Turner expands recruiting Down Under
WBB: The 8th-year head coach is hoping to find some future Racers in Australia
It’s not unusual for basketball programs to post graphics on social media showing where their coaches will be hitting the road to recruit. Two weeks ago, Murray State’s women’s program did just that.
The Murray State coaches made plenty of familiar stops on the recruiting trail back in May.
Houston? Check.
Greensboro, North Carolina? Check.
Norman, Oklahoma? Check.
Des Moines, Iowa? Check.
Sydney, Australia? Ch — hang on, what?!?
Sitting in Rechelle Turner’s office a couple weeks ago, she randomly threw into our conversation that she and her staff would be expanding their recruiting footprint. I certainly didn’t expect that footprint to extend more than 9,000 miles to The Land Down Under, but Turner knows in this new era of Name, Image and Likeness, she needs to get creative when searching for future Racers.
“Everything is on the board,” Turner said. “I’m going to be honest with you. With NIL, and trying to be able to have enough money to compete in the United States, especially for bigs, is very difficult. We’re tapping into international players. (We) saw a lot of good players. You want to see them in person. It’s very difficult to bring kids when you haven’t seen them in person, so we were able to do that. We’ve got some offers out, but those will be for the 2025 class. I think it’s somewhere we’re going to have to tap into simply because of the market of bigs, especially if they’re in the States.”
Under current NIL rules, international student-athletes aren’t eligible to receive NIL money, which makes the trip overseas a significant opportunity to get a caliber of player Murray State likely wouldn’t be able to get domestically.
“I had a relationship with some people over there for a little while,” Murray State Assistant Coach Wyatt Foust said. “(The Missouri Valley Conference) is just not the kind of conference that you’re going to win (recruiting) within a three-hour radius unless you are in Chicago or a major metropolitan area. It’s just not going to happen. Especially for us, you look at our three-hour radius and there’s some pretty darn good mid-majors. You’re setting yourself up for failure if that’s kind of going to be how you approach it.”
Foust is also a firm believer that you have to lay eyes on recruits before you try to bring them to your program.
“If you’re going to recruit internationally, you have to go,” Foust said. “Anybody on Earth can put together a highlight tape that makes them look pretty good. You don’t know the level of competition. You’re probably not going to get the full truth from the people trying to help those kids over there, for the most part. You just have to be careful. The other thing is you’re not fighting 20 schools for some of these kids. There are some guys that I saw over there, if they were over here, we’d probably not even try to recruit them. Now we’ve got a chance to get some impact kids where we might be going against two or three (schools) instead of 23.”
While the ATC Showcase in Sydney was halfway around the world, Foust said Murray State was part of a half-dozen schools represented at the event. Kids from all over Australia came to Sydney for their chance to be seen by college coaches and potentially earn a scholarship. Unlike domestic recruiting events, Foust knew he needed his professional margin for error to be extremely slim.
“You pretty much knew there would be one or two kids (you’re interested in) on the floor all the time, and you really only had a couple days. (When recruiting in the United States), you see them in April. If I like them but I’m not sure, another coach can go see them in July a couple times and get a bunch of eyes on them. I (only) had myself and just a couple days (in Australia), and that was all the live evaluation I was going to get on these guys. That was the biggest difference. You can’t blink.”
Every program has a recruiting budget they need to abide by. You’d think a trip to Australia would really stretch the bounds of that budget, but Turner says that wasn’t the case at all.
“What’s crazy is that trip cost us the least of all the other coaches being out,” Turner said. “They put him up, they fed him. The only cost we had was the airfare, and the book was $100 for the event.” For the uninitiated, when coaches go to these recruiting events, they buy a “book” from tournament organizers. The book has information on each player, such as contact information, grade level, grade point average and their interests. “The two events I went to, flying all over the country, the books were $700 a piece,” Turner continued. “So actually, that cost less than us chasing these kids across the (United States). A lot of people think that’s crazy, but because of the way they handle things, and because of their hospitality, we got off cheaper going there.”
While the “book” is vital at all recruiting events, Foust said it’s even more significant in Sydney to see what level of competition the kids play against. In some cases, even though they can’t get paid, some of these kids have already played in Australia’s professional league.
“That’s one of the big advantages of recruiting (in Australia),” Foust said. “The top players over there are going to have played against some 30-year-old women. They know they’ve got to get stronger earlier. A lot of them have more college-ready bodies because they played in the WNBL — that’s the pro league over there. That also gives you a baseline. You can see how they played against those players. That’s a huge piece of it too.”
Foust and Turner are hopeful the trip to Australia will lead to bringing some future Racers to Murray. But how was the actual travel part of the trip?
“Miserable — I’m never going back,” Foust laughed. “It was brutal. That’s the one disadvantage. We’re not a coastal team. I had to fly from Nashville to Houston, Houston to Auckland, New Zealand, and Auckland to Australia. When it was all said and done, it was about 19 hours total of flight time. If I never eat an airplane dinner again, I’ll be just fine. Our plan is to go every three years so you can kind of see three years worth of players with your own eyes, build those connections and stay consistent with it, but not have to make that trip too consistently. This is our first go-round jumping in and being really serious about getting after a specific area. The other five (U.S. schools that were there as well) have been to it and done it successfully, and have gotten some all-conference type players. Hopefully, we can bear the same fruits by getting over there and not missing.”
Very interesting read. Coach Turner is awesome!