Nation’s hoops hotbed?

Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, February 2, 2005

SEATTLE – When Lorenzo Romar was an assistant coach at UCLA in the mid-1990s, the philosophy of recruiting in Seattle was pretty simple.

If you couldn’t get one of the top two players in the area, you didn’t bother.

Boy, has that landscape changed.

Romar now coaches a University of Washington team that’s ranked 13th in the country with a roster of mostly Seattle players. And just about every time a Pac-10 team comes to town, it boasts at least one key player who has Washington roots.

That will be the case again tonight, when USC features leading scorer Lodrick Stewart, a product of Rainier Beach High School. On Saturday, opponent UCLA will bring in seven-foot center Michael Fey, a graduate of Olympia’s Capital High School, and reserve Brian Morrison, who attended Lake Washington High in Kirkland before beginning his college career at North Carolina.

These days, the Seattle area is seen as a hotbed of recruiting.

“We’re all proud to say where we’re from now because everyone knows that’s where great basketball is being played,” said Jim Marsh, coach of a Seattle-based AAU team called Friends of Hoop that tours the country each summer. “It’s a lot different than five years ago, when (tournament officials) would stack all of our games together and put us in a cruddy gym where no one would see us.

“Now we’re being catered to; they give us the best gym. As they say: the times, they are a changin’.”

UW’s Romar owes a lot of his success to local recruits. Four starters are from the Seattle area, as is sixth man Brandon Roy. Stanwood’s Ryan Appleby, a transfer from Florida who has to sit out this season, will officially join the team next fall, along with incoming freshmen Jon Brockman of Snohomish and Martell Webster of Seattle Prep.

But UW doesn’t have any secret pipeline. Big-time basketball recruits have signed on with North Carolina, Kansas, Arizona, Louisville and Oregon over the past two years. The same state that had just one player (Morrison) sign on with a power-conference school outside of the Pac-10 in 2001-02 has had six in the past three recruiting classes.

No longer are marginal players like omm’A Givens and Jeffrey Day considered the class of Seattle. Lately the area has boasted the kind of talent that gives serious thoughts to skipping college and going straight to the NBA.

“Right now they’re turning out more good players than anywhere in the country,” said Arizona coach Lute Olson, who will add Roosevelt High’s Marcus Williams next fall and has coached area products like Jason Terry and Michael Dickerson in the past. “… This year, I think they have at least five top-level, Division I players. There are kids coming out every year that any of us would love to have.”

Romar, who played at UW from 1978-80 and returned as head coach in 2003, has two theories on why there has been such an increase in local talent lately. The first is a growing AAU program, and the second is a population surge.

“A lot of coaches around the country now are wanting to know when the local (AAU) Seattle teams are playing because they seem to have great talent,” Romar said. “It filters down to younger kids. Over a period of time, it’s encouraged guys to do well.”

Stanford coach Trent Johnson, a product of Seattle’s Franklin High, believes exposure has been the biggest change in this area’s recruiting landscape.

“I think Seattle’s always had their share of talent,” Johnson said. “You can go back to the ’70s, and I’m not just saying that because that’s when I was in school. There was a nucleus of players who came out of there – James Edwards, Clint Richardson, Kim Stewart, Keith Harrell, you could go on and on. So I always think Seattle has had its share of talent.

“I think in the last 10-15 years, because of the exposure in the AAU tournaments and the amount of exposure, that helps.”

Four of the Pac-10’s top 11 scorers are from Seattle: UW’s Nate Robinson (16.7 points per game) and Tre Simmons (16.4), Oregon’s Aaron Brooks (15.1) and USC’s Stewart (14.6). Washington State’s Thomas Kelati, who played high school basketball in Walla Walla, ranked 13th in the conference at 13.2 points per game. And UCLA’s Morrison is a key reserve, having scored 19 points off the bench to lead the Bruins over the Huskies last month.

The area has had its share of stars over the years, but guys like Terry (Arizona), Jamal Crawford (Michigan) and Curtis Borchardt (Stanford) were typically head-and-shoulders above their Seattle opponents and went away to play college basketball. Lately, the state of Washington has had both a deep pool of talent and an inclination for those players to stay home.

“There were a lot of good guys that we just couldn’t get on one team,” said Huskies junior Brandon Roy, a product of Garfield High School. “Going to Arizona or Michigan, those were the more popular decisions then. As guys like me and Nate came around, we were like, ‘Let’s make Washington one of those schools to go to.’ Since guys like us did that, now it’s easier to come here.”

The difference now is that there’s enough local talent to go around. Star players can go to big-time programs in other places, while others can stay home and play for UW.

The Huskies’ success “really shows that when local players do stay,” said Brockman, who opted to play for the Huskies over perennial power Duke, “they play well together.”