Recruiting Blue Chip Prospects follows a high school African-American basketball player who is being recruited by colleges to play for their school. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

A confluence of experience, events, and life-lessons provided myriad inspirations to write Recruiting Blue Chip Prospects.

As a high school and college newspaper editor, I experienced an early newspaper job offering somewhat similar to my story’s high school journalist. A rising college junior, I was offered a summer job from the sports editor of an East Bay newspaper when he was going to cover the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Though recruited, I did not accept. Unregretfully, I wonder how life might have changed if I had.

I did serve as a newspaper moderator at my San Francisco high school (and published a teaching simulation with Interaction Publishers called Saturation contrasting traditional and new journalism). I also quickly became English Department Chair (and one of my department members in 1973-75 was Tobias “Toby” [he told us he was named after his father’s Toby mug] Wolff, then writing This Boy’s Life).

Our then all-male, middle-class Catholic school, more known for producing the city’s police and fire personnel than doctors and lawyers, was renowned for its athletic history. Uniquely then, it had produced two baseball Hall-of-Famers, Joe Cronin and Harry Heilmann.

Our baseball and basketball teams were excellent while I was a student and new teacher. Glimpses of our coach, Jerry Phillips, can be seen in the coach in my story.

I did enjoy talented newspaper staff members. Dennis Caulley, Sal DiGrande, Leo Pierini and Tom Longdon were exemplary. Gary Lucchesi (who would win an Academy Award for producing Million Dollar Baby) and Kilian Kerwin (who would win an Emmy for producing Delhi Crime, and may be a bit of a model for Kelly Kerwin in my story — though, at best, most characters, like the Coach Burke character too, are conflations of real people) were also notable staff members. Maybe I should pester Gary or Kilian to do the movie version of Recruiting.

Of course, it’s the recruiting machinations employed behind the scenes in 1991 to land Blue Chip Prospects, specifically T.R. Ward in my novel, that sets my Sacramento story (I needed a nearby river for my Huck Finn allusions and to drive the plot) in motion.

I started writing the story at about the same time Jason Kidd was being heavily recruited out of St. Joseph’s after pundits thought the Alameda school itself had recruited him as an eighth grader away from Bishop O’Dowd in Oakland, which my daughter attended.

I’ve always loved sports and have written a number of sports-related published memoirs since retiring. Doing so gave me the confidence and impetus to resurrect my novel, started thirty years ago. Being a high school principal and also teaching college classes didn’t allow enough time in the interim.

Today, with NIL, Prep Factories, television money, conference realignments that defy geography, numbers (Big 18?) and common sense, “follow the money” undeniably has replaced any ideal of student-athlete as dominating collegiate sports and recruiting.

In fact, today’s frontpage headline of a Connor Letourneau story in the San Francisco Chronicle (11/26/23) reads, “Big Money Upending Basketball Recruiting: Bay Area Colleges must ‘Adapt or Die’ as Athletes Seek Out NIL Deals.”

My timely story anticipates that world.

My interest in college sports recruiting might initially have been fueled by a specific undergrad hoop contest. In a game against Long Beach State, I, along with my fellow rowdy St. Mary’s yell leaders, led a call and response to taunt the opposing coach throughout about allegations and investigations about recruiting violations.

Jerry Tarkanian, who would later solidify his nickname of “Tark the Shark” when he recruited, many thought with illegal enticements, a team that would go undefeated and win a national championship at U.N.L.V., already was in the crosshairs by my senior season in college.

In the last few years while redoing, polishing, and finishing Recruiting Blue Chip Prospects, I could also call upon direct experience as a college counselor. For example, I counseled Shannon Rowbury, (a three-time Olympian track finalist in the 1500m, who held the American record in the event) after being successfully recruited by Duke where she became an All-American.

While principal of Sacred Heart Cathedral Prep in San Francisco, I participated, during a seven-year span, in trophy ceremonies for the Fighting Irish’s five Nor Cal championships and four California state championships won by boys’ and girls’ basketball teams. We also won Nor Cal volleyball championships three times during those years.

Students got recruited off that team and many others over the years.

I had always loved sports. Even today with the “follow the money” mentality having gained a complete stranglehold on this important segment of the American culture, I’m inspired by the fact that the sporting scene often provides a perfect lens for seeing the best and worst of moral and ethical decision-making, in the moment or the era.

In short, I’ve always been inspired by the fact that sports can teach lessons that don’t shy away from exposing the faulty versions of truth of others.

Was there anything from your own life that you put into the characters in your novel?

The novel’s main premise is that everybody, and especially young adults, sometimes unwittingly, get recruited, if nothing else for other versions of the truth.

Americans live that out daily in our social relations, culture, and politics.

That’s a main takeaway from my experience, my observations, and my reading and thinking during a 46-year educational career.

In the story, a big deal is aptly made of T.R. Ward’s recruitment to play collegiate basketball.

