Tom Kelsey is a familiar name to many Alabama basketball fans. He served as an assistant to former UA head coach Mark Gottfried for three years.
He went on to be an NAIA head coach at Belhaven and to serve as the director of basketball operations for Johnny Jones at LSU. He now works as a basketball ambassador for Coachtube, which makes specialized coaching videos for, among others, NBA China and NBA Asia. He was also an honest and friendly person away from the court.
Kelsey has no axes to grind, just a perspective to share that can help with understanding exactly how college basketball recruiting works. Big-name coaches — Rick Pitino, Sean Miller — are in screaming headlines.
This isn’t about a particular school. This is a national story, and this is a primer to help people understand how the process has evolved into one that seems to have trampled the old rules to extinction.
If you think all of college basketball is a cesspool, or you think it’s a good barrel with a few bad apples, or you think that your school, wherever it may be, has been sprinkled with magic fairy dust that allows it to hover above the muck, that’s fine. This isn’t about “who,” just “how,” from someone who has insight.