Sweet 16's: The Plan For A Program-Defining Recruiting Class
11/25/15 | Women's Basketball, @GoDucksMoseley
The first in a three-part series looking at how Kelly Graves and staff assembled the nation's No. 6 women's basketball recruiting class for 2016.
By Rob Moseley
Editor, GoDucks.com
The spring of 2001 was a heady time for Southwest Missouri State women's basketball.
Legendary Bears guard Jackie Stiles was on her way to becoming the first Division I women's basketball player to reach 1,000 points in a season. Behind Stiles' elite scoring, the school now known as Missouri State reached the Final Four of the 2001 NCAA Tournament.
That postseason run by the Bears remains memorable all these years later, and for more than Stiles' prolific scoring. More than a decade later, the 2001 Southwest Missouri State team remained the last from a mid-major conference to reach the Final Four.
Out in Spokane, Wash., Kelly Graves was aware of that fact. As head coach at Gonzaga from 2000-14, Graves won 10 conference titles and reached the NCAA Tournament seven times. There's little reason to doubt that, had he been so inclined, Graves could have remained with the Bulldogs and sustained that level of success for years to come.
But in those seven NCAA appearances, Gonzaga advanced past the Sweet Sixteen just once. Looking to summit greater heights, Graves in 2014-15 took over an Oregon program that hadn't regularly competed for conference titles since before Stiles was making history in Missouri.
To get the Ducks nationally relevant again, Graves turned his attention to Sweet Sixteens of a different sort – the first recruiting class he'd be able to pursue full-time as UO head coach, the high school senior class of 2016.
“This is the class that will define the program, arguably forever,” Graves said. “Once you can get in a group like this, it builds on itself. You just need that one group to say, 'Yeah, we believe in you guys.'”
Earlier this month the hard work of Graves and his staff paid off, as the Ducks announced a six-player signing class rated No. 6 in the country by ESPN. The class features four top-100 players as rated by ESPN, along with versatility and length – four signees are 6-foot-3 or taller. And the staff remains in pursuit of at least one more player, who could commit at any point and sign in the spring.
But 18 months ago, Graves was armed with little more than his own reputation, the talented staff he'd assembled and his desire to turn Oregon women's basketball into a national power. Arriving in early 2014, Graves and his staff were already behind the curve in recruiting 2015 high school seniors. Almost immediately, they turned their full attention to the class of 2016.
For his first season in Eugene, Graves returned a roster led by one of the best players in program history, Jillian Alleyne. He added some promising newcomers, including transfer Jacinta Vandenberg and guard Lexi Bando. But among the entire roster for 2014-15, Graves' first season, only Vandenberg and Bando projected to be on hand when the 2016-17 season began. The hunt for the future of Oregon women's basketball was on.
Graves' staff at Oregon was led by his longtime Gonzaga assistant, Jodie Berry. They knew they were leaving the Bulldogs in the capable hands of another longtime assistant there, Lisa Fortier, and so Graves also brought along to Oregon as an assistant Nicole Powell, the former Stanford and WNBA star.
As the UO staff set out to pursue elite recruits, those with dreams of playing professionally, Powell provided huge credibility. “Stanford-educated, all-American, played in the WNBA – she's the whole package,” Graves said.
For the final position on his staff, Graves hired the man he calls “the best recruiter I've ever seen,” Mark Campbell, at the time working in Corvallis. Respected for building deep relationships with recruits and having a keen eye for the primary influencers in their lives – be that a parent, family friend or coach – Campbell is “relentless” on the recruiting trail, Graves said.
Graves and his new staff had some advantages working in their favor. Like any staff at a new school, they were so far behind recruiting the next class on the calendar, they could get a jump start on the one two years out – in this case 2016. And the class of 2016 happened to be the deepest in West Coast talent in recent memory – and in particular, talented big players.
The new UO women's basketball staff needed to make some quick fixes early, and brought in not only Vandenberg as a transfer in 2014, but three more transfers for 2015. The lifeblood of the program would be high school players, however. The staff felt entrusted by UO administration to take the long view with the class of 2016, and recruit a foundational group of high school players.
There were other advantages Graves and his new staff enjoyed as they embarked on a new challenge.
“Let's face it: That big 'O,' that's a great brand,” Graves said. “And it helped that our football program was great, the Nike ties – it all helped. And we really played that up. So we knew we'd be able to get in homes. Now, can we seal the deal?”
There were hurdles to overcome, too. The Ducks wanted to fill six or seven spots in the class of 2016. Usually a staff pursues two or three players for each open scholarship; given the size of the 2016 class, and the depth of relationships the staff desired to build with players, that wouldn't be possible. Graves could only afford to truly go hard after 10, maybe 12 players, thus needing to bat better than .500 in order to fill out the class.
And the new staff faced the reality of negative recruiting by other schools, based on Oregon's recent track record. In the dozen years preceding Graves' arrival, the program finished above .500 just three times, and won as many as 20 games once. The Ducks needed to rebuild.
“It takes a special kid to want to take on that challenge, and build from the ground up,” Campbell said. “There's some kids that don't want to be a part of that – and that's OK. But it's our job to identify that.”
Powell was late arriving to Eugene, after playing her final season in the WNBA. Graves was hired in early April, and Powell showed up late in the summer. Immediately, she saw the impact of moving from one of the West Coast's best mid-majors to a Pac-12 school with a reputation for success across its athletic department.
In her previous experience, if Powell was trying to contact an elite player from across the country, “I wasn't even getting a call back,” she said. “I show up here in September, and I could literally call anybody.”
It's a long way from phone calls to commitments, however. Entering the fall of 2014, Graves and his staff were armed with little more than ambition and a plan for what they hoped the 2016 signing class could be.
It would be program-changing, the class that took Oregon women's basketball back to relevance—but they couldn't say for sure yet which players it would include.
“You know you need a little bit of everything,” Campbell said. “But it's only when one domino falls, two dominoes fall, then you get to start building around them. But you need one of the dominoes to fall first.”
In the fall of 2014, the new UO staff hit the road. Out on the horizon lay the future of the program. At that point, it seemed a long way off.
Check back tomorrow for part two, "The Hunt," and Friday for part three, "The Future."
