DriveTheLane.com Manual

Recruiting is one of the cornerstones of college basketball. This game attempts to capture that fact. To succeed on a regular basis, you will need to be a good recruiter. Only high school seniors are available for recruiting, and they may be viewed at any time. All recruit signings take place at the end of week 9 (i.e., the Saturday after regular season game #24).

Recruiting centers around "Recruiting Points," or RPs. Your team is allotted a weekly allowance of recruiting points to spend as you choose. These RPs represent the way you give a recruit your attention. You may spend between 1-17 RPs per recruit per week. If you spend less than 17 at one time on a recruit, you may spend the remainder (up to 17 total) at any later time that week, assuming that you have unspent RPs to do so.

You will also have a limited number of scholarships available to offer. You must offer a scholarship to a player for them to seriously consider signing with your school. It does not matter when in the season you offer.

You must also have offered a recruit a total of at least 28 RPs by the end of the season for them to consider your school. In other words, any RP amount from 0 to 27 is functionally equivalent to 0 with regards to a recruit deciding what college to sign with.

The number of RPs and scholarships you have are determined by your program size. Please see the account section for more on program sizes.

There is a "Delete Actions" option that allows you to clear any unprocessed actions for a recruit. Once processed, an action cannot be undone.

You can "flag" a recruit for inclusion on your "Top Recruits" page with the "Flag Recruit" button. This option neither costs nor credits RPs. It is simply a way to make a "short list" of potential recruits. This is most useful for getting players to appear on the list for future reference without spending points on them.

Recruiting actions are processed when games are played, but the allocation of another week's worth of RPs only occurs weekly. Note the first two weeks of the season (3 exhibition games and 3 out of conferences games) represent a single recruiting week. This means you can wait for 5 games to be played (3 exhibition and 2 regular season) before offering any RPs/scholarships. You just have to submit them some time before game 6 is processed. The 2-week window allows high school players to play a few more games than a single week would, giving college coaches more informtation before having to decide who to pursue in recruiting. RPs can be carried over from week to week (but not season to season) if not spent, but this may not represent a desirable strategy since you will face the 17-point limit in future weeks.

The earlier a school starts recruiting a player the better. In the game this is reflected in a one time RP bonus the first week either RPs are spent or a scholarship is offered. The bonus is 15 RPs in the first recruiting week, 13 the next, 11 the next and on down. So if you spend 17 points on a recruit in week 1, they will have 32 (17 + 15) RPs on them. If you offer a scholarship to a recruit in the second recruiting week, they will have 13 (0 + 13) RPs.

Every high school senior has a scouting report. The accuracy of the scouting report is indicated by a Poor/Fair/Good/Exc rating. A poor scout will not do a great job of revealing the actual attributes of a player, while an excellent scout will come pretty close. A high school players basketball intelligence is estimated by an exam (ranging rougly from 20 to 75) and GPA (about 1.50 to 4.00). The scout does *not* affect these numbers.

Recruit Preferences

Every recruit has 3 public preferences for the type of school they would like to play for: Win, Impact, Local. Just as with player attributes, they are on the None/Poor/Fair/Good/Exc scale. It is important to remember that these are just preferences: if you follow the preferences it will tip the balance in your favor versus teams which do not match a recruit's preferences as well (and vice versa if you do not match preferences well)... *but*, RPs are still the most important factor. A breakdown of each of the preferences:

Local Preference

An "Exc" rating here indicates a strong desire to stay close to home. A "Fair" means "neutral" and a "None" actually represents a strong desire to move away from home. In addition to a home conference, there is also a concept of a home region. The regions are simply defined as groups of 4 conferences, starting with conferences 1-4, on to 5-8.. etc to conferences 29-32. The regions are clearly grouped on the recruiting index page. "Close to Home" is measured as follows:

• All teams in the same number conference as the recruit's are considered equally close (even compared to the hometown city).
• All teams in the same 4-conference region as the recruit's are considered equally close, but are not as close as the same conference.
• All teams outside of the recruit's region are considered equally far away
• An example: If you are a conference 2 team, your best "close to home" advantage is with Conference 2 recruits. For recruits who want to stay close to home from conferences 1, 3 and 4, you have an advantage over out of region schools, but a disadvantage to schools from a recruit's conference. For recruits out of region, you have a disadvantage.

