David Haynes Really Committed?

[50's PONY]

2-sport stars find time to court schools
By JERRY HILL Tribune-Herald assistant sports editor
As a 5-foot-11 forward, Belton's Ramonce Taylor doesn't exactly turn the heads of major-college basketball recruiters. Not even when he knocks down eight three-pointers and scores 44 points in a single game.

But he's one of a handful of Central Texas athletes who are balancing basketball games, homework and football recruiting.

"Most of the time when the colleges call, I just tell my mom not to answer the phone," said Taylor, the Tribune-Herald Super Centex offensive player of the year in football who's averaging 21.9 points per game for the Tigers' basketball team. "And all the mail that comes in, I just don't open it. It's just too much for me to open."

Taylor is one of the lucky ones. He committed to Texas last fall and has never wavered, making just one official visit down to Austin.

While other players are finishing whirlwind recruiting tours, Taylor uses the weekends to catch up on sleep and homework.

"It's been kind of weird knowing that I had committed to Texas and still having other schools calling me wanting me to take a visit," said Taylor, who had 44 points in a win over No. 8 Amarillo last week.

"A&M quit talking to me, and then they came back real strong after football. Baylor's been with me ever since, but I'm the kind of guy that likes to win. I know I can go to Baylor and play, but I don't see myself going in there and winning as many games."

Waco High's Torey Degrate is one of the state's top prospects at wide receiver and is averaging 12.9 points with 32 three-pointers for the Lions' 15-6 basketball team. To avoid potential conflicts, Degrate scheduled his recruiting visits with Arkansas, Texas A&M and Oklahoma State before District 13-5A play started.

"I had to miss a couple of games, but I felt like I needed to get in my visits early," he said. "The only thing that's really [deleted] me now is just making my decision. It's a hard choice out of those three."

The players also face a difficult choice on Friday nights: making the first leg of a weekend recruiting visit or staying home to play with their basketball teams.

"I don't like making that choice," said McGregor quarterback David Haynes Jr., a Super Centex first-team pick as a kick returner who is averaging 10 points per game as the Bulldogs' shooting guard. "But that's my future. I had a talk with (basketball coach Jeff Burgess) before the season, and he understood."

It seems easy enough. He is giving up one night of high school basketball to help him make a critical choice on the next four or five years of his life.

"I think everybody has to put up with some of it, especially if the kid's a good athlete," said Baylor coach Guy Morriss. "The basketball coach isn't going to want to give that kid up. But if he's a marginal basketball player who's a just a role player, the coach will excuse him. You have to understand that his bread is being buttered by football."

An ankle injury kept Haynes off the basketball court early in the season and allowed him to make trips to SMU and Kansas. But he missed Friday night's home game against Bruceville-Eddy for a trip to Arkansas and is still considering possible visits to A&M, Baylor and North Texas.

"I got my first flying experience on the Kansas trip," Haynes said. "Kansas came down and got me on their (university) plane. I was nervous, because it was bumpy when we first took off. But I wasn't too scared."

Haynes went into the process with more knowledge than most wide-eyed recruits. His dad, McGregor head coach David Haynes, was a standout at McGregor in the early 1980s who played at Tulsa.

"He told me he went through the whole thing," the younger Haynes said. "And he said that whenever you commit, you're not locked down until you sign the paper, so don't be afraid to back out or anything. Right now, I'm wide open. I'm going to see how all this stuff turns out, and hopefully I'll wind up in the right place where me and my family feel comfortable."

Other multisport players like Gatesville's Lashon Thayer and Italy's Xavier Randle have had more time to focus on basketball than they probably wanted. Both are still waiting for offers.

But they've still had to deal with the grind of going straight from football to basketball. For some of them, there is no off-season.

"I'm used to it," said Randle, who will also run the 110-meter hurdles and two relays in track. "I've done it my whole life."

Taylor said it was a tough adjustment for him, but "as the season goes, I've been playing pretty good. I just wasn't used to it yet, coming straight out of football."

Morriss said basketball games are another measuring tool for a football recruit's athleticism.

"I like for our coaches to see players play basketball, especially the big guys," he said. "With the skill position guys, you can usually see it on the football field. But sometimes with the linemen, you don't see a lot of lateral movement. But if you watch them play basketball, you can see them move with the ball in their hands and see how hard a kid competes. It's all the intangible things that you can't see just from watching film on them."

Jerry Hill can be reached at 757-5715 or at [email protected].
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[Stallion]

this has already been covered in the bumped "David Haynes" thread. We should know within a couple of hours whether Arkansas offered. Unaccessible posts on Arkansas' subscription Insiders site suggests 9 of 17 visitors to Arkansas this weekend were offered or committed-but they already have 22 commits-will probaly go as high as 28-30 although because of NCAA violations they can only enroll 23.

[HFvictory]

Originally posted by Stallion:
they already have 22 commits-will probaly go as high as 28-30 although because of NCAA violations they can only enroll 23.

Sanctions don't go into effect until 05-06 year. They can sign 25 this year.

[Stallion]

according to the NCAA they lost 3 in 2001-2002, 2 in 2002-2003, 2 in 2003-2004, and 1 in 2004-2005. So they are limited to 23 this year but will likely go WAY over that. I hear Wrighter and Richardson are secret commitments-Richardson doesn't even re-take his SAT until March so they can't be sure of him for awhile.