CHARLOTTE -- One hour until basketball practice. Clair Watkins, in a Butler High sweatshirt, walks quietly into her family's sunroom in Charlotte. She folds herself onto a seat, as small as her 6-foot-3 frame can get, and prepares to talk about what she doesn't want to talk about: Duke.
She is 17, a high school senior, among the better girls high school basketball players in the country. One year ago, her future - at least the next few years of it - seemed nicely paved. She had verbally committed to play basketball at Duke, an elite program, a fine school for a National Honor Society student.
It was, simply, a dream year. She got notes and calls from Duke coaches. They sent a team Christmas card, a Father's Day card. She felt she was part of the Duke family. But then, in October - just a month before high school players can sign a letter of intent that binds them to a school - those same coaches told her she wouldn't be happy at Duke. The team would honor the scholarship they had offered, but she likely wouldn't play.
"I've moved on," Clair said, but moving on is difficult when you're towing unanswered questions, such as why did coaches wait so long to tell her, leaving her a recruiting landscape in which many schools have filled their rosters? And should Duke have offered a scholarship so early if they weren't sure about her?
Duke associate athletic director Jon Jackson, after being told Watkins' version of the events, declined to comment on her recruitment but said: "While there is no formal written policy regarding verbal scholarship offers, it is Duke's practice to honor commitments made during the recruiting process."
It is not an uncommon story - a recruitment gone sour. Each year, thousands of collegiate coaches and thousands of high school freshmen, sophomores and juniors pledge their mutual desire to spend four years together - and none of it is binding until a letter of intent is signed during the athlete's senior year.
The recruiting relationship is well-chaperoned, governed by pages of NCAA rules on how often and when coaches can contact high schoolers. Those rules are designed to ensure no schools gain recruiting advantages, but also to protect 16- and 17-year-olds and give them time and space for reasoned choices.
Coaches and athletes can change their minds any time before the letter of intent is signed. Most often, it's the student, but occasionally a school will if the athlete has academic or discipline problems. But if the kid has none of those, like Watkins?
"It's rare," said Phil Kornblut, a South Carolina recruiting expert.
"Maybe 1 percent or 2 percent of the time, it's the team," said recruiting expert Bret McCormick.
So what happened? It's a product, experts and coaches say, of the women's game becoming more like men's sports, with coaches getting commitments from players early, players who are young, with promise yet fulfilled. It's a question the NCAA has about recruiting in general, enough so that this year, a key Division I committee is pursuing the issue of early scholarship offers.
For now, most schools give those players a chance to prove themselves on campus. Otherwise, said Kornblut: "It's a public relations nightmare," with angry parents and peeved high school coaches and hurt players, deflated in their parents' sunroom, wondering what changed.
A part of the family
It was over early, Clair Watkins said, with a hint of a smile. More than 90 schools, from every major conference in the country, had expressed some kind of interest in her basketball future, her parents said, but the day the Duke coaches walked into a pair of open scrimmages at Butler, her recruitment was pretty much done.
That was in October 2008, before the start of Watkins' junior season. By the end of the month, Watkins and her family took an unofficial visit to Duke. The school was beautiful, she thought. The academics were ... Duke academics.
"I just liked it so much," Clair said. "I didn't see the need to look for anything else."
Just to be sure, she visited again the next month with her mother, Nancy. They saw the dorms and the library and the cafeteria. Clair walked to practice with coach Joanne P. McCallie.
"I want to come," she said on that walk.
She remembers the coach and staff being overjoyed. Duke coaches and officials are not allowed to comment on specific recruits.
Clair was thrilled, too. At 16, she was part of an elite basketball program, with four Final Four appearances before McCallie took over in 2007. But Claire was also part of something more. That's the message the staff sent in weekly phone calls, in the cards with inspirational messages printed on them. Near Christmas, she got a "Season's Greeting" card, with a picture of the players and McCallie, surrounded by snowflakes. "The Duke Basketball Family," it said. Her family.
In another card, in February, assistant coach Samantha Williams wrote: "We are so excited to get you to Duke."
Another, from McCallie: "We are so proud of you, Clair!"
Another: "Know that you ARE one of our future leaders."
By the spring of 2009, Clair had completed her junior season. She was named to all-conference first team, the all-district second team.
"She's still very raw," says her coach, Stephanie Butler. "She has all the physical skills. But aggressiveness is something I've challenged her to take heed of consistently."