Win Preference

Here, an "Exc" means "really want to play for a winner". "Fair" means "gives moderate consideration to playing for a winner". "None" means "this doesn't factor into my decision" (it does NOT mean "want to play for a loser").

A winning program is determined by, in order of importance:

• National tournament and national tournament finish. Losing every game in a more prestigious tournament is roughly as valued as winning the next most prestidious tournament (eg, losing every game in the NTT is about the same as winning every game in the PTT)
• End of season power ranking.
• Conference tournament and conference regular season.

These factors give us a score for any given season. The previous 3 seasons are taken into account for recruit preferences. This includes the current season. So, for example, if league X is in season 15, when the season ends, recruits will look at seasons 15, 14 and 13. They are weighted 55% for the most recent season, 35% for the year before that, and 10% before that (note that when a league first starts, there will not be 3 years of history to look at. After the 1st season, season 1 is simply weighed 100%. After the 2nd season, season 1 is weighed 39% and season 2 is weighed 61%).

Impact Preference

Here, an "Exc" means "really want to be able to make an impact". "Fair" means "gives moderate consideration to making an impact". "None" means "this doesn't factor into my decision".

A recruit's ability to have an "Impact" for recruting will be based on:

• Returning talent (NOT position-specific)
• Returning height (NOT position-specific)

So each recruit is compared to every returning player on a team. The greater the difference in height (in both directions, shorter or taller), the greater impact the recruit can have. The greater the talent level of the high school player vs the college player, the greater the impact.

Note that game results and college player positions do not factor in at all. This preference was designed with helping out struggling college teams in mind. To that end, the talent part of the impact equation is weighed more heavily than height.

Priority Points

You have the opportunity to rank your recruits by allocating "priority" points to them. The recruits you assign the most priority points to should be those that you want the most. Priority points are entirely relative within your own team. For example, if you allocate 1 PP to player A and 35 to player B, or if you allocate 1 PP to A and 2 to player B, the result is exactly the same: you have ranked player B ahead of player A. There is no "cost" to allocating PPs, you can change their allocation as often as you would like througought the season. You will sign the 3 highest-ranked recruits that are willing to sign with you. If you do not submit points, or if you have ties in your rankings, the computer's rankings (unpublished) will be used to select your preferences.

Tracking Your Recruits

Once any action you take on a recruit is processed, they will show up on your my-recruits page. This page shows your top 35 recruiting targets (it is very common to recruit less than 35 players. You may never actually need this many). If during the course of the season you decide you are not interested in a recruit, you can "ignore" them to push them to the bottom of your top 35. This is solely a UI feature, it has no impact on signing/not signing a recruit, and can be easily undone if you change your mind. Note ignoring does not remove a recruit. There is some strategy to the maximum of 35 recruits, the inability to remove recruits is intentional.

You can see the status of all of your recruits broken down by "Through Current Week" and "At End Of Last Week". There is also a link to toggle between "Through Current Week" and "Stats". The stats columns are self explanatory, the rest are broken down below:

Name

Recruit's name. The recruit's rank on the top 75 most recruited list will be in parenthises here if applicable.

Conf

Recruit's conference.

Through Current Week

RPs

Number of RPs you have spent on recruit

Top

Number of RPs the leader has spent on the recruit

Sch

Have you offered the recruit a scholarship

CurWk

Number of RPs spnt in current week

PPs

Priority Points

At End Of Last Week

RPs

Number of RPs you have spent

Top

Number of RPs the leader had

W-3

The number of teams, excluding yourself, who are within 3 RPs behind you, or have equal or more RPs. For example, if you have 50 RPs, the number of teams with 47 or more RPs (excepting you). See more examples below.

W-12

Same as W-3, except 12.

