State isn't producing nearly as many high-end players as it once did; some reasons obvious, others contentious


On the heels of another frustrating experience with another heralded out-of-state recruit, Michigan State basketball coach Tom Izzo undoubtedly wishes he were living in 1985, or even '95 or 2005.
He wouldn't have had to leave Michigan.
The state Izzo worked vigorously to put a fence around has become mostly devoid of high-end basketball talent over the last decade.
If, for example, an in-state class similar to that of Kalin Lucas and Durrell Summers in 2007 had existed in 2013, Izzo admits he wouldn't have needed to pour so much energy into mining Chicago the last few years.
"You can get (in-state) kids up here (to East Lansing) so much more, you can build a relationship with them," Izzo said. "Jabari (Parker) I knew since eighth grade, but that's a freak thing, and it almost worked.
"Marquise Gray we had up here in sixth grade, (Chris) Webber eighth grade. Marcus Taylor fifth grade. It's easier."
MSU's basketball brand can hold its own beyond state lines these days. It doesn't stick out as an underdog in recruiting tussles for top prospects in Chicago or Indianapolis, Ohio or elsewhere. But MSU's brand — and Izzo's name — remains strongest on Michigan soil.
That's in part because he built his program with Michigan kids — a philosophical choice from the beginning.
"Anytime you can recruit your home state, I think it benefits all parties — you, the school, the parents, the player, the high school coach in that area," Izzo said.
That plan worked perfectly. He had six recruited scholarship players from the state on his championship team in 2000 and seven on his Final Four team 10 years ago. This past season, he had three. After next season, it's possible he'll only have one.
"I mean I used go watch pros play each other in Flint and now, Detroit, Flint … "
None of Michigan's once-fertile basketball grounds are close to producing the players they used to. The reasons can be debated, though some are in plain sight. The data isn't debatable.
Over a 13-year span, players born from 1965 to 1977 — Dan Majerle and Jeff Grayer through Mateen Cleaves and Morris Peterson — 50 Michigan-born players played in the NBA. In the 13 years that followed — Shane Battier through Draymond Green — the number of Michiganders to reach basketball's highest professional level was 22.
Michigan produced at least one McDonald's High School All-American every year from 1991 to 2004 — in five of those years, it produced two — and then none for the next five years.
"The quality is definitely noticeably less and there's probably a myriad of reasons for it," said Perry Watson, longtime coach of both Detroit Southwestern High School and the University of Detroit.



The primary culprit is basic math and probably irreversible. Michigan's basketball hotbeds have lost population in droves. Since 1990, Detroit, Flint and Saginaw have lost more than 30 percent of their people, more than 300,000 fleeing Detroit alone.
Sixty percent of Detroit's auto industry employment vanished between 2000 and 2009. In the rest of the state, it was 77 percent, according to an Upjohn Institute study that year, coinciding with stark immediate drops in population in Detroit, Flint and Saginaw.
These three cities have produced 84 of the 157 Michigan high school players ever to reach the NBA or ABA — including Spartans Cleaves, Peterson, Charlie Bell, Jason Richardson, Maurice Ager and Green.
"When people are moving their families and moving their kids, all of a sudden you hear (in recruiting), 'He came from Detroit in second grade,'" said Detroit native and Iowa State assistant coach Cornell Mann.
"It's different," said longtime Clarkson High School coach Dan Fife, the father of MSU assistant Dane Fife. "I mean, years ago, if you combined the two Pontiac schools, it would have been incredible how good they were. Now they're combined and they're not even the top level in our league. The cities are depleted."
College and high school coaches, squirrels and chipmunks — everyone is in agreement on this point.
From here, however, there is contention and a feeling among many coaches that Michigan is not doing the most with what it has.


Pinched by regulations
Outside of its cities, Michigan is not a high school basketball-crazed state — not like Illinois or Indiana, where 6-foot-3 wide receivers more often turn into Gary Harris than Charles Rogers.
"I remember when I first got to Illinois, just going to the gyms in Illinois, these guys they play year-round," said former Saginaw High School coach Louis Dawkins, now an assistant on Mark Montgomery's staff at Northern Illinois.
This, too, is at the root of the fall-off. Schools, anecdotally, don't exert the same effort finding the right coach — even if it means creating a full-time position for them — as they do in some other states. Administrators and high school coaches in Michigan, collectively, don't support increasing the allowance for offseason team workouts, which might conflict with other sports seasons, or permitting interstate travel beyond 300 miles (and now also anywhere in Illinois).
Whether this is at all a problem depends on your perspective.
To college coaches who rely on talent acquisition and old-school high school coaches in basketball-centric economically depressed areas, the Michigan High School Athletic Association's policies are hindering the state — mostly limitations on out-of-season gym time and out-of-state travel. The former, they say, has lessened the influence of high school coaches and fostered the AAU-first dynamic that exists today, where less-vetted summer league coaches are more often the influential voices in teenagers' ears. Yet, admittedly, in some cases, the high school coach isn't a better fit for the job.


