INDIANAPOLIS -- When basketball scouts arrived at last summer's Nike All-America Camp, they gazed as intently at their cell phones as they did at the games. Then they started sending messages, one after another.
This is the new college recruiting world, where technology is essential.
Call a player on his home phone or send a postmarked letter, and today's teenagers might label the coach a dinosaur too unhip to consider. That's why today's recruiters increasingly rely on BlackBerrys, Sidekicks, e-mails, text messages, instant messages, even social websites to communicate.
Now the NCAA wants to keep pace.
"I don't know if we can ever get ahead of the technology, but as soon as it comes out, we can get involved," NCAA President Myles Brand told the Associated Press. "We're already struggling with social networks, and the technology changes very quickly. That makes it hard."
Especially hard because most NCAA regulations take at least one year to make it from proposal to rule, longer than some tech companies need to produce the next big gadget.
The 460-page Division I manual includes regulations about almost everything, from official statistics to major infractions. But today's primary recruiting tools are absent.
The NCAA management council plans to start tackling that Monday and Tuesday in Indianapolis when it debates an Ivy League proposal that would ban all text messages. Among major concerns cited by school officials and athletes are the cost, which recruits sometimes bear, and privacy.
Brand is not opposed to technological advances. In fact, he embraces them.
The NCAA, often criticized for being stodgy, now employs a blogger and Brand spends each Monday doing a short podcast.
"We'll still have a stuffy section," Brand joked. "But we want to have communication in a manner that's appropriate to our student-athletes. We're looking aggressively at new ways of getting our messages out."
Some athletes, however, worry instant access could spiral out of control.
Division I Student-Athletic Advisory Council chairwoman Anna Chappell acknowledges she never dealt with these issues because she didn't consider herself an elite recruit. She played basketball at Arizona and is now a grad student at Oregon.