This novel emanates also from my desire to tell a story about other Blue Chip prospects beyond athletic recruits.

At the same time, I wanted to draw upon my experience to focus on a high school culture.

Much in the story — including characters, classroom situations, interactions, school extracurriculars, and challenges – comes from personal experience at my school and others. I have served on accreditation committees, observed and evaluated teachers, and mentored administrators at various high schools over the years.

I did think it important to have a genuine “teacherly” voice tell the story of a very positive, if not always harmonious, culture of one school so that readers can compare it to their own high school experience, the most common rite of passage today in the broader American culture.

I also conferenced with many other principals and Athletic Directors over the years, a number of times about sports related concerns. In fact, Ron Nocetti, the Executive Director of California’s CIF, which oversees all prep sports in the state, is a former student of mine who taught with me for a couple years before moving to Sacramento.

I also had heard the real voices of various students over the years since the school in which I spent my career and which served as something of a model for the novel’s school enjoyed a diverse student body in which students interacted well with one another. I wanted to echo those voices which have so enriched my own life.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

I spoke to the main theme in #2 above — that we are all constantly being recruited, especially during the coming-of age phase of our lives.

Since all literature is about moral revelation (shorter works) or evolution (longer works), and you can’t have a narrative without conflict, other themes in Recruiting emerge from the evolution of the characters and relationships in the story and the conflict at its heart.

Percy Forte, for example, seemingly a villain for his part orchestrating recruiting enticements for the underprivileged young man of color he represents, in actuality emerges fully fleshed out as much more than a stock character with an interesting backstory. While gaining things for himself in the process, he might be the only “player in the game” with unethical institutions and boosters who is genuinely trying to create better lives for his people.

In fact, another theme of the novel, seen in other characters too as revelations emerge, is that there’s a fine line between villains and heroes, and people often cross that line one way or another.

Melissa Suggitt, writing a critique of Recruiting Blue Chip Prospects for Independent Book Review (“Celebrating Small Press Books”) captures another important theme quite well:

“The tension between the couple [Patrick and his girlfriend Suzie] highlights the broader theme of personal growth and the challenges of maturing relationships in the face of evolving beliefs.”

And, she also clearly articulates a final historical theme:

“These lessons range from choosing the moral high ground to navigating changing and deepening male friendships at the precipice of adulthood to understanding the complexities of teenage hormones and first loves. The book does a fantastic job of encouraging open and healthy emotional expression, starkly contrasting the toxic masculinity often associated with the sports world, particularly [coming out of] the 1980s.”

The 1980s, a boom time in American business when regulation, moderation, and scruples seemed to go by the wayside, truly infected the world of sports and spread its values into high school environments. This historically set novel, though framed by chapters that connect us to the present day, seeks to bring to light that theme as it becomes more and more relevant when talk now suggests legal wagering might soon take hold even for prep sports.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?

I just finished a play that I think is pretty riveting. It’s set in a San Francisco school, again a number of years ago, but revolves around the reactions to the neighborhood’s homeless population. In the end, it brings the two cultures together during an event that changes lives and direction.

A key scene emerged from my wife’s personal experience (Sally served as the PR spokesperson for SF’s Catholic Charities) accompanying Mother Teresa as that icon for justice and compassion visited a crack house in the Bayview District and then toured a soon-to-close funeral home in the Outer Mission. The future named saint (my wife’s still waiting) emerged from the rattrap of a car she insisted be used to transport her to the site to see if it would make a good venue for the works of her Missionaries of Charity.

My play includes a scene in which a character tells a story that echoes Mother Teresa’s actual words as she fingered a casket’s mahogany and its inside pillow top and puffing, seemingly made of silk: “I guess the dead will be sleeping more comfortably than the homeless tonight.”

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I’ve also been working with the aforementioned Shannon Rowbury as she compiles a number of vignettes into her own memoirs. Fascinating stories tell of her upbringing as an Irish dancer turned off by the patriarchal underpinnings of sports, her experiences as a professional runner for Nike, her post-racing efforts to innovate a non-profit with her husband Pablo, and her successful battle with Nike to change policy to ensure pregnant runners could keep their insurance and health care.

The Olympic stories are the best. The Opening Ceremony in Beijing; the final in London which ESPN called “the dirtiest race in Olympic history” (Shannon was the first of only two finishers of the nine in the race never convicted of using illegal drugs or blood doping, but is still listed only as the official fourth-place finisher); and just missing a medal with another fourth-place finish in Rio.

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My daughter has suggested I write a full-length work, fiction or non-fiction, about the ‘50s and ‘60s and growing up in San Francisco. I have mined that time and place for many shorter memoirs.

Maybe I can combine two ideas and do a police procedural about that time and place. A number of classmates did go on to become police officers and, in my dotage, a guilty pleasure has become reading detective novels by the likes of James Patterson and Michael Connelly.

Like I say, when I grow up, I’ll decide what’s next …

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