Recruiting vs. Developing

The portal has made acquiring easier than developing.

The player you could spend three years building from a high school recruit can now be replaced in a portal cycle with a player who is already three years along. The economics of that calculation, under competitive pressure, are hard to argue with in the short term. And in the long term they have the potential to hollow out the thing that makes coaching meaningful.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. Paul is describing a process that is distributed across time, people, and stages. The planting and the watering are distinct acts of faithfulness. Neither is the growing. The growth is not within the control of the one who planted or the one who watered — it belongs to something larger.

The coach who develops a player from raw talent to full expression is doing something that the portal acquisition cannot replicate. The three years of relationship, the specific formation that happens in the context of sustained trust and repeated challenge, the player who becomes a leader because the development environment shaped them into one — that is the work that has a formative impact extending beyond the player’s career in your program.

None of that means portal acquisition is wrong. A program that refuses to use the portal in a portal era is making a unilateral disarmament decision in a competitive landscape that will punish it. The question is not whether to recruit through the portal. The question is whether the development calling — the core reason most coaches entered the profession — is being preserved alongside the acquisition strategy, or whether it is being crowded out by it.

Plant seeds. Water what others planted. Trust the growing to what it belongs to. The development work is the work that lasts.

The ratio question is a diagnostic that produces honest self-assessment. Let it sit.