Calipari and staff fill their schedule with in home visits starting next week
By Staff
The UK basketball recruiting season is officially hitting “crunch time” as the next two weeks will be kind of intense. As announced earlier by Dustin Rumbaugh of Kentucky Sports Radio, UK will be making an in house visit to Doron Lamb on September 10. So far, this is the only in house visit announced to Doron Lamb so it is kind of a good sign. Rumbaugh also tackles the story on Doron Lamb’s supposed visit to Kansas’s “Midnight Madness” on October 16. Seems that Lamb or his father really don’t know a lot about the supposed visit and that it is not a confirmed visit to Kansas. While it is entirely possible that Lamb may visit Kansas soon, the “Late Night in the Phog” visit seems to be nothing more than that. A rumor.
Rumbaugh did list a complete schedule of the visits that UK will be making and as you can see, it is a pretty full dance card:
September 9th: Tobias Harris (NY)
September 10th: Doron Lamb (NY)
September 12th: Adreian Payne (OH)
September 13th: Stacey Poole (FL)
September 14th: Brandon Knight (FL)
September 15th: Kyrie Irving (NJ)
September 22nd: Terrence Jones (OR)
Kentucky’s in house visit to Tobias Harris on September 9 will kick off a whirlwind 10 day tour or recruiting activity which will commence with the UL/UK football game on the 19th at which Brandon Knight and Stacey Poole will be attending. Look for these in house visits to spawn official visits from the rest of the guys on this list.
Like a lot of Wildcat fans, I kind of thought that the recent announcement that Mark Krebs would assume the 13th scholarship this year meant the end of the Eloy Vargas flirtation. Well apparently not. There is news from the JUCO ranks that Eloy Vargas has enrolled at Miami Dade (former home of Darnell Dodson) and will be playing there this year. The starting five for last year’s number 3 ranked Miami Dade team all landed with Division 1 teams this year and it is assumed that once he gets his grades up, Vargas will take that route as well. Miami Dade’s coach Matt Eisele said that Kentucky is still recruiting Vargas, but he expects him to sign late.
There was an interesting mailbag article from Jerry Meyer, the national basketball recruiting analyst for Rivals.com about UK’s 2010 class and the lack of commits thus far. It’s a pretty good response to why UK is commit-less thus far and lets UK fans know that this will probably be a sign of future recruiting classes for UK.
With Kentucky coach John Calipari going after seemingly only top-50 talent, do you see UK being primarily a spring destination for commitments?
— Mark from Kentucky —–
Your question brings up a significant point. Patience will be important for Kentucky fans following recruiting. Kentucky is targeting the top prospects at their positions, and more and more of those upper-echelon prospects are going to wait to sign until the spring. It only makes sense for a recruit who has leverage to wait until the end of the season before signing. At that point a recruit knows how the season went for the teams recruiting him and has a better grip on roster turnover and coaching changes.
Plus, with a school like Kentucky that has elite talent, recruits who are considering the school want to have more specific knowledge about which players are entering the NBA draft. Any program that has rapid turnover in the roster like Calipari’s programs have had lately is more likely to have to wait on recruits to make decisions in the spring.
Kentucky recruit Jelan Kendrick recently informed Rivals.com that he will wait until the spring to make a decision. Brandon Knight, Josh Selby and other top recruiting targets are likely to play the waiting game as well.
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