Interesting article about the Las Vegas tournaments and recruiting

The following covers some players, teams and basketball figures up in Washington but it provides a good sense of what the last week in July is like in Vegas. The story is long but informative.

Summer Basketball: Hoops in the City of the Stars
Chuck Stark
Kitsap Sun
August 15, 2009

LAS VEGAS — In this city, you never know who or what you might see, so a bunch of tall kids bouncing basketballs in the lobbies of extravagant hotels and casinos might have seemed a bit strange, but gamblers studying their cards at nearby blackjack tables or rolling dice at a crap table didn’t take notice as they dribbled by.

Take a walk on the famed strip, where people called “hooker hawkers” routinely bombard tourists with handouts advertising “hot babes,” and odds are you’d also bump into some of the hottest young high school-aged basketball players in the country — maybe even the next LeBron or Kobe.

This city that never sleeps is the center of the summer basketball universe. It’s where more than 10,000 players and 900 teams — including Bremerton-based Total Package, which brought two squads — attended four summer youth tournaments. The Reebok Summer Championships (once called the Big Time Tournament), the adidas Super 64 Tournament, the VisionSports Main Event (it used to be called the Nike Main Event), and the StarVision Sports Center Stage are all staged over the last week of July. Although Total Package was sequestered in a semi-out-of-the-way motel, you’re never too far from the glitz and all those big billboards advertising the Blue Man Group, and shows featuring the likes of Beyonce and magician Criss Angel.

You needed to be a magician of sorts, especially if you were one of the 1,000 college coaches in town, to navigate your way to one of the 46 gyms the used around Las Vegas. And these college head coaches and assistants — representing 300-plus NCAA Division I schools as well as DII, DIII and the NAIA — weren’t here to bake in the 110-degree heat; they were here to evaluate the mother lode of hoops talent that migrates to the Nevada desert every July...

Go here for the remainder.