"The AAU coaches, the entourages, the uncles, they now have replaced the high school coach as a figure," said Watson, who coached Detroit Southwestern from 1979 to 1991 before becoming an assistant at the University of Michigan. "As a high school coach, you were accountable to your schools system, your principal, so you couldn't be like some of these characters.
"I tell high school coaches, you're part of the blame, too, because you are not providing an alternative or a platform where your player is in the gym with you and he's seeing you're there with him. When the state high school season ends, they almost turn the kids loose. They're being coached for six months with no regulations by AAU people."
Turning the kids loose, to some degree, is what the MHSAA and its members want. When the association orchestrated a conversation this past year about adding full-team practice dates in the fall and spring — beyond 15 competition dates in the summer and individual workouts with up to four players in the fall — its members weren't interested. They didn't see the need and wanted to protect their other sports.
And if you live in suburban Grand Rapids or rural Southwest Michigan or don't care deeply about high school basketball, it makes sense. If your summers are filled with other sports, camps and family vacations, you don't need more basketball or to feel pressured into participating?
But in the 1980s at Detroit Southwestern, Watson wasn't worried about his players missing a summer on Lake Leelanau. His fear: "Does the dope man get them?"
"You've got to keep these kids involved, you've got to keep them focused," he said.
Bottom line: Kids who take the sport seriously are going to play year-round. It's a question of who's coaching them and the quality of instruction.


A new parasite
The AAU problem — too many games instead of skill development, etc. — is an issue everywhere. It may be more pronounced in Michigan, but that's tough to show, other than perhaps as part the bundle of reasons the state isn't producing more high-major and McDonald's All-American players.



The strict travel rules, though, are a Michigan thing, tighter here than in Illinois, Indiana or Ohio. And, this, coaches say, is allowing in an new parasite — out of state prep schools.
Michigan's 2016 class, for example, features players ranked Nos. 1, 23 and 27 in the nation, according to Rivals.com. Only you wouldn't know it just to look at the rankings. The only player listed as from Michigan is No. 23 Cassius Winston, from the University of Detroit Jesuit High School.
No. 1 Josh Jackson, a 6-foot-7 guard, left Detroit Consortium for Prolific Prep in Napa, California. No. 27 Miles Bridges, a 6-6 forward, transferred from Flint Southwestern to Huntington Prep in West Virginia.
"It's all based on national exposure," Dawkins said.
MHSAA's 600-mile round-trip rule, several coaches insist, is making it impossible for hometown high schools to provide those opportunities.
"The biggest problem (with high school basketball) in this state — teams don't get to travel anywhere," said former Detroit Pershing coach A.W. Canada, who coached former Spartans Keith Appling and Derrick Nix to a state championship in 2009. "When I was coaching, we had opportunities to go to Hawaii, the Bahamas, California. (But) we couldn't go more than 300 miles."
Dawkins' said his Saginaw program — during the Draymond Green era — had a similar opportunity, all expenses paid to San Diego, the December after its first state title in 2007.
"The kids have probably never been to California before, and we can't go," he said.
The issue of student-athlete experience and increased exposure can be countered with concerns about competitive fairness. If certain state powerhouses are able to accept invites for travel to the coasts and national television appearances, the rich get richer and kids want to go to those schools, MHSAA director Jack Roberts said. And in the schools-of-choice era, they can.
But in serving the masses, in protecting ideals, the MHSAA is "holding back growth," Izzo said.
"Because all those places sell them on is, you come here, you get the exposure," Izzo continued.



It's a mischievous and faulty sales pitch. Discovery in recruiting is done mostly through AAU summer basketball these days. And coaches are paid to find players. That's half the gig. A Division I-worthy high school prospect would have to work to go unnoticed.
But logic isn't always part of the equation. It's about being "the loudest voice in their ear," Western Michigan coach Steve Hawkins said.
When that voice doesn't belong to a high school coach, it's open season. Sometimes it is anyway.
Lansing Everett's Trevor Manuel left rival Sexton after his sophomore year for Oak Hill Academy in Virginia, once Sexton coach Carlton Valentine stepped down.
"If he would have stayed, I would have stayed," said Manuel, who signed to play college basketball at Oregon, and returned home for his senior year of high school.
His reason for going to Oak Hill, "More exposure and to play against the best competition," he said.
In Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, in-state high schools are able to play out-of-state showcase games, and so stand a better chance of thwarting prep schools.
In Illinois, twice a year they can miss school days for an event and there are no limits on games or tournaments that don't come at the expense of class. Indiana has a 600-mile round-trip maximum, though this doesn't include single-game matchups if both schools are in good standing with their state associations. Ohio allows games with neighboring states and Ontario, and one trip elsewhere, provided players don't miss class.

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Roberts, of the MHSAA, staunchly defends his organization's policies, well aware he has his critics.
"If I were to line up 100 administrators, 90, 95 percent of them would agree that no further travel is necessary and that national tournaments and the like do more harm than good," the MHSAA director said.
"The national teams and scene with unethical and unregulated agents — our current rules tend to insulate Michigan schools from that environment and reduce transfers to schools in other states. We're not losing students because of our rules. We're actually insulating them from those temptations. And when some go, it's only a handful."
Maybe. But that handful right now includes some of this state's best players.
"They're not leaving Chicago to go to prep schools," Iowa State's Mann said.
Chicago's visible run of nationally prominent high school talent has only exacerbated the awareness of what appears to be missing in Michigan. But it's not always so good in Chicago.
And it isn't many places right now.
"There's still some pretty good talent coming out of Michigan in my opinion," said Youngstown State assistant Steve Hall, who coached Detroit Rogers to three straight Class D titles a decade ago and then won a PSL title at Detroit Northwestern.
"It might not be the same as in the 80s, but it's not the same as it was in the 80s in New York, either."
The declining numbers of top high school basketball players here in Michigan is an obstacle for in-state university programs, Izzo's especially. And it pains the hearts of those who ruled the city programs in a different era.
To them, it's a problem. To much of Michigan, it appears, their problem isn't a concern