Traveling Men: Local coaches hit road in search of players

If Charleston Southern basketball coach Barclay Radebaugh wakes up one morning over the next few weeks and doesn't know where he is, at least he knows it's July.

Today kicks off a fast and furious evaluation period for the nation's college basketball coaches, who will spend most of the rest of the month traveling around the country to camps and tournaments eyeing potential recruits.

"For the entire staff, July is the most travel-intensive month of the year," said Radebaugh. "It gets pretty crazy."

College of Charleston coach Bobby Cremins' itinerary is fairly typical. Cremins will be in Indianapolis on Friday, Charlotte on Saturday, Myrtle Beach on July 11, Augusta on July 12-13 and Atlanta on July 14.

The coaches get a break, thanks to an NCAA-required dead period in recruiting from July 16-21.

Then it's back at it for the rest of the month.

"All coaches are all over the place," said Cremins, who will also visit Las Vegas, Orlando and South Orange, N.J. before the end of the month. "Not just me. All coaches travel. It's an important time for all of us."

The choices are nearly limitless. There are 258 NCAA-certified camps and tournaments sprinkled all over the country compressed into a 20-day period in the month of July.

Radebaugh employs a strategy where he and his two assistants criss-cross various camps in a seven-state region before converging on camps in the Orlando area at the end of the month.

From there, they will take a few side trips to other nearby camps.

The Citadel coach Ed Conroy says it's important for coaches to do their homework before hitting the road.

"You do a lot of preliminary work, calling different high school coaches or AAU coaches trying to find out where the kids are going to be that you think you have a shot at," Conroy said. "Then sometimes there are some geographic areas or teams that have been good in the past as far as what you're looking for. But for the most part you try to pinpoint where the guys are you're going to be recruiting. Invariably, especially at our level, you go to watch those guys and somebody else will catch your eye."

Conroy says he can relate with Radebaugh's occasional confusion at waking up and not knowing exactly what city he's in.

"The worst thing for me is rental cars," he said. "It just starts to run together and you just have no idea what color your car was or what make and model. You walk out of a gym and see a bunch of coaches in the parking lot hitting the alarm button to try and find which car is theirs. But all the coaches are doing it so there are just horns going off all over the place.

"Then you hope the first guy who leaves for the airport knows where he's going because the rest of us will follow him just like sheep going off a cliff."

And of course, there are the usual glitches that anyone who travels frequently is bound to experience.

"You'll will see a guy, and after three or four days you notice he's wearing the same thing," Conroy said. "You know they lost his bags that first day and he hasn't had time to do anything about it. So he's just traveling around the country wearing the same stuff. Every summer, somebody is going to be in that boat. I myself have had to run into K-Mart or Wal-Mart and try to find something that looks like my school colors on a T-shirt or something else."

Even so, Conroy says things have gotten better for coaches on the road. "It used to be even crazier before the dead period," he said.

Reach Charles Bennett at cbennett@postandcourier.com.