no ability to look at 3 kids, decide all would be good enough and put the most effort into the one most likely to actually commit.

I'm also not sure why you twice have complimented brad for Darren Clarke. That is probably the biggest recruiting f up while he was here. Taking him over Blake Ahearn was something he never quite recovered from.

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