Two weeks ago, the unpredictable whims of a high school senior in New Jersey turned the veins of the Syracuse basketball program into silly string.

Head coach Jim Boeheim restlessly preoccupied himself with paperwork. Assistant Mike Hopkins anxiously kept tabs while accepting a truckload of incoming cell-phone calls.

And six hours south, Terrence Roberts, a highly regarded power forward from basketball powerhouse St. Anthony’s, held the recruiting hopes of the Orangemen in his oversized and much sought-after shooting hand.

“It’s like the stock market right now — you have a hot stock and it goes up and down every damn day,” Hopkins said of the recruiting process just before Roberts made his decision. “There’s always a turn, and you can never relax or get comfortable. You’re constantly on edge.

“I can’t eat. On a day like today, I haven’t eaten. When I go through something like this, I can never eat. I might go to a banquet, but I couldn’t even touch the food.”

By nightfall, Roberts made his decision. He would verbally commit to Syracuse, completing a talented three-man recruiting class of 2003 — one that will now follow a pair of equally impressive classes from the previous two years.

With Roberts’ decision, the veins of the basketball program pumped back to full strength, as Syracuse once again demonstrated the recruiting know-how that’s become the lifeblood of a successful program.

Of course, there’s a secret to keeping the program in full health: It’s a set of five, reliable recruiting guidelines that, best as possible, keeps a frigid school in Central New York competing with the nation’s elite.

Stay small

Before the commitment, before the official visits or the phone calls or the earliest stages of flirtation, Syracuse coaches must decide on a list of high school players to target. Most often, this list is unconventionally small.

By the time Hopkins and fellow assistant coach Troy Weaver divide up those whom they seriously wish to recruit, each coach is left with a manageable task.

“A lot of schools mass recruit,” Hopkins said. “They have 100 people on a list, and they send out 100 identical letters. But here, I might only recruit five or six guys, and Troy might only recruit five or six guys.”

Deciding on those guys comes from a process that weighs several factors: a prospect’s fit for the program’s style of play, his interest in the Orangemen and his proximity to SU. (On SU’s current roster, only three scholarship players — Kueth Duany, Josh Pace and Jeremy McNeil — live beyond a six-hour driving radius).

Generally, though, the product of those factors does not translate into a lengthy list of McDonald’s All-Americans or can’t-miss blue-chippers.

“Sometimes, we might not even go after any of the top 20 players (in the nation),” Boeheim said. “It all depends on what we need and what we see. Once in a while, we’ll target a top-20 player, but that’s not easy to do. I think we’ve only gotten about five top-20 players since I’ve been here.”

In the past, players like Etan Thomas and Derrick Coleman weren’t even rated among the top 50 prospects by most recruiting experts. And currently, Boeheim identifies springy sophomore forward Hakim Warrick as the one unheralded recruit on this year’s roster with a chance to follow in those steps.

“Coach Boeheim has a great eye for talent,” Hopkins said. “He’s always spotted guys.”

Said Villanova coach Jay Wright: “(Boeheim) plays his little low-key shtick — he’s full of it. He works as hard as any coach in the country at recruiting, seriously.”

Be positive

So why did Roberts commit to Syracuse? What attracted him to join a class that already included Demetris Nichols, a 6-foot-7 small forward from Barrington, R.I., and Louie McCroskey, a 6-foot-2 shooting guard from the Bronx? What tempted him to choose the Orangemen over defending national champion Maryland?

“When I visited Maryland,” Roberts said, “every other sentence they told me was bashing other schools. They were like, ‘Syracuse doesn’t have a gym like this,’ or ‘Syracuse didn’t win a national championship like we did.’ I just wanted to go to a place that was a little more positive.”

Roberts’ observation came by design. Syracuse coaches, and Boeheim in particular, maintain a strong disdain for so-called “negative recruiting” — when recruiters criticize another school rather than advertise their own.

“We tell (recruits) right from the beginning that we don’t do that — we don’t use negative recruiting,” Boeheim said. “Some schools might do that, but we say right away that we’re only going to talk about Syracuse. We’re not going to tell you why you shouldn’t go to another place. I think that if a kid hears enough negative stuff over the course of the recruiting process, he might want to go someplace where things are more positive.”

Most coaches dismiss negative recruiting as something that rarely happens, but players who’ve been through the recruiting process disagree. Syracuse small forward Carmelo Anthony, pegged by many experts as the No. 1 recruit in the country last year, recalls that both Virginia and Georgia injected a small dose of negativity into their pursuit.

The tactic is even more common, Big East coaches guess, among schools at the bottom of the conference — where teams, according to Connecticut assistant Tom Moore, might need to be “a bit more devious about what they say.”

“If you have to talk about someone else,” Weaver said, “you probably don’t have much good to say about yourself.”

Sell stability

Every school must decide on the unique points that it will promote to potential recruits. At Syracuse, the decision is easy.

