I manage 2 d3 teams and have experienced limited success with both of them. I have had a LOT of trial and error, including screwing up by rescinding scholarships, as well as telling kids I was going to redshirt them and completely losing them as recruits. I have been able to develop what, for lack of a better word, I will call a program by recruiting for high athleticism and defense with potential. I don't use a lot of the auxiliary tools like scouting trips, etc., but I do use Future Stars Scouting to see their potential. I have noted with some regret how much work ethic plays into a players growth, as I have some players who had high potential in a lot of areas but have shown almost no growth in IQ or talent over 2-3-or-4 years. I have begun to utilize redshirts to get an extra year out of players and also have been trying to recruit well rounded players who will, at least, play good defense. I am, however, struggling to find a formula to consistently produce star-quality players or complete teams. 

I feel very much like I should be further along on this process and hope that it's just that I'm still learning, albeit after 20 or so seasons on HD. If possible, I'd like to start a discussion as to what the factors you go through in building success on your teams. 

What is your gameplan strategy? How do you prepare for when you are out-talented or have a deficiency against the other team?
What is your recruiting strategy? Do you go hard after 1 or 2 players, even if you have 3 or more open scholarships, and just leave the others unfilled? What do you look for most in your players?
How do you plan the practice time to optimize growth? Do you put extra time into IQ related practice?
When you see a talent level deficiency for your team based on scheduling, do you give time to younger players in preparation for next season?
Do you set your players for fatigue or minutes, or does it depend?


As you can tell, I have many many questions, and love to gather info. Please let me know if you have thoughts on any of these thoughts or other ones that come to your mind.

Thanks

http://www.whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?ForumID=30&TopicID=453763&page=-1#postBox

Is excellent information.

As well as:

http://www.whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?ForumID=30&TopicID=457031&page=-1#postBox

Might give some of my own thoughts when I am not about to leave for work.

Artie - site mail me and I would be happy to provide some detailed responses if you have specific questions on your team

One of the biggest things thats helped me is that I always start my recruiting search with ONLY players with 45+ work ethic (WE). Players with low WE will most likely never max out on their potential or it will take til his Sr season with a RS.

Posted by vegask on 9/22/2012 1:15:00 PM (view original):
One of the biggest things thats helped me is that I always start my recruiting search with ONLY players with 45+ work ethic (WE). Players with low WE will most likely never max out on their potential or it will take til his Sr season with a RS.

You can go lower than 45 and still have players reach their potential.  Honestly, if you're using 45 as a cutoff and are never looking below that, you're missing out on some really, really nice players.  But, to each their own, I guess.

Posted by emy1013 on 9/22/2012 1:59:00 PM (view original):

Posted by vegask on 9/22/2012 1:15:00 PM (view original):
One of the biggest things thats helped me is that I always start my recruiting search with ONLY players with 45+ work ethic (WE). Players with low WE will most likely never max out on their potential or it will take til his Sr season with a RS.

You can go lower than 45 and still have players reach their potential.  Honestly, if you're using 45 as a cutoff and are never looking below that, you're missing out on some really, really nice players.  But, to each their own, I guess.

It's been successful so far... I just followed AeJones guide when I first started

http://whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?TopicID=453763&TopicsTimeframe=30

I recruited a guy who had 37 WE "Accidently", he is a SR now and I have Sophomores better...

I always use WE as a tiebreaker myself. They just grow more thru their careers

work ethic is quite important in the current engine. however, i definitely wouldn't exclude players for just being under 45. less than 20? they have to be good as you ever want them to be. but at 30, 40, you can still get pretty much improvement. i recruited a d2 big not long ago, he had great starting ratings, but only like 33 work ethic or something. now he is pretty beastly. you just have to be careful. i would NOT have recruited the guy if his caps were the 75 ath, 99 reb, 90 def/sb type numbers he has now (hes not quite capped, but everything is low potential), if he had low 30s work ethic, and high-highs in all 4. as it was, i think he had 2-3 mediums and a low high or two in those key areas. so i knew hed grow enough to be good. helped he had like upper 50s ath and around 80 reb already, so he was basically playable when he showed up.

you just have to be smart about it. for a long time in potential, i told people to recruit off max ratings, not current ones. but seble upped WE value like two or three times since then (actually it probably was 1-2x with 1-2x of slowing down growth). so now its a combo. you need to be able to project where the guy will be when you expect to rely on him, and decide if thats enough. find a guy with great starting ratings, great max ratings, and 30 work ethic? i wouldnt turn him down over it. find a guy with mediocre starting ratings, huge potential, and 30 work ethic - who you need to start as a sophmore? probably better guys out there to choose from. so its all relative. if your 30 work ethic guy wont get much PT till junior year, that could slow his growth too much, so you need to think about that stuff. i think my big started since his soph year, so he was a perfect fit.

