How Grant McCasland handles recruiting for Texas Tech basketball in transfer portal era

Posted by Admin October 11, 2024 Basketball

National signing day is on the horizon and Texas Tech basketball coach Grant McCasland’s staff has its sights set on a few top-tier talents to add to its 2025 recruiting class.

Since his arrival in April 2023, Red Raider fans have wondered how McCasland would go about recruiting at a power-conference school. Last year’s signing period came and went without Texas Tech landing a single player, which wasn’t surprising. McCasland had to reprove Texas Tech as a contending program, and he was more than willing to wait until the end of his first season to reap those benefits. That paid off by signing a pair of recruits in four-star guard Christian Anderson and three-star guard Leon Horner this summer.

The strategy this time around is more or less the same. McCasland told the Avalanche-Journal that while the Red Raiders have their eyes on some big prizes, they’re looking for quality rather than quantity.

More: ‘No place I’d rather be’: Why Grant McCasland wasn’t going to leave Texas Tech basketball for Baylor

“This is all about getting the right one,” McCasland said. “We don’t have a number or target of like, ‘Hey, we want this many guys.’ This is about, ‘Hey, we want to go after these specific players.’ And if we get one of them, if we get four of them. … It’s more about those specific guys, not a number.”

McCasland himself can’t speak on specific players he hopes to sign. One of the team’s top targets, 6-foot-10 center Jaden Toombs out of Dynamic Prep in Dallas, committed to SMU over the Red Raiders last month. Recruiting services such as 247Sports don’t have Texas Tech atop many prospect boards except for one.

Kingston Flemings, a 6-3 point guard out of Brennan High School in San Antonio, has been a priority since the current staff took over. Ranked a four-star prospect by 247Sports, Flemings is also being targeted by heavy hitters such as Arkansas, Gonzaga, Houston and Texas.

To those on the outside, targeting one player rather than getting several signees in one class could be cause for concern. But McCasland said this approach is by design. With the transfer portal being more and more present in the college basketball landscape, less focus is being placed on kids coming out of high school.

More: Texas Tech basketball roster breakdown: Projected starters, top lineups for 2024-25 season

Instead, coaches such as McCasland use the high school signing periods as a starting point to see what they’ll need to get when the portal opens in March, then readjust when their own players inevitably depart as well.

“I think there’s definitely positives to having early signees to give you a jump start on how you can supplement what you need around that,” McCasland said. “But in the days of the transfer portal, I don’t think it’s necessarily as it used to be.

“If you knew guys couldn’t transfer, and you had six guys on your roster that were returning, then you could look at it and say we’re gonna have these six guys, but with the possibility that any guy could leave on your team at any time, really you’re just kind of trying to manage the season that you’re in and then find who you think would be a good fit, regardless of what your roster looks like moving forward. Honestly, that’s the approach we’ve taken.”