Editor's note: This story originally ran in our Summer 2024 magazine. We are re-publishing it given its relevance to the start of AAU season and the college recruiting cycle.
Alannah Morantus is on a stellar basketball trajectory.
Morantus, a rising sophomore guard from North Attleboro, Mass., is playing up on the Shooting Touch 17u travel [AAU] team. She won MVP of the She Got Game Classic in January 2024 as a Cushing Academy freshman, and before she even reached high school, Morantus had secured her first Division 1 verbal offer.
It came at a Boston College elite camp in summer 2023. Morantus had impressed competing against older players in five-on-five scrimmages. Her father, Rich, told her to go see head coach Joanna Bernabei-McNamee, who then asked Morantus to hang back after the camp ended to chat. She complimented Morantus for her play, remarked on her potential and said the Eagles would like to offer her a scholarship.
Morantus was ecstatic at the life-changing opportunity, but surprised at how it came — no big reveal or fancy papers to read.
“It was definitely a lot different than the perspective I had in my brain,” she said.
When they got in the car, Rich gave his daughter a well-intentioned reality check.
“That’s when I gave her the speech: ‘It doesn’t mean a whole lot,’” he said. “‘I know you’re excited. That’s awesome, be excited, but it’s based on how good you could potentially be.’”
The verbal offer is perhaps the most valuable commodity in amateur basketball. These tickets validate a child’s countless hours in the gym and help build the reputation of an AAU or high school program. Announcements of verbal offers spawn thousands of custom graphics that litter social media timelines. They are a pillar of the recruiting news cycle.
Yet there is nothing tangible about them.
A verbal offer occurs when a college coach tells a player that they’d like to give them a scholarship or roster spot on their team. Per NCAA rules, colleges can’t reach out to a player before June 1 of their sophomore year (June 15 for boys). But the player can initiate contact anytime. The guidelines are an attempt to give young athletes some control over when the recruiting whirlwind begins.
Typically, an interested college coach will tell a high school or AAU coach to have that player call them. Coaches can also talk with athletes while they’re on an unofficial visit to campus, or after a camp.
The actual conversation doesn’t come with fanfare, but the intent is clear.
“‘We want to offer you a spot.’ Those words, almost verbatim, is how it’s communicated,” said Vinh Bui, head coach of the Shooting Touch program.
Nothing about a verbal offer (or a verbal commitment from a player) is binding until a student-athlete and college sign the National Letter of Intent during senior year. Colleges can verbally offer to as many athletes as they want and pull an offer at any time. That’s where things can get wild.
“I’ve seen some very particular with their offers that they have go out, and I’ve seen some schools let them things fly,” Bui said. “Handing them out like cars on the ‘Oprah’ show.”
As players battle for scholarships, colleges are competing for talent. Erik Johnson, a Fairfield women’s assistant coach and former head coach at BC, believes the Stags are more purposeful and selective with their offers. But he knows schools with a reputation for shelling them out, and with good reason.
Student-athletes and their families have limited time and financial resources to spend traveling to colleges for unofficial visits. An offer can pique their interest enough to keep a school involved during recruiting.
“We often have to decide, well, if we’re gonna get this kid to visit campus, we have to be on the list of schools that have offered,” Johnson said. “There’s some pressure kind of in both directions.”
Charleston men’s assistant coach Matt McCall emphasized the importance of hearing an offer from a head coach as opposed to an assistant, who might be jumping the gun to carve their recruiting niche with a prospect early. McCall, previously a head coach at UMass and Chattanooga and an assistant under Billy Donovan at Florida, has been on both sides of the coaching staff dynamic. He noted that coaches need to be aligned in their recruiting strategy.
“It is the most important thing, because as a head coach, you don’t want to be caught off guard,” McCall said. “If you’re on the phone, or you run into an AAU coach, or you’re on the phone talking to a coach, and he says, ‘Hey, you guys offered my 2026 guard,’ and you go, ‘Who was that?’ The AAU coach is gonna get upset. So the line of communication between your staff and the head coach, in terms of who’s getting offered [and] where are these offers coming from? It’s vital.”
College coaches also monitor their rivals’ activity. Bui, Johnson, and McCall each know of coaches offering athletes simply because a conference foe or reputable school had already done so.
