FSU coach Leonard Hamilton is known for 'building relationships with the kids.' (Getty)

Tennessee was coming off of a trip to the Sweet 16 in the summer of 2007 and just a few months away from signing what would eventually become Bruce Pearl's first top-five recruiting class. So things were going well. And the Vols were considered by some recruiting analysts to be leading in the pursuit of five-star prospect Chris Singleton.

Singleton played for the Atlanta Celtics in the summer.

Adidas funds the Atlanta Celtics.

Tennessee has an endorsement deal with Adidas.

Everything was lining up perfectly.

"I thought we had him," said Steve Forbes, who is now an assistant at Wichita State but was, back then, recruiting for Pearl at Tennessee. "But then Leonard came in and got it done."

Leonard, of course, is Leonard Hamilton.

And have you noticed he's getting it done again now?

Go take a look at the team recruiting rankings at 247 Sports.

What you'll find is a top five in the Class of 2015 that currently looks like this:

  1. Arizona
  2. Louisville
  3. Florida State
  4. Syracuse
  5. Ohio State

That's the result of four verbal commitments over the past five weeks -- highlighted by three athletic guards/wings named Dwayne Bacon, Malik Beasley and Terance Mann, all of whom are consensus top-85 national prospects. (Bacon and Beasley are consensus top-40 national prospects.) Collectively, it's the latest bit of evidence that Hamilton -- aided by his capable staff, most notably associate head coach Stan Jones -- remains a recruiting force even at the age of 66 and despite the fact that he doesn't work at a place anybody would describe as a national basketball brand with inherent advantages.

I asked two recruiting analysts for their thoughts on Hamilton as a recruiter.

Here's what they said:

"He's an established coach who is connected with basketball regalia such as Michael Jordan. He's viewed as a players' coach." -- 247 Sports' Jerry Meyer

"He does a great job of working behind the scenes and building relationships with the kids and the people surrounding the kids." -- Scout.com's Evan Daniels

That second quote is interesting because it reflects what I've heard from countless coaches over the years, that Hamilton is among the best at quickly identifying the decision-makers in the recruiting process and developing strong relationships with them. And Hamilton has apparently been among the best at that forever, or at least the past four decades, considering he first started recruiting six months after he graduated college.

Hamilton was a graduate assistant at Austin Peay who was promoted when a full-time assistant took a medical leave of absence, at which point Hamilton became a recruiter for a team with a roster featuring players who were older than him. Filled with naivete, Hamilton flew to New York on what would be his first recruiting trip. This was the early 1970s.

"I didn't even know that you had to have a credit card to rent a car," Hamilton told me by phone this week from his office on the FSU campus. "I was that green."

Still, he ended up in the home of Fly Williams, a streetball legend.

As the story goes, Hamilton arrived in the evening, but Williams wasn't there. So he waited. And waited. And waited. But there was still no sign of Williams. And, remember, this was the early 1970s; so it's not like you could send a text to see what's up. If somebody wasn't home, you were reduced to waiting for them to get home. And so that's what Hamilton was doing, just sitting with Williams' mother and waiting for the prospect to arrive.

Every once in a while, Williams' mother would walk to the kitchen.

Each time, Hamilton set the clock back to make her think it wasn't as late as it was.

"I was afraid to leave the house, and I didn't want her to make me leave because it was getting too late," Hamilton said with a big laugh. "So I just kept setting the clock back so that she wouldn't really know what time it was."

Williams finally got home around 7 a.m.

He eventually enrolled at Austin Peay and became a first-round pick in the ABA Draft.

"And his home is the first home I was ever in," Hamilton said. "I just sat up all night long talking to his mother until he finally got home. That's a true story."

Hamilton has been recruiting similarly well ever since.

No, there are no Final Fours on his resume, which is why he never gets mentioned in discussions about college basketball's most accomplished coaches. But Hamilton has spent 26 years as a Division I head coach, never been on anybody's hot seat, never had any NCAA issues, and he's led Florida State to more ACC wins over the past nine seasons than everybody else in the ACC except for Duke and North Carolina.

Did you realize that?

FSU has won more ACC games the past nine years than all but Duke and UNC.

That, more than anything else, is the byproduct of Hamilton's ability to recruit, which is well-established among his peers. Kansas coach Bill Self, a fine recruiter himself, once told me Hamilton is the best, and almost everybody within the sport would rank him high on any such list. The past five weeks haven't solidified that as much as they've reminded the country of it, and Forbes laughed while recalling an interaction he had with Hamilton after Tennessee lost Singleton to FSU back in November 2007.

"I bumped into Leonard on the road one time, and I told him, 'Please just let me know who you're recruiting from here on out, and I promise you I won't try to recruit them,'" Forbes said. "There's always a decision-maker in the recruiting process, and Leonard is just the best at identifying the decision-maker, getting to that person and gaining their trust. He's relentless. And he just figures it out before everybody else figures it out."