When 7-foot Serbian Dusan Ristic on Saturday announced he plans to enroll at Arizona and play for the Wildcats next season, it was a rare piece of recruiting news in March.
February and March are normally basketball-centric, the only two months of the year when a coach like Sean Miller can focus solely on coaching. Friday at his team’s Oregon hotel, speaking generically about recruiting, Miller said that “last weekend was a huge weekend for us. We had a number of kids on campus in our last home weekend.”
Recruiting has changed, Miller said. “The reason for it being constant is that players leave earlier. Ten years ago, you might have a recruiting class of five, and that would almost cement your future. You really couldn’t add to that if you wanted to.”
But all of that has changed. At a time it’s possible Arizona could lose four underclassmen from its 2014 Pac-12 title team, Ristic could avoid a personnel crisis if Kaleb Tarczewski or Rondae Hollis-Jefferson left. Ristic, who grew up playing against Serbian and EuroLeague pros, will be a freshman on paper, but not in approach and bearing.
