Late last week, Louisville men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino touched on a very interesting topic. At a news conference this past Thursday, the 62-year-old expressed his desire for athletic shoe companies to lessen their hold, so to speak, in the recruiting process.
Pitino’s reason behind his reluctance is that he believes that the relationship between shoe companies and AAU programs in recent years have become questionable at best.
“What I personally don’t like (is) I can’t recruit a kid because he wears Nike on the AAU circuit,” Pitino told the media at said conference. “I had never heard of such a thing and it’s happening in our world. Or, he’s on the Adidas circuit, so the Nike schools don’t want him.”
In addition, Pitino said that this situation is a very difficult one to address “because our pockets are lined with their money.”
This past spring, the Louisville Cardinals and Adidas agreed to an extension worth $39 million to outfit the school’s teams, whether it would be on the hardwood, the gridiron or wherever.
With all of that said, there is no (and has been no) rule against a school sponsored by one shoe company from pursuing a recruit whose high school or AAU team is sponsored by a rival company. For example, despite Louisville being sponsored by Nike, Pitino and his staff have every right to recruit their next big star even if he is draped in Nike apparel – or Reebok, or Puma, or what have you. The point is that this sort of ordeal is not off-limits. Mr. Pitino himself, in fact, knows that as he, en route to recruiting some of his best classes in recent years, has landed prospects who have not played for Adidas-sponsored programs.
But for those who want to jump on the legendary coach for being somewhat of a hypocrite with this process, you do have to give Pitino credit for being big enough to admit that he was wrong.
“As long as you do your homework, you’re fine,” Pitino said. “I didn’t do my homework. … We have to make sure we know that it doesn’t matter to the kids; and those kids we want to go after.”
It may be difficult for some to have sympathy for a coach who already has seven trips to the Final Four and two National Championships to his name, but this isn’t about sympathy. This is about adjusting to a problem – assuming anyone even wants to call it that – that has, like it or not, become commonplace in modern-day collegiate athletics. It is, after all, the nature of the beast – and I, for one, certainly cannot blame someone as successful as Rick Pitino for simply wanting to continue said success.
Personally, I don’t see this issue changing anytime soon, so for Pitino and the rest of the coaches who find the dilemma with shoe companies to be problematic, it will have to be something to get used to.
It may not be the most ideal answer, but it is the most accurate one.
*Section Photo credit to James Crisp, The Associated Press; Featured Photo (above) credit to Kim Klement, USA Today Sports
