Mark Mangino supports the emergency recruiting initiatives adopted Thursday by the NCAA. With one minor exception.
“The only rule that will change things for us,” said Mangino, who began his third season as KU’s football coach when the players arrived Friday for preseason drills, “is hanging a jersey with the recruit’s name on it in the locker room and using the video board.”
On a standard recruiting weekend, Mangino and his staff will entertain prospects in the Memorial Stadium press box. As part of the process, highlights from the recruit’s high school or junior-college career customarily were shown on the video board in the south end zone.
“I feel badly we can’t do that anymore,” Mangino said, “because all the schools have video boards, and there’s no way to abuse that.”
Perhaps the highest-profile initiative was forbidding the use of private jets to fly prospects to and from campuses on official visits. Mangino has no complaints about that.
“I think that’s a good rule, and I support it,” he said.
With the KU campus located less than an hour by automobile from Kansas City International airport, Mangino rarely has had to use a private jet to haul recruits to Lawrence.
“If we had five or six recruits from the same geographical locale,” Mangino said, “it was cheaper to bring them by a private jet than on a commercial flight. I think we did that once, maybe twice.”
In the wake of high-profile abuses in recruiting — notably at Colorado and Miami of Florida — schools must develop written policies that specifically prohibit inappropriate or illegal behavior in recruiting. Those policies must be approved by campus presidents or chancellors by Dec. 1.
It goes without saying Kansas University will meet the deadline because Chancellor Robert Hemenway is chair of the Division One Board of Directors that approved the legislation.
“This package is intended to put an end to the celebrity atmosphere that has developed around the recruiting visit,” Hemenway said.
Not that KU and other schools don’t subscribe to strict adherence of the rules. Mangino, for example, has a handbook containing all the recruiting do’s and don’ts in his program.
“It covers everything from the procedures for coaches, players who are hosts and all of the support staff, like the Crimson Girls,” Mangino said. “Our handbook covers everything from A to Z.”
Men’s basketball coach Bill Self also maintains a strict set of rules.
“We have our own policies we give our guys, so it won’t be a big change for us,” Self said earlier in the week.
While these new initiatives were not instigated with women’s sports necessarily in mind, KU women’s basketball coach Bonnie Henrickson believes they contain a message regardless of gender.
Henrickson is on the board of directors of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Assn. and just returned from the board meeting in Atlanta, where recruiting was among the topics discussed.
“I really do believe there is an entitlement issue in recruiting,” Henrickson said. “I think young men and young women need to know about accountability. I think this is a step in the right direction.”
