Should NCAA Ban ‘Unofficial Visits’?
The next advance in this department: “Get rid of all unofficial visits,” Kentucky coach John Calipari told Sporting News on Thursday. “It’s not fair to the kid who doesn’t have the means to make all these trips.”
Obviously, it would be impossible and undesirable to declare that athletes are not allowed to visit campuses that are open to the general public. An athlete shouldn’t lose a bit of his freedom merely because he’s a targeted recruit.
It would not be at all complicated, however, to declare that coaches no longer could arrange to have a recruit visit campus unofficially and could not have contact with him during a campus tour. The recruit would not be allowed to see the areas that typically are reserved for varsity athletes: Locker rooms, training areas, video suites.
If an athlete wanted to visit a campus in the same manner as a prospective journalism major or pre-med student, he could contact the admissions office and arrange the same tour as everyone else. I’ve been on a few of those with my nephews. They were all to universities with significant Division I basketball programs, and none of them showed off the players’ lounge.
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