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•Northwestern is one of several schools recruiting Ryan Harp, a 6-4 junior shooting guard from Abilene, Texas. Last season Harp averaged 22.8 points and shot 42 percent from 3-point range. He also is an honors student ranked 12th in his class.http://www.dailyherald.com/sports/northwestern.asp
Northwestern assistant coach Mitch Henderson already has made two trips to Abilene to see Harp play. According to Marc Case, Harp’s coach at Cooper High School, Henderson indicated three weeks ago that Northwestern would offer Harp a scholarship.
Harp also is being recruited by Stanford, Arizona State, Texas Tech and TCU. He could get an early taste of the Princeton offense, which Case plans to use more in 2006-07.
“Northwestern is the kind of school that he’s looking for,” Case said. “I don’t think he’s the kind of kid who’s afraid to go away from home.
“One advantage they may have in recruiting him is he’s got grandparents and other family in the Midwest. His mom and dad are from Indiana.”
D-I schools size up Cooper's Harphttp://www.reporternews.com/abil/sp_lc_ ... 10,00.html
By Bill Hart
October 2, 2005
The who's who of NCAA Division I basketball coaches have been coming to town and more are on the way, making it like a three-ring circus at the Cooper High gymnasium.
The reason is 6-4 junior shooting guard Ryan Harp, who is rated as the 19th top junior basketball prospect in the state. One, however, has committed to play football at Oklahoma.
Cooper coach Marc Case says Texas A&M, Texas Tech, TCU, Baylor, Oklahoma, Northwestern North Carolina State, Valparaiso, William and Mary, Stanford (which was here Friday) and Rice have had representatives here and a Notre Dame coach is scheduled to come in Monday.
In addition, Harp has had letters from Arizona, Syracuse and Florida among others.
Two things have helped Harp gain respect nationwide. After his freshman year, the Cougar was among 126 high school basketball players invited to a Nike Hoop Jamboree camp in St. Louis. One of the players there was the son of Michael Jordan, who needs no introduction.
Then last summer, Harp played for the Texas Top Prospects, an AAU team from the Metroplex who played in several prestigious tournaments throughout the country. Taking in two of the games was Texas Tech coach Bobby Knight.
Ryan Harp's father, former Hardin-Simmons University basketball coach Dennis Harp, says Ryan probably will decide where he is going next November, taking the heat off recruiting during the Cougars' regular season.
The younger Harp ranks 10th in his class academically. That came from his mother.
Coogs' Harp voted player of the yearAnd over on the SMU board, they have posted a story from somebody who covers Stanford:
By Troy Shockley / shockleyt@reporternews.com
April 14, 2006
For Texas Tech coach Bobby Knight to travel three hours by car so he can watch a high school basketball game, someone on the floor must be fairly impressive.
Bringing The General to Cooper High School this past season was junior guard Ryan Harp who, despite not having a strong supporting cast, kept the Cougars in most every game until the end. Scouts from across the country have flown in to get a first-hand look at Harp, including those from UNLV, Northwestern, North Carolina State, Florida State, Notre Dame, William & Mary, Texas A&M and Wichita State.
That attention alone is more than enough to make the Division I prospect the 2005-06 Abilene Reporter-News Class 4A-5A Boys All-Big Country Player of the Year.
Meet Ryan Harphttp://www.glass4.com/phpbb2/viewtopic. ... f012ae7509
Mike Eubanks
TheBootleg.com
May 12, 2006
For the second straight year, the Cardinal find themselves intensely recruiting in the Lone Star State, albeit focused on a player not from the hoops hotbeds of Dallas or Houston. Last year Stanford mined Will Paul from Corpus Christi in south Texas. This year Trent Johnson is traveling to Abilene in west Texas, where we find 6'4" shooting guard Ryan Harp. Neither his town nor his high school scream high-major, but this kid can gun.
Losing is no fun. Being the recognized star (and sole) talent on your losing high school team is less fun. Being the only shooter on a team unable to find the basket - now Friday evenings start to feel like an audio tape tour led by Virgil through warm concentric circles. Such, unfortunately, was the 2005-06 basketball season for Ryan Harp at Abilene (Tex.) Cooper High School. The talented junior endured a downward spiral for the Cougars, surviving on an island.
"We started off really well before district started. We were 12-4," Harp begins. "We kind of went downhill from there. All of a sudden, we were 0-4 to start the district. After that, we couldn't get it together."
"We couldn't put the ball in the basket. Nobody could score. People didn't try to get to the basket any more, and they relied too much on jump shots," he analyzes. "I was able to score, but it was hard. I can't remember any games where I didn't see some kind of crazy defense. A 'box and one' or a 'triangle and two.' In a typical game, I would get five good looks and hit maybe four of them. I would get to the free throw line a lot and get out and run whenever I could."
The Cooper Cougars finished dead last in their district. Yet Harp incredibly was voted as the Offensive Most Valuable Player in the district. The 6'4" scorer averaged 22.5 points, nine rebounds, three assists and two steals per game. Harp shot 48% from the field, 74% from the free throw line, and a sizzling 43% from three-point range.
"It was really good for me because there wasn't one time where I didn't have to work for it," he says of his scoring.
