The NCAA Bans Satellite Camps and How that Affects Texas Tech

The NCAA moved quickly, or at least it felt like it did, and banned satellite camps. Land Grant Gauntlet’s Chris Ross has some good detail on this move. Satellite camps were essentially camps that teams would hold at various places other than where the team’s home base was. For example, in recent years, Texas Tech would hold camps in Dallas, East Texas, Houston, Central Texas, etc. These camps provided opportunities for potential athletes to be seen by coaches that couldn’t travel to Lubbock or anywhere else.

The divisive part of this was that teams in the Big Ten were moving into places like Texas or the SEC and the SEC really wanted none of that, other teams moving into their “recruiting areas”. On the other side of the fence, there are folks bemoaning the idea that this provides even less opportunity for athletes to be seen by colleges across the country.

Programs are permitted to hold camps where the regular facilities are, which means that Texas Tech could continue to hold camps in Lubbock. This is an obvious advantage for teams like Baylor, Texas and TCU, who really don’t have the same travel issues that it does to get Lubbock, which is really a full weekend rather than a day-trip. I suppose that if you’re from the DFW area, you could say the same thing for Oklahoma and Oklahoma State, but Houston, Austin, and San Antonio are full day trips for those programs.

The one interesting thing that I had not considered that Chris Level brought up on Tech Talk was that this now provides an opportunity for high school coaches at big-time programs to essentially be “hired” to come to the local team camp and they’ll bring their players to be a part of that camp. I’m not sure why I put “hired” in quotations other than I’m not completely sure if the high school head coach is actually hired or just invited. The question is going to be whether or not that high school coach receives compensation for attending or if they just show up out of the goodness of their hearts.

One more thing, what would I be doing as a blogger if we didn’t do a little bit of Satellite!

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