College Recruiting

Just like in real college basketball, recruiting is a very important element here at SSW. If you do not recruit, do not expect to get the roster you need to win many games. Recruiting is something that takes time and can be a major challenge. It can be very risky at times but also potentially extremely rewarding.

Recruiting Periods
There is one recruiting period during the season, at which point you can recruit both seniors in high school and players currently already at college age who have filed for a transfer or who were cut from a roster the previous season. The recruiting period begins each season after non-conference play has completed and lasts through the end of the season. There are multiple signing dates based on skill level. You can see a full schedule as well as the specific signing dates here: Generic Site Schedule

Watch List
The first thing you do as a coach is find players in which you potentially could be interested. When you find a recruit that you are interested in, you put him on a "Watch List." The only way you can recruit/scout/offer a scholarship to a player is by first putting him on the watch list. The watch list is an organized way to check out your target recruits. And manage the players that you have interest in. To add players to your watch list, simply click "add to watch list" after searching through recruits in the Find Recruits section.

==Scouting ==

One of the major things that is done in the recruiting in process is scouting the players. Scouting is an important tool to find players that fit your play style and work best for your team and is also probably one of the first things that you will do when checking out a new recruit. To really know what a recruit is worth, you will obviously need to scout the player to see if they are as good as their overall rating indicates.

When scouting, you take 10 players from your watch list and have them play a scouting game. For each time you scout, you find out one specific rating for each player who participated in the scout. You can also watch the scout games to get a better feel of how the players play in a game situation. Tier 1 teams receive 2 free scout games each day, Tier 2 teams receive 1 per day, and Tier 3 teams receive no free scouts. After free scouts are used, scouts can still be run by sacrificing recruiting time.

Another option for scouting is the use of scouting cards. These allow you to choose specific attributes you would like revealed rather than getting a random attribute from scouting games. These cards can be used from the scouting screen and consist of 4 different levels: For more info on cards and how to acquire them, check out Cards
 * Level 1 - 1 attribute revealed
 * Level 2 - 3 attributes revealed
 * Level 3 - 7 attributes revealed
 * Level 4 - All 14 attributes revealed

==Recruiting ==

With the recruiting time you have, you can try to sell a pitch to the recruits to try to convince them to come to your school. You can spend various amounts of time from 15-240 minutes each time you sell a pitch to a player. You can sell as many pitches to the recruits as you want with the recruiting time that you have available to you each day.

When selling a pitch, you have to find the right one for each player. Every player has one specific pitch that they are the most interested in, and the other pitches will have varying degrees of success. Pitches range from location to academics to star potential, along with many others. Pitches are completely random sa far as how effective they are for a given recruit. That means you can be a coach in a power conference recruiting the worst player in the recruiting pool and he could be completely sold on Star Potential, so testing different pitches to find the right one and keeping a record of the best pitch for each recruit is essential to recruiting success. The random pitches also mean that the best pitch for a given recruit will be different for each team, so sharing recruiting info with your buddies will not let anyone bypass the system.

When it comes to signing players, you must offer a scholarship or they won't be eligible to join your roster. On the appropriate signing day, a recruit will sign with the team who has the highest total of recruiting interest that has offered a scholarship. Scholarships can be offered at any given time to a player and you can take away the scholarship at any time as well. Scholarship offers are unlimited but you can sign a maximum of 10 players in a season. Signing 10 players would force you to cut your entire roster and replace them with your incoming class so always be careful when offering scholarships and make sure you have a plan for who you want that player to replace, whether it's a graduating senior or a sophomore who hasn't panned out.

==Paygrade ==

Each school in the CSBA gets what is called a paygrade. The paygrade is based intially on conference but can be upgraded by the team owner. The paygrades directly influence how much time a team gets to recruit each day, higher paygrades mean a more popular team that has more capability to recruit players.