Valpo seems to really enjoy recruiting international players. Seems like we get plenty of solid athletes from overseas but rarely find that traditional post player to dominate in the paint. I wrote a short post about why that might be. Hope you enjoy it.
http://sectionee.blogspot.com/2011/05/international-trapezoid-recruiting-post.html (http://sectionee.blogspot.com/2011/05/international-trapezoid-recruiting-post.html)
Very interesting article. However, we used to get foreign big men. Raitis, Antii, Ivan, and Zoran come to mind...what has changed for us? I think it is kind of like Moneyball. The A's identified a trait that no one else was looking at---OBP. Now that everyone is on the OBP bandwagon, it is not an advantage to the A's anymore. Foreign recruiting is now huge on the national scene and Valpo doesn't get the great big men anymore. I think this plays as much of a role as the court---although I do think that was an interesting, valid point.
good point about more teams jumping on the international big man bandwagon. What I was going for more was that there aren't that many to go around to begin with. That combined with your thought has definitely hurt VU's recruiting of the international post player.
international recruiting has been a great tool for valpo during homer drew's era. but now with bigger schools coming in to that realm it will be more difficult to be successful at it. usually the US big men are taken up by the power six if they are really good.