Basketball Recruiting & the Disintegration of Detroit
There is a sad article at Yahoo on the total breakdown of Detroit. It highlights Southwestern High School, slated for closure next year. The article caught my eye, mentioning Jalen Rose, Joubert, & Rockymore, all former UM basketball players. Perhaps most relevant and shocking is the total decimation of D-1 players coming from the city.
The city of Detroit hasn’t been considered wealthy in decades, yet it still had enough structure to have its high schools produce as many as 35 Division I players a year from the 1970s-90s, according to long-term observers. In 2009, the city’s once-potent public school league produced just two Division I recruits. There was just one from a city Catholic school. That’s three recruits; for all the high schools in the entire city of Detroit.A year or so ago, there was much discussion here on the number of bluechip recruits coming out of the city. This article provides the hard numbers to backup the negative change from even as recently as the Fab 5. It is sad, but it is the new reality, and underscores that Beilein has a harder job recruiting. Between competition from Izzo, and the smaller pool in this area of Michigan, it isn't like fishing from a trout pond.
March 23rd, 2010 at 12:10 PM ^
Correlation != Causation
March 23rd, 2010 at 12:45 PM ^
this gets into a lot of issues, one of which was discussed a while back about the long term viability of the city of Detroit and how it is thinking about pulling back. Detroit is closing lots of schools due to the fact that it has does not have enough money/population to support the current infrastructure. The state of Michigan as a whole has shrunk a bit in population so while states in the Southeast and west have inlarged Michigan is diminishing, making recruiting for all sports harder.
The state's population isn't actually dropping; it's just basically stagnant (it grew by 64,000 people from 2000-2008).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan#Demographics
March 23rd, 2010 at 12:50 PM ^
There's some interesting points but he doesn't have much of a grasp of what's going on in Detroit or the history of Southwest Detroit.
"Like much of Detroit, Southwest is a shell of itself. The factories on Fort Street are mostly shuttered, the street now lined by abandoned buildings and graffiti. When the jobs left, so did many of the families that could. In their place came poorer residents and renters. Some houses went into foreclosure and now stand empty, a haven for drug dealers."
This is a blanket statement that in relative terms is false, Southwest Detroit has seen the most growth of any region of the city including downtown. It's just Vernor is now the main concentration of population and business. Fort St. has mainly been abandoned, and the Polish neighborhoods south of Michigan Ave. are far from what they were 25 years ago. But Southwest Detroit as a whole is one of the few glimmers of hope in the city.
"The city itself has become a war zone, 362 killings in 2008"
Has become?? Those numbers represent a precipitous drop in murder the last 20,30 even 40 years. We all know Detroit is no picnic, but this is the wrong article.
PSL lack of success is from a huge drop in enrollment, from the school of choice initiatives, black flight and charter schools and as Dan points out suburban and private schools cherry picking guys like Webber. Proposal A in 1994 did much more to kill the PSL than anything Wetzel writes about.
... on murder, it would be interesting to look at the murder rate as a percentage of killing age population.
Seeing that most murders probably are committed by young to middle age men, it would be interesting to see if murders have dropped off in Detroit because this population group has dropped considerably or because there is actually a change in behavior of this group. Maybe it's a bit of both?
The total number of people killed in Detroit is indeed down from 20-40 years ago, but there also are a lot fewer city residents than there were then. Detroit has not only lost more than half its 1950 population, as is well-known, but it's also lost one-third of its 1980 population. Is the murder rate (the number of killings per 100,000 people) in the city down? I'm not sure.
Regarding Proposal A, didn't it increase per-pupil funding in poorer cities, like Detroit, by establishing the minimum spending threshold? At any rate, I don't remember the quality of education in the DPS being much to write home about before 1994.
1) the consolidation of the high schools in detroit might actually create better high school teams by forcing more good players onto smaller numbers of teams thereby creating better competition.
2) I think this long term trend has been one of the reasons our bball team has decreased in long term quality. Um historically did well recruiting detroit and the metro area all the way up to Flint. The confluence of Izzo establishing in-roads, UM emphasizing national recruiting post-89 natl championship, and the decline of detroit all contributed to the point where when we tried to go back to traditional recruiting areas, either Izzo had shut us out or the quality players simply weren't there. The long term decline in talent from the D is also reflected in the national AAU scene... D teams routinely don't do well (and some would argue that the big money laundry that used to fund Detroit AAU's teams got scared off by Ed Martin's troubles and the loss of auto jobs in the D proper).
3) The increased emphasis on recruiting at private schools like Country Day and school choice programs has allowed even certain public schools on the west side of the state to now field area all-star teams that can compete with the metro area teams and beat them on a regular basis.
All in all, it's a pretty bleak picture. I love Detroit, but it's going to have to undergo a self-imposed enema to get back to even a minimally functional state. Hopefully, Ford's resurgence along with Mayor Bing's plans take hold and provide a basis to rebuild...