Patty Broderick

[Scrapper1]

One of the facts of camp life is that you're always hoping to "be seen" even if the camp is described as a teaching camp only. Sometimes these camps are the only way to get in front of an assignor. So you pay the money knowing that you're not going to get a contract at the end of camp, but with the hope that the assignor will remember at try-out time. That's just the way it is.

Last summer, I met a guy who went to Hoop Mountain. The assignor for a D1 conference is usually there and sometimes Jim Burr is there. They always say "You're not going to get any games from this camp." But it has happened in the past that Mr. Burr has passed along a name to the Big East assignor and a Hoop Mountain grad would show up in the Big East. And I think that the D1 assignor has taken a few guys from the camp. Not often, but it has happened.

So they were sitting around and talking about their various experience levels and guys were saying six years of high school and trying to break into college, stuff like that. And this guy I met says, "I've been working a college varsity schedule for about 10 years now". When a camp observer asked why he was at this "teaching camp", the guy admitted that he was hoping to be seen by the D1 assignor.

Well, apparently, this created a bit of a situation. He took a lot of heat for coming to a teaching camp in order to try to break into D1 and was made to feel very uncomfortable for the remainder of the camp. But honestly, there's no other way to do it for most guys. So even teaching camps are very often "be seen" camps, even if they're not labeled that way.

I guess you just shouldn't admit that's why you're there.