This is what she remembers the Duke coaches saying, too - work hard on your game, be aggressive. In June, Clair was named to the all-tournament team at an AAU event at Georgia State, but she says she was disappointed with her play later in the summer at an AAU tournament in New Orleans and Adidas tournament in South Carolina. At both, Duke coaches were in the stands, she said.
Still, before Clair left on an AAU trip to Los Angeles and Japan, Coach Williams was encouraging in a phone call, she remembers.
"She wanted to see me be more aggressive and play harder."
OK, Clair thought: That kind of stuff is easy to fix.
But when the trip was done and the school year began, the communication stopped. Outside of a brief conversation with McCallie on Oct. 1, Clair says her calls to the Duke coaches went unreturned. She didn't know why. Maybe, she thought, they had just run out of inspirational material to send.
On Oct. 10, a Saturday night, Clair was checking her e-mail when the phone rang. It was Coach Williams. Clair remembers the coach asking how she was doing. Then Clair remembers this: Williams said the staff had been "thinking." They didn't know if Duke would still be a good fit for Clair.
Clair didn't know what to say. She brought the phone to her mother.
Nancy Watkins remembers hearing the same, but also that Duke never said it was pulling the scholarship. But, Nancy remembers: "She said, 'If Clair comes to Duke, she will sit on the bench for three years, and she may never see the floor.' "
The next day, Williams told Clair to call McCallie. This time, Clair was ready with a list of things she wanted to say, things that would show the coach she was wrong.
"I'll fight for playing time," Clair said. She remembers the coach saying there was nothing to fight for. They didn't see her on the team.
Claire was devastated, embarrassed. She thought for a moment that she would go to Duke, anyway, and use the scholarship. But she wanted to play basketball somewhere. She ripped the Duke cards and photos from her wall. She cried. "Part of me couldn't believe it," she says. It was three weeks before signing day. "I thought it was too late," she says. "I thought no one was going to recruit me."
Her parents, angry and hurt for their daughter, called the Duke staff and athletic director. Mark Watkins, Clair's father, sent a harsh letter to McCallie, saying that if she were a man, he would ask her to step outside. Watkins regrets the note now. The coaching staff no longer will return the parents' calls.
About early decisions
Recruiting expert Bret McCormick was an assistant women's basketball coach for more than a decade, including stops at Division I Cincinnati and Marshall. He understands the conversation that Duke, which has verbal commitments from five players ranked higher than Claire, was trying to have with Watkins.
"I agree with them," says McCormick, who said he has spoken with a Duke coach in the past month about Watkins. "She wouldn't have played much."
But McCormick, along with other recruiting experts and coaches, said most schools avoid that conversation altogether.
"Usually the kid is at least given the chance to show what she can do," said Butler, Watkins' high school coach and a former Division II assistant.
If the athlete can't compete, NCAA guidelines give the school the option not to renew the scholarship each year. Duke, however, states in its student-athlete handbook that the school treats athletic scholarships as four-year grants unless an athlete becomes ineligible for academic reasons or violations of policy.
Was Duke, by making the call now, saving Watkins a hardship?
"I can't see how they did her a favor," said recruiting expert Kornblut. "By waiting this long, they certainly limited the landscape of scholarships available to her."
Another possible miscalculation came a year earlier, experts say, when the coaches offered Watkins a scholarship without even seeing a high school game her junior season.
"I think they offered too early," said McCormick, who says he sees such early verbals more often now.
NCAA rules consider athletes eligible for verbal commitments as early as the ninth grade, but the Division I Recruiting committee has made early scholarship offers one of its priorities, said NCAA spokesperson Cameron Schuh. One proposal, to be considered later this year, would prohibit colleges offering athletic scholarships until the summer after a student's junior year.
No longer just a game
Clair stands up. Time to leave for practice. Her coach said the senior has bounced back in the last couple of weeks. Clair is glad to be playing, but even basketball is different now. It's not just about running and shooting and working hard on your game. Now it's also about proving somebody wrong.
"It's a fueling thing," she said.
She's restarted the recruiting process she thought she had avoided. She likes Georgia, Indiana and others.
Her parents say that Clair likely will not make a decision until the spring. Perhaps Duke can be a learning experience for her, they think. But they're not sure they like what she's learned.
A few days ago, her mother said, another coach called, telling Claire she would be a great addition to the basketball program.
At the end of the call, Clair hung up and turned to her mother.
"Do you think she's telling me the truth?" she asked.
