Monday, August 4, 2008 11:15 PM CDT
EIU basketball gets new hope from recruits
By Brian Nielsen, Sports Editor
bnielsen@jg-tc.com
HoopScoop.com ranks Eastern Illinois’ latest basketball recruiting class as second best in the Ohio Valley Conference.
Detractors might say it had better be, considering only five players return from a 7-22 season.
If sheer numbers — four junior college transfers and incoming freshmen — help boost coach Mike Miller’s group in the eyes of those who try to evaluate recruits, then that’s part of his plan to provide depth so that injuries might not be so damaging as last season, when Eastern suffered more losses than any other basketball team in school history.
The likes of a defensive-minded guard who helped his high school team to the state tournament and junior college team to the national tourney, a record-setting junior college 3-point shooter and a 24.2-point-per-game high school hotshot show some quality as well.
Several of the new Panthers are just now being announced, rather late in the game for basketball recruits, but Miller and his staff actually have had a good idea of who was coming for some time now.
“Some of the paper work we didn’t get back until the summer,” Miller said. “We had some academic responsibilities before we could release anything.”
One player was lost as an academic casualty. Evansville (Ind.) Reitz’s 6-foot-6 Damion Garrett, one of the more highly regarded players to sign with the Panthers last November, is no longer on the 2008-09 EIU roster, at least for this year.
“What we’ve done is to encourage him to attend junior college,” Miller said. “Going into it we knew that there was a chance and we had ourselves covered either way. We liked what he brings to the table, but at the same time when he was having trouble we had to do something else.”
This never was a recruiting process banking on one superstar.
“What we’re really after is the depth,” Miller said. “I think the best teams are the ones that have the depth, not the teams with that 1-2 punch. What we’re trying to do with the athleticism and versatility is build depth. We went through the year that we lost so much production with the injury. What we’re trying to build is to where we have that balance, and if we lost a guy for a portion of the season, we have someone else to step up.”
Main example, of course, is last season’s injury to Romain Martin, who led Eastern’s scoring two seasons ago as a freshman and was taking things another step as one of the OVC’s top scorers before an injury 13 games into the season.
Ideally, Eastern would have a healthy Martin as a junior who will not miss any games.
Even more ideally, the Panthers will not be so dependent on this guy with 112 3-pointers through 46 college games.
“This will be the best shooting team that we’ve had,” said Miller, entering his fourth season at Eastern.
That is predicated not only on Martin no longer having foot problems and Tyler Laser, who after averaging 29.6 points as a Hillsdale (Mich.) High School all-stater, recovering from a shoulder injury that slowed his EIU freshman season, but also on production from incoming recruits like Jay Smith, who averaged 16.7 points with a Trinity Valley record 135 3-pointers last year as a junior college sophomore; Dewayne Wright Jr., who averaged 18.4 points for Highland Community College in Kansas; and Will Hamilton, who averaged 24.2 points for Greenfield (Ind.) Central High School.
But maybe just as big as any of the signings of players with prolific scoring statistics is the addition of T.J. Marion, who averaged 10.7 points for a Southeastern Illinois team that went 28-8 going to the national junior college tournament two years after being named first-team all-state when averaging 11.1 points for an Aurora West team that was 29-2, reaching the IHSA state quarterfinals.
“T.J. Marion has done nothing but win,” Miller said. “He won at West Aurora and went to the state tournament twice and has gone to the national junior college tournament. He’s impacted winning every where he has been. He fills a role as that lockdown defender. Late in the game he will be guarding the other team’s big scorer.”
Maybe in a similar category is guard Jeremy Granger, who helped Elgin to a Class 4A state quarterfinals berth. The fourth-team all-stater brings athleticism as well as shooting that took him to the IHSA state level in the Three-Point Showdown.
For forwards, Eastern has signed 6-7 Edin Suljic from 20-11 Ellsworth Community College, where he averaged 15.1 points and 7.5 rebounds as a sophomore; Indianapolis North Central High School’s 6-6 James Hollowell, who was rated the No. 15 prep in Indiana; and Kokomo Northwestern High School’s 6-6 Zavier Sanders, a third-team Indiana all-stater who scored 29 points in Indiana Class 2A’s state championship game win his junior year.
They can provide help up front for 6-8 Ousmane Cisse, returning for his third season as the starting center; 6-11 sophomore Matt Dorlack, whose freshman year was slowed by an injury; and 6-4 Billy Parrish, who is this team’s only senior two years after Eastern had no seniors.
“You look at with what we have returning, we have quite a bit back,” Miller said.
That is pointing to quality, of course, rather than just the five returning players.
To build around them, Eastern has eight recruits. These eight landed Eastern a No. 2 OVC and No. 67 in the nation ranking for recruiting classes by HoopScoop a year after the same service ranked Miller’s 2006 class with a top 100 spot.
Miller points out his first EIU year he got a late start to recruit when hired during the spring.
“We feel like we have really addressed our needs coming in,” he said. “If you talk to any coach at this point you’d probably hear him say they have addressed their needs.
“We had the chance to sign some guys in the spring that we had the chance to evaluate and better yet had the chance to evaluate our needs. I feel we have addressed those. We needed to be more athletic. We need to take care of the basketball better. We have some guys who give us that.”
Brian Nielsen is sports editor of the Journal Gazette/Times-Courier. Contact him at bnielsen@jg-tc.com or 238-6856.
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oldeiu10 wrote on Aug 5, 2008 4:49 PM: