When men’s basketball coach Bill Carmody left Princeton two years ago, he insisted that he’d be able to get high schoolers to choose Northwestern more often because of the availability of scholarships.
And if Vince Scott is any indication, he might be right.
Scott, a 6-foot-10 center from Phoenix, chose NU over Princeton last week, making a verbal commitment to the Wildcats. He will be eligible to make it official in November when the early signing period begins.
Scott is Carmody’s first verbal commitment for the 2003-04 freshman class.
“I just really liked the campus, the players — they had their own private beach,” Scott said from his home Wednesday night. “Obviously the coaches are great people. They had the confidence to recruit me as a Big Ten player.”
The Greenway High School center averaged 13 points and 10 rebounds a game as a junior. But as is the case with most of Carmody’s recruits, those points didn’t all come under the basket.
“He runs the floor well, has good soft hands, passes well and can shoot it,” said Howard Mueller, Scott’s high school coach. “He’s very smart on the floor. He realizes his limitations and plays accordingly.”
Scott is still a thin 220 pounds, but both Mueller and Scott agree that he should be able to get bigger by hitting the weight room, something Scott said he planned to do a lot of once he gets to college.
The 18-year-old, who has a 4.0 GPA and scored an 1180 on the SAT, visited NU last week for three days and canceled his visit to Princeton immediately thereafter.
While he ended up choosing between the two schools, Scott had about 20 offers. But none was from a major-conference school, with most coming from programs like Bowling Green, Drake, Northern Arizona, Buffalo and Texas-El Paso.
NU was an early favorite of Scott’s, but the whole coaching staff wasn’t sold. Scott said the assistants — especially Craig Robinson, who did most of the recruiting groundwork with him — were in his corner.
But Carmody wasn’t ready to offer a scholarship. Then, about a month ago, NU turned on the pressure.
“Northwestern kinda disappeared for a while and then they were after him real hot all of a sudden,” Mueller said.
Carmody and Robinson flew to Arizona about a month ago to watch Scott play in a workout. That trip apparently sold Carmody.
“I asked him if (Scott) could play in the Big Ten,” Mueller said, “and he had no doubt that Vince could play.”
Mueller said his high school team runs a motion offense with Scott as the focal point. Almost every time down the floor, Scott gets his hands on the ball, but his passing skills and constant double- and triple-teams mean that he doesn’t take shots as often as one might think.
Mueller was also the high school coach of Chad Prewitt, who scored 17 points a game and was All-Pac-10 for Arizona State last season. And Mueller said that Scott compares very favorably to Prewitt at this point in time.
“They liked the way I moved outside with the ball,” Scott said. “The Big Ten is the best there is out there.”