Both Boeheim and longtime right-hand man Bernie Fine have occupied the same duties for the past 26 years, and neither figures to leave soon. Over that time, the tandem’s embellished the program with a measure of steadiness that precedes all other selling points.

“Basically,” Boeheim said, “we’ve had as stable a staff as anyone in the country.”

That contrasts sharply with several upstart programs around the country — often schools that gain exposure with an NCAA Tournament run and suddenly find their coach coveted by an upper-echelon school. At Kent State, for example, head coach Stan Heath (a replacement for Gary Waters, who departed for Rutgers) left for Arkansas this offseason after the Golden Flashes upset their way to the Elite Eight.

Even at elite basketball programs, coaches such as Rick Pitino and John Calipari occasionally bolt for the NBA.

“Stability was a huge factor,” said William Edelin, father of Syracuse freshman point guard Billy Edelin. “You have to look at the stability of the head coach. With Syracuse, this isn’t a guy who will get a better deal elsewhere and take off for greener pastures. You don’t want your son to be left standing alone and playing for a guy who didn’t necessarily want him in the first place.”

Generally, the assurance that a head coach will be in place throughout a player’s career appeals more to the parents of a player, Hopkins said. Players look more for television exposure and opportunity to play immediately.

“But they need to understand,” Weaver said, “that you make your own opportunity.”

Build relationships

When Weaver worked with the Washington, D.C.-area Boys and Girls Club in the early 1990s, he met a 9-year-old named Billy Edelin who, 10 years later, would become Weaver’s starting point guard at Syracuse.

Recruiters draw on every possible connection, and in Weaver’s case, there are many.

From the time the future-SU assistant first met Edelin, Weaver’s contacts in the nation’s capital would only grow, as he built relationships with AAU and high school coaches. Today, Weaver is SU’s primary recruiter in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, whereas Hopkins — a former SU player — recruits mostly in New York, New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania.

“I really do believe, like my dad used to tell me about business, it’s all about relationships,” said Hopkins, who like Weaver, spends roughly 100 days a year on the road recruiting. “The more a kid feels comfortable with you, the more a kid can trust you, and that’s the biggest thing.”

Weaver and Hopkins, already targeting high school sophomores, begin recruiting early. Carmelo Anthony knew Weaver two years before committing. Fellow freshman Matt Gorman said Hopkins was more active than any other coach in the process.

“I got to know him a lot better than I got to know (other coaches),” said Gorman, who completed the 2002 class with Anthony and guard Gerry McNamara. “And I think that’s just because he has such an ideal, outgoing personality.”

The trick of recruiting, however, also requires coaches to appeal to parents.

When guard Josh Pace committed during a home visit with Weaver and Boeheim two years ago, Pace’s mother, June, broke into tears because she dreaded having her oldest son move so far away from his home in Griffin, Ga.

“Coach Boeheim and I went outside,” June said, “and I told him, ‘I’ve gotten my boy this far, I want you to take care of him now.’ And he just looked me in the eye and said, ‘You have my word that we’ll take care of him.’

“For some reason, I trusted him.”

Seal the deal

Although most of SU’s recruiting legwork comes from long-distance runners Weaver and Hopkins, Boeheim always enters the process when a decision is near.

“We take the philosophy that (the assistants) should get as close as possible, and then the head coach should close the deal,” Hopkins said. “And (Boeheim) is great at it. There are no props. No videotapes. It’s just him.

“A lot of kids are in awe just to have coach Boeheim in their house. He really is great at dealing with people, as much as you might not think. He’s not going in there with slicked-back hair and a huge smile saying, ‘Come to Syracuse!’ like he’s Bill Fuccillo or something. What you see is what you get.”

Most of the time, Syracuse coaches get what they see, too.

Often, SU’s appeal comes from its ability to maintain patience when other schools might be overbearing. Anthony, during the peak of his recruiting process, got 38 letters in one day. Edelin’s father remembers receiving four or five phone calls during family dinners. And Roberts struggled to find peace from recruiters even during the earliest weekend hours.

“Syracuse was always pretty calm about things,” Roberts said. “But some schools that thought they might have been lower on my list couldn’t leave me alone — I’d come home, be all tired, but the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Schools would call at 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. Now who wants to get calls at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning?”

The question is fitting because recruiting in itself is rhetorical. Can a school recruit too much? Recruit too little? Start too soon? Start too late?

Syracuse hasn’t necessarily found the answer, but it has discovered a formula that’s working to keep the veins of a basketball program flowing with talent.

“You don’t want people here that don’t want to be here,” Hopkins said. “The worst thing that you can do is smoke-and-mirror a kid to come here, and then he finds out that this place is nothing like you told him. I don’t want to be a used-car salesman. I’m a basketball coach, and I’ll show you what’s here.”

Published on October 29, 2002 at 12:00 pm