Especially in this day and age of intense recruiting wars and technology making communication and data more accessible, it still amazes me how some college prospect gems almost fall through the cracks.

Kama Bailey hardly got any Division I offers for most of the football season, which might have been understandable given Damien’s DII status, but I thought for sure the floodgates would open after he racked up 317 yards and five touchdowns against Punahou. Then he had another spectacular performance against mostly DI competition in the HUB All-Star game.

But his best offer turned out to be Idaho. Nothing against the Vandals or the town of Moscow, and a free education is a free education. But I think they got a steal and other schools might end up wishing they offered Kama. And even if he doesn’t end up starting or making All-WAC, he’s a great student and humble kid whom any program should want to have.

And now there is Jamie Smith.

UH offered her early, so props to Jim Bolla for realizing she was the real deal. But Smith understandably wanted to take at least one Mainland recruiting trip to see if she wouldn’t rather go away.

The problem was, the offers amazingly were not pouring in. This despite her proving she could compete against top competition, both with Team Aloha during their championship run at Santa Barbara in Fall 2006 and also against top California opponents in the ‘Iolani Classic last December.

She went on to have a fantastic regular season, then showed her toughness by scoring 17 and 20 points against Sacred Hearts and Kamehameha, respectively, in the ILH tournament despite a broken nose. She also had a great state tournament.

Still, the offers were slow to come, and I don’t get why. Like Bailey, Smith is great student and humble person, the type any program would be proud to have. She showed an ability to adapt and improve her game in the offseason, working hard to develop her ball-handling and 3-point shooting.

Finally, in the last couple months, the visits and offers materialized. One of the last turned out to be the best, soon after Kathy Olivieri took over at UNLV.

Some might think Smith should have taken the bird in hand with UH’s offer, and like I mentioned earlier a free education is a free education. I give Bolla credit again for being patient during the early signing period, but I don’t know how strong the push was after that to keep her home.

But obviously, Smith was curious about the Mainland and there can be a lot of peer pressure to go away when you know over 80 percent of your classmates are headed for the continent. She admitted that she “wasn’t super excited” about the other schools she visited, which I guess includes UH.

Being partial to UH myself, I selfishly wish she could have stayed home to help build the Rainbows program and I see lot of reasons why that could have been a good decision. But the bottom line is what will make her happy, and UNLV is where she wants to be, so I’m happy that she found a place she can be excited about.

I think UNLV, like Idaho, got themselves a steal and other schools will end up wishing they had Smith.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 5:28 am and is filed under Prep Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.