How do you find max ratings?

Posted by vegask on 9/22/2012 1:15:00 PM (view original):
One of the biggest things thats helped me is that I always start my recruiting search with ONLY players with 45+ work ethic (WE). Players with low WE will most likely never max out on their potential or it will take til his Sr season with a RS.

Not good advice (no offense).  Some of the best players I've ever had have lower than 25 WE.  I would set my search filter at 20 WE (but would only sign the guy if I can give him starts/PT in his first 2 years, preferably first year.)

Posted by artie40 on 9/22/2012 8:13:00 PM (view original):
How do you find max ratings?

well, you obviously cant know EXACTLY, but by using FSS, estimating potential growth factoring in work ethic and possibly starts/playing time, as well as identifying those high/high vs low/high cores when appropriate, you can get pretty close. i usually just use mean values to estimate out. so i might look at a player and go, well, based on his potentials, hes going to be a 70 ath, 90 reb, 85 def, 70 sb, 85 lp big man. now maybe that reb was a 66 low/high and im guessing thats a 24, but its a 21, and hes an 87. maybe that sb is a 57 med and im guessing its a median 13, but really, its a low 6, and hes a 63. those are worst case scenarios, but its pretty rare your estimates will be THAT far off. you might win a few points here, lose a few there, but in general, it mostly evens out.

really its the mediums and high/highs with significant deviation (could be off by a significant-but-not-huge 6 points, or more if you get REALLY lucky in a high/high, but i would just take that with a smile, not worry about it affecting my estimates). the low/highs and lows are pretty darn precise (within 3 pointsish). if you have an unknown high, id put it around a 26 or 27 so your max downside is 6 points. and then you have to figure, how close will he get to his caps? i basically recruit players for how i expect them to look at juniors and seniors. you cant get as pin point precise as you could before potential, but you can get pretty close, and i think its crazy to recruit without trying to predict out each player!

Sorry is this is a stupid question, but what do you mean when you say high/high and low/high? I look at the high potential in FSS and understand that doesnt always mean there will be x amount of growth. Are you combining information from scouting trips with fss?

Posted by artie40 on 9/23/2012 12:12:00 PM (view original):
Sorry is this is a stupid question, but what do you mean when you say high/high and low/high? I look at the high potential in FSS and understand that doesnt always mean there will be x amount of growth. Are you combining information from scouting trips with fss?

high potential when you use FSS means there are 21 or more points of improvement to be had. if you send scouting trips/evals to players, you can get 5 messages - these messages can be 2 forms of low, medium, or 2 forms of high. originally there were going to be 3 of each but i guess the wording was too confusing or something. anyway, the low low messages read like, no improvement, not seeing any improvement, and mean 0-1. the better low messages (high/low) imply 2-6 points, and will read like, im not seeing much improvement.

for the high category, there are low/high messages for every category except FT ratings, which inexplicable only has 1 message. anyway, low/high message read like, he has substantial improvement left, something like that, and imply 21-27 points of improvement. high/high messages imply 28+ points of improvement, and read like, player has *massive* improvement left, or there is no reason not to expect HUGE rebounding (look for things in ** or caps). there is like one tricky one, maybe two - i used to publish the complete list of high/high messages but i don't have it on hand. and anyway, i stopped posting it after dacj converted it into some convenient format. if you look for threads by him i think you can find it pretty easily/quickly.

Just to fully close out this point, gillispie, and thank you for answering all of my questions, but i have been spreading out the practice time on their high rating categories that are important to their position with an attempt to attain 15 minutes of practice time on those categories. Is that enough practice time to maximize their potential?

Posted by artie40 on 9/23/2012 3:05:00 PM (view original):
Just to fully close out this point, gillispie, and thank you for answering all of my questions, but i have been spreading out the practice time on their high rating categories that are important to their position with an attempt to attain 15 minutes of practice time on those categories. Is that enough practice time to maximize their potential?

it totally depends on work ethic, and playing time/starts. and high could be 20 points (well, 21) or 40, so there is a HUGE range in variation between that, work ethic, playing time, and starts. so, there isn't a simple answer. i try to put as much time as possible into high categories. sometimes thats only 15, others its 18, 20, 22 or even 24 (reb on bigs i often try for 20-24, depending on how much over 20 i need in conditioning for their stamina). one trick is, i almost always put 0 into EVERY low potential category of incoming freshman who have a lot of highs. if its a low end low, they will lose 0 or maybe 1 point. if its a high end low, they might lose 2, or who knows, even 3. if its a core core, like reb for a big, or passing for a pg, ill often check, and if it drops a 2nd point, ill put minutes in. but otherwise, those minutes can reap much higher dividends at other positions. a lot of coaches don't go this route, but i think its a mental block about losing points, not because its the right thing to do.