Harp played predominately at the point for his high school team, though he would also move off the ball at times to play one of the two wing positions. Unless you are one of the college coaches who made the trek to Abilene this winter, you are more likely to see Harp with his AAU team, the Texas Top Prospects. There he plays at the shooting guard position where most believe he will play at the next level.
"We have a pretty good point guard. He sets people up," Harp says of AAU teammate Brent Stanton.
The Texas Top Prospects played three events in April during the evaluation period. One trip brought them to Georgetown (Tex.) for the Tops in Texas tournament, where Harp helped his team defeat the well-known Houston Swoosh squad before losing in the championship game. They also attended an event in Pearland. But the king of all spring events remains the Kingwood Classic, where Harp played before a national audience of college coaches and put on a show.
His team went 2-0 in their pool on Saturday and by a scheduling quirk had to play a third game that same day, which they lost to the hallowed Dallas Mustangs - down to the wire with a three-point loss. But the second game of that day for Harp saw his squad upend the Illinois Fire. The Prospects' point guard was out of commission, forcing Harp to take primary ballhandling responsibilities. While that arguably curtailed his opportunities to score, the Abilene man made the best of the situation.
He scored 18 points, grabbed eight rebounds and dished four assists in the upset win. The gym was buzzing. Coaches afterward laid a bevy of flattering comparisons upon Harp, ranging from "a better Matt Carroll" to "a carbon copy of Rex Walters" to "a poor man's Jason Kidd." Take your pick, but those are each ringing endorsements for the relative unknown from Abilene.
"Virginia - I had never gotten any mail from them before, and all of a sudden they started calling after Kingwood," the recruit relates.
"Kansas State, Iowa State, Wake Forest, SMU and Virginia all indicated after Kingwood that they 'loved his game' and wanted to know if it was too late to get involved," adds father and former Hardin-Simmons University men's basketball head coach Dennis Harp. "They seem to indicate they would all offer him a scholarship."
Harp's firm offers have come from TCU, Northwestern, Valparaiso and William & Mary. It is debatable, depending on how you follow semantics from the coaches, whether a number of Big XII schools like Texas Tech and Texas A&M have offered. At the very least, Bobby Knight has made three-hour drives from Lubbock to watch Harp's high school games in person.
In the ACC, Florida State and North Carolina State have both been involved with Harp, though the departure of Herb Sendek from Raleigh has carried those recruiting efforts now to Tempe, adding Arizona State to Stanford in the list of Pac-10 suitors.
"It's kind of hard to choose," says Harp of his favorites. "But one that kind of stands out is Stanford. They are an elite school, and the location is great. One of my AAU teammates, Chris McClain, his sister plays lacrosse at Stanford and says it's incredible."
The Cardinal have been recruiting Harp since before his junior season, and they have made a handful of trips to Abilene in the fall, winter and spring. With a GPA in the 3.6-3.7 range and a pair of AP classes on his junior transcript, Harp has promising academics to go with his shooting ability, court savvy and perimeter defense. Last weekend he took an important step for Stanford by sitting down for the SAT for the first time.
"It was real, real long," he exhales. "But it wasn't that bad. If I can get a 1200 on the old scale, that would be great. We'll have to see."
Harp has his eye on a college commitment by the end of the summer, which would mean a strict diet of unofficial visits now that the NCAA no longer allows official visits before a prospective student-athlete starts his senior year. No trip is yet on the books to take him to The Farm, but Harp says he plans on seeing Stanford "sometime this summer."
"By the middle or end of the summer, I will have a decision probably," he forecasts. "After I make some unofficial visits and talk to my parents, I should have a pretty good idea."
We have a pretty good idea that Ryan Harp is a recruit worth watching closely in the next few months. Stay tuned for his all the latest on his recruiting story as it develops.
).LUconn wrote:also I'd like for SJ to take the "we" out of his statement as he's professed his love for the chantiqueer bball team too many times last season.don't be too hard on the boy- using "we" is a big step here. Also, I think he's more of a beach-chicken FB fan than for hoops, but he can enlighten us when he gets up at around noon today.
JLFJR wrote:Thanks for your input, PA! Very helpful.
SCAR wrote:Schools at our level don't usually land big named recruits that sign early. It is the ones that wait for a long time and forge a great relationship with the coaching staff that end up being steals at this level. If they sign early, it is usually because the right Big school came after them and made them a priority.That seems to be the key...if you are the first school to show a kid some love, he'll likely remember that when it comes time to pick a school. Winthrop was after Torrell Martin early and they got him to sign in the early signing period. If they had waited, they wouldn't have gotten him. The same thing happened with a signee for this year, Byron Faison...WU was targeting him for a long time, and got him to sign in November before he had a huge senior season which may have led him to getting bigger looks elsewhere...I'm sure that's how a lot of other schools at this level are able to get some of the more talented players that could play at higher levels...
PAmedic wrote:Sorry, I slept in today, didn't wake up til one.LUconn wrote:also I'd like for SJ to take the "we" out of his statement as he's professed his love for the chantiqueer bball team too many times last season.don't be too hard on the boy- using "we" is a big step here. Also, I think he's more of a beach-chicken FB fan than for hoops, but he can enlighten us when he gets up at around noon today.
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