PirateCrew: Seton Hall Pirates Football & Basketball Recruiting
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By Colin Rajala
Due to the fact that Scotty Middleton will be announcing soon Colin spoke to Cassidy late last night and sent this partial Q&A to me this morning.
Parts 2 & 3 will be posted either late this week or early next week.
Trove: We have seen Seton Hall’s new Head Coach Shaheen Holloway get involved with a number of highly touted recruits, more so than recent years it seems. First it would be good to start off with your general sense of how Seton Hall is doing recruiting under Holloway in his new role of Seton Hall head coach, following his Elite Eight run at Saint Peter’s.
Rob Cassidy: Things are obviously going better I think. When you’re a first-year head coach, no matter what you’ve done at your last stop, it is difficult to sell the dream. You look all over the country, you can look at bigger schools like Kenny Payne at Louisville, year-one is so often about just kind of getting your name in with some of these guys and getting your name mentioned and out there. Then maybe in a couple of years or so you make it to the finals in year two or year three and I think some of these prospects especially at Seton Hall’s level are looking for a demonstrable trajectory, right? They want to see that things are going well. You need to recruit at a high-level and you need the players to see the direction. It’s kind of hard right now because he’s selling a dream, he’s never been the head coach at Seton Hall before. Nobody knows what direction the team is going to go, but he’s doing a great job of getting involved with some top guys.
Trove: He was the lead recruiter back in the day at Seton Hall under Kevin Willard, but it’s a little different when you’re running the show yourself.
Cassidy: Exactly, he has nothing he can point to. Unless you’re at a Duke or such where no one seems to care that he’s never coached a game in his life. But at a normal school you have to build up to it, regardless of where you came from.
Trove: It seems like Holloway’s gung-ho recruiting approach for top rated players nationally is little different than Kevin Willard's, who really concentrated on that 100 to 150 plus range, sort of the three-star guys. He really looked for guys that were underrecruited and guys he could coach up and develop without the fear of them being poached by larger schools. How do you feel a program like Seton Hall has to balance their approach moving forward?
Cassidy: Somebody once told me a long time ago, Frank Martin at Kansas State I believe, he said "one of the biggest talents you have to have as a coach is knowing your limitations.” That’s because you can get sucked in to chasing guys that you can't get. I think Willard was pretty good at that [knowing limitations]. At the other end of the scale, I don’t think you want to try and defeat yourself by eliminating yourself and not even trying to bring in high quality. So, it takes a good balance. I really think it takes a year or two to find your footing around the guys you should be recruiting and the guys you have no chance at getting. You’ve got to be honest with yourself. At the end of the day, you can sink resources and time into guys that you don’t have a chance of getting and next thing you know, your backup option is off the board and you can kind of get yourself in a hole. You also don’t want to go the other way with that and only concentrate on guys that are outside the 150 and not make the call to the top 50 guy you actually might have a chance with.
Trove: I appreciate that perspective on what it takes to balance roster construction. With Seton Hall looking to add some high school players to its 2023 roster, I would like to get your perspective on a bunch of the recruits Seton Hall has been mentioned with. I have to start off with Scotty Middleton because he is set to announce his commitment in the coming days. He obviously had a larger list and cut it down to three schools – Ohio State, Seton Hall and UConn. Lately I’ve been hearing he has it down to a two horse race between the Buckeyes and Pirates and I’ve been given odds as good as 50/50 for the Hall. However, I’m not convinced he’s going to leave the Midwest to come to The Hall. How about you?
Cassidy: I think Seton Hall will finish second here. I think it’s nice that they’ve been mentioned until the very end, but I think its Ohio State in the end. I wouldn’t bet my house on it, but I would probably bet my car on it.
Trove: I think with him leaving The Patrick School and going out to the Midwest to Sunrise Christian Academy and seeing Ohio State put a guy in the first round of the draft like Malaki Branham, it shows, like you mentioned, the demonstrable track record to make the NBA. It’s hard to talk a kid out of that type of projection.
Cassidy: It’s nice that they’ve been mentioned with him and its nice they’re a finalist for him because it’s going to pay off down the road and give Seton Hall the appearance of a more attractive place for kids. He’s the type of guy that they could land by building a track record of success. Guys want to see the trajectory to the next level and I think there can be a desire for some of these kids to play at Seton Hall given the history and the geographic location. It’s just really hard to start out as a new coaching staff and head coach and land a Scotty Middletown without anything to point to at that level.
Trove: While it would be unfortunate to come up just short for that level of recruit, especially given his defensive abilities, I will say that Seton Hall has cleaned up pretty nicely in the past for being the runner up. They’ve been able to catch some guys on the flipside when they were unhappy at their first choice or didn’t like their fit. It doesn’t hurt to be fresh in a guy’s head in those scenarios.
Cassidy: Relationships are more important than ever now, especially given the transfer portal. Recruitments are never over anymore. It’s kind of on pause until something goes wrong or they're upset. You never know. I think now more than ever it’s important to make it down to the final three or final two because like you said, it gives you a jumpstart when recruitment 2.0 starts.
Parts 2-3 to follow
