Re: Wisconsin Recruiting Vol. XXX: 1 All American at a Time
It is shocking that they were not monitoring his performance in games via box scores and even reading local articles on team he plays for. To not know and keep track of the guy is just deplorable.
It sure makes you wonder how he researches recruits. Some of us were scouring the BCHL and AJHL league stats looking for targets last year before Rockwood and Ustaski signed as UW didn't have a full load of players committed at that point. I was going the BCHL site when Rumpel was committed and still playing there wondering how he was doing. We are doing more research than Eaves? Unbelievable.
I think it is a complete load of crap to suggest that the coaching staff wasn't paying attention or wasn't keeping track of his performance.
With young athletes (especially heavily promoted ones like this), what are they going to want to talk about? THEMSELVES!!! If I were a coach I would certainly take the approach of "So how have things been going?" to allow the player to respond with "Really well, I had a monster game against XYZ!". This would allow me to reply with "Yeah, I saw that you had X points in that game, that was pretty good!".
This gives the kid a chance to blow his own horn, and also feeds into the positive feedback loop from an authority figure; "Look at me, I did something good!" "Yes, yes you did and we are so proud of you!".
But then again, I'm certainly not a coach or a recruiter...so feel free to tell me how full of crap I am.
So Eaves may have said Burnsville when he meant to say Waterloo, mistakes happen...I know that I've said the wrong name of a city or a person when I've been talking to someone. I'd love to know what the source on this conversation is. Is this something that Chuck got directly from Brock? From a teammate who overheard the actual call? From a 3rd hand source that heard someone say something about something?
Alternately, who is to say that Eaves didn't have knowledge of a trip that Boeser had made to Burnsville, its only a few hours from Waterloo so it isn't out of the question. Maybe the intent was to show that the coaching staff
had been paying attention, and had been paying attention to things
beyond the game and it got lost in translation.
I know that the popular thing to do is bash Eaves and the rest of the coaching staff, but unless any of you know every move that the coaching staff is making, every box score that they look at, every highlight clip they watch on YouTube, every phone call that they make, every chart that they have on the progress of a potential recruit...this is all pure speculation and is highly unfair and unfounded in my eyes.
So yes, I'll offer an excuse for why Eaves may have said Burnsville on accident, and another one for why he may have said it on purpose.
But if you take a step back and take a look at what is grounded in fact and you'll see that we don't really know much (if anything) about what is actually happening in the coaching offices.
That should add enough fuel to the fire to get a few more pages worth of ranting from the anti-Eaves crowd. I'll sit back and enjoy.