“Just offering a kid because you’re scared of another school in your league that has already offered them, and you don’t want to be late to the party — that’s a bad reason to offer somebody. It really is,” McCall said. “Because at the end of the day, what’s good for St. Joe’s may not be good for UMass. What’s good for Charleston may not be good for Hofstra, and basing an offer just strictly off of [knowing] the other school offered — that’s a recipe for something bad happening, and somebody’s going into the transfer portal.”
Then, as the recruitment process continues, verbal offers can evaporate. Perhaps a player doesn’t develop the way a coach expected, or they learn about an off-court concern. A coaching staff change could also reset verbal offers since the new head coach has a new vision for the program.
Or, as McCall and Johnson attested from their experience, the recent explosion of the transfer portal means coaches prioritize proven college players.
“If you’re not getting one, two, three, impact transfers, you’re behind each year,” Johnson said. “Now I think, across the board, coaches are saving scholarships to make sure that they have the ability to be a player in the portal… There’s gonna be fewer high school kids recruited earlier because schools are saving scholarships.”
One of an AAU program’s primary goals is to set its players up for college success. When the transfer portal takes priority, high schoolers and coaches have to wait out the frenzy.
“I love the transfer portal. It’s made basketball so fun to watch, to be honest. But yeah, it’s definitely affected how high school kids are getting recruited,” Bui said. “I’ve talked to several coaches that said [they’ve] had less than a 30-minute conversation — a week after the April live [recruiting] period — about high school kids, because they were still dealing with the portal.”
So what happens if a verbal offer gets pulled? The college coach lets the player and family know, which can sometimes make for a tough phone call.
“If you’ve recruited somebody for a week, those phone calls aren’t nearly as challenging. If you’ve recruited somebody for two years — yeah, man, it can be challenging,” McCall said. “It’s just essentially, ‘Hey, we got a guy at your position that says he wants to come, we’ve got to take his commitment, and unfortunately, we’re not recruiting you anymore.’”
McCall adds that keeping a connection with a program’s head coach helps a player stay in the recruiting conversation. In contrast, Johnson believes a deteriorating relationship between player and college coach is usually a bad omen.
“Either one way or another, the kid doesn’t know the school’s as interested, the school doesn’t know if the kid’s as interested, or whatever,” he said. “Just like in any business, honest, transparent communication can make all this stuff work, and without that, it can be pretty messy.”
Morantus, as of June, holds four verbal offers from BC, Fairfield, Providence and Dartmouth. She talks regularly with all four programs, and it’s not always about basketball. When Providence coach Erin Batth offered Morantus, they chatted about nails and lashes along with hoops.
“It doesn’t have to be as formal as it seems,” she said. “You could make it an informal conversation. It’s not this serious thing; they really want to get to know you as a person.”
Should Morantus commit quickly and solidify her future, or wait to accumulate more offers? Should she post them all online to build hype, or keep them private to avoid outside pressure? Rich, also the boys’ basketball coach at Buckingham Browne and Nichols, thinks these are personal choices.
“I don’t really think there’s a right or wrong way to do it,” he said. “It’s really what works for your family and your child, and I do think for the kids, it’s definitely a lot of pressure at times. I think we try to keep her grounded.”
Social media has made offers and commitments far more public. McCall remembers starting at Florida in 2002 and FedEx-ing handwritten letters to keep in touch with players. Now, it’s hard to escape the sense of competition that comes from being bombarded with online recruiting news.
The advice to families from McCall and Johnson: Take on the recruiting journey at your own pace, and don’t let external expectations dictate your final decision.
“The recruiting process is going to stop at some point in time,” McCall said. “It’s going to be over, and all the bells and whistles, and the nice things, and the official visits and things like that, it stops. Where are you going where you’re going to be the most happy? And in terms of being the most happy, it’s not [about] the facilities, it is not the bells and whistles of what the school has. It’s the people, it’s the coaching staff, it’s the style of play.
“When you can put those things together and you found a place [where] that’s how it feels for you? Shoot, man, and go ahead and pull the trigger and make your decision. But if you don’t, and you can’t foresee yourself coming to this school or this university, or you’re not going to be happy there, there’s no need to rush.”
