High school basketball in the Mahoning Valley is a wasteland. Can't get any help here. Players in other parts of the country want to come to a basketball school where fans are excited about their game. Hey, thirty years ago, but not now. But there is a potential source of talent that we have largely ignored. Basketball in Europe is vastly superior to what it was thirty years ago. For our community, with over half the population tracing their roots to southern or eastern Europe, this source should have been tapped long ago. And eastern Europeans tend to be taller than say, French or Spaniards. And those players would leap at the chance for an American college education (paid for with their basketball skills.) And there are ethnic organizations in the Mahoning Valley with cultural ties to those ancestral homelands. We should be networking with those folks and seeking info about potential talented teenager players in Lithuania (remember Vytas) Greece, and the remnants of Yugoslavia. And Slocum (or at least one assistant) should fly out there once a year. But that takes money, and we all know that administrative staffing takes priority over recruiting in all sports except football.