Teams

The teams within 3 of the RP leader, including yourself (teams within 12 in parentheses) ((teams in double parentheses trail by more than 12 and will be shown after the season is over)), asterisk (*) denotes computer team

W-3/W-12 Examples

• Recruit A

  1. Your Team, 100 RPs
  2. Team 2, 100 RPs
  3. Team 3, 100 RPs
  4. Team 4, 15 RPs

  You would see 2/2 in the w3/w12 column and the team IDs of your team, team 2 and team 3 in the Teams column.

• Recruit B

  1. Your Team, 50 RPs
  2. Team 2, 100 RPs
  3. Team 3, 47 RPs
  4. Team 4, 40 RPs

  You would see 2/3 in the w3/w12 column and the team ID of team 2 in the Teams column

• Recruit C

  1. Your Team, 100 RPs
  2. Team 2, 15 RPs

  You would see 0/0 in the w3/w12 column (a "clear lead") and the team ID of your team in the Teams column

Recruiting Point Cutoffs

There are two important recruiting point cuttofs.

First is one we have already mentioned, the minimum interest requirement of 28 RPs.

Second, there is a cutoff at 83 RPs. In the table above, we can see the W-3 and W-12 columns for tracking your recruits. If you see a 0 (zero) for both, we call this a "clear lead". Any other team on the recruit is more than 12 points behind. If you reach 83 RPs, and: you have a "clear lead", offer a scholarship, and have at least 83 RPs, you will win the recruit 100% of the time (due to priority points, you don't have to sign the recruit if you don't want to). This cutoff is not actually hugely important, as if you have a clear lead, you will be a big favorite to sign the recruit (as long as you have at least 28 RPs!) even if you are under 83 RPs. You should not see any teams in double parentheses after the season is over if you have a clear lead at 83+ RPs.

The Auto-Recruiter

You will see an option to turn on the "Auto-Recruiter" on your recruiting home page. The auto recruiter is meant to help out in case you forget to recruit for a week. It follows these rules:

1. Will check if it should take any actions just once a week, on Friday when instructions are processed
2. The only action it will take is spending RPs
3. Will only spend RPs if 0 RPs have been spent in a given week
4. Will spend the same RPs on the same players as the previous week, starting with most RPs spent, on down to least RPs spent, until either all the same actions have been performed again or the team runs out of RPs

Note that this means the auto-recruiter will not submit initial recruiting actions for you.

Miscellaneous

You can expect many of the top recruits to receive 17 RPS each and every week from someone, and you will probably have to keep pace to go after the top-notch recruits. On the other hand, since competition is so fierce at the top, you may choose to cast your fate with the 2nd tier recruits where you have a much better chance of earning a commitment.

There is a "High School Team Info" page which shows some summary imformation of high school programs: current and previous season team record, average height, and average rating for each attribute. The height and attribute averages are for the entire team, not just seniors. The attributes are based on the players' actual attributes rather than the scouts.

Sometimes a recruit may be unrecruited (or available because the team(s) that recruited him signed 3 other players) that is better than one of the recruits you would otherwise sign. If you do not want to accept these more highly-ranked "walkons" over your other recruits, then you need to allocate at least 1 PP to anyone that you want to have preference over any walkon. If a higher-ranked "walkon" wants to sign with you, he will supercede any of your recruits that have zero PPs.

There will always be a delicate balancing situation between trying to get star recruits and trying to get "solid" recruits, since you will lose control of who signs if you do not fill your roster from your scholarship offers. My advice is this: in true life, a coach can never know a recruit's thoughts, intentions, or future actions. This is true in this game. Follow your gut feelings and hope to land the big one. If not, make adjustments the following year.

You will finish the season with a 3-person recruiting class (no carryover scholarships). If you do not sign 3 players, you will accept onto the team randomly assigned players to bring your total recruit count to 3. This is equivalent to accepting unsigned players already enrolled in school to fill open spots. The risk of having recruits randomly assigned is an additional risk of holding out for only top-notch recruits. If you come up empty, you lose control of who you sign.

There are two national organizations that provide recruit rankings, SimHoops (SH) and HardWood (HW). Each independently ranks all college incoming classes from #1 to #256, with #1 being the best.