Looks like he was on his way to Romania. Part of the FIBA U19 qualifiers are being held there. That’s next level recruiting.

http://www.fiba.basketball/europe/u18b/2019/

Anyone know what event/kids he might be scouting in Greece?

Link

Here is a clip about recruiting:You are the assistant basketball coach of, George Washington University. Obviously, we are in different times right now. how much are you able to do through apps like, Zoom? Nima Omidvar: Through Zoom, we’ve had a handful of invite calls and virtual visits, although it’s not necessarily a virtual visit. It’s more of a re-connection. We’re kind of ahead of the game with 2021 recruiting. We invested a lot of time and hit the ground running. We got 2020 done pretty quickly. We signed 3 transfers immediately after the season ended and right as the Corona Virus hit off. We were armed with videos, content and information. Luckily our campus is in the middle of the city. We’re several blocks from the White House, so we’re probably on the safest couple of blocks in the country. So, it was nothing for us to just ride up to campus while everybody else had already left and do a Facetime tour. It helped really bring the experience to the 3 young men that we signed, Matthew Moyer from Vanderbilt, Ricky Lindo from Maryland and James Bishop from LSU. Now that that’s been handled, 2021, we have 2 spots left available. We did all of our work in terms of offering the guys that we really wanted last fall. So, we got a year of relationships in with a handful of kids and we don’t need to show our campus, they’ve seen it. We don’t need to talk about the academic side, they know it. and now it’s just revisiting and talking about ways that they can get themselves better, and re-acclimating them to our new roster. We have only one player on this roster for the day, Coach Christian was given the job.

Interesting and insightful, nice to learn about Omar!

Agree that this is a great interview.  An old adage in the sales world is that people hate to be sold but they love to buy.  Our coaching staff really seem to understand this.  They approach recruiting from the standpoint that you (the recruit) should absolutely want to be playing at GW given the school, the academics, the city, the opportunities beyond basketball and the history of the basketball program.  If you're still unsure after all of this, probably best that you play elsewhere.

As for the Hobbs comment, I'll attempt to explain rather than defend.  Hobbs came from a program which committed itself to annually compete for national championships.  At GW, he had to understand that this same goal was not going to be attainable.  Yet at the same time, his ambition wasn't for GW to annually finish in the top half of the conference either.  He wanted much more than this.  Before the prep school issues were exposed, Hobbs was on his way to building a perennial top 40 program, or certainly coming close to this.  To get to this point and sustain it, not only would GW need to be more successful than say 5th place teams at major conferences but they would also have to every bit as good as schools in their own conference like Xavier, Temple and Dayton.  So while I'd have to agree that nobody enjoyed hearing about what GW did not have again and again, I do think that Hobbs was making valid points and not excuses.  He wanted a high level of sustained success for this program and points he made regarding facilities, recruiting budgets, not being able to charter flights, and being hamstrung from playing in a small arena were all true with respect to making it more difficult to attract high level players.  I realize that if you say the same thing enough times, it does start to sound like an excuse and not a reason.  Yet in the case of Hobbs, I really believe he had very high goals and wanted more support to help achieve them.

Well, I knew Hobbs’ apologist would chime in with the same tired spin. I couldn’t disagree more with your take. 

1) The idea that Omargate was why his teams went downhill always seemed like BS excuse making you me.  For one thing, recruiting had already gone downhill before that.  For a second thing, other coaches (Jarvis, Lonergan, now JC) have proven that you can in fact recruit good players to gw even without fake prep schools.  Third, Hobbs biggest problem was that he only had one coaching move, which was to try to exploit athletic mismatches.  That worked well when we were more athletic than our opponents, but even his best team had trouble with BCS schools that could come close to matching our athletes - all of which is to say that his excuses about not being able to recruit the most  athletic kids to GW were really spin by him and his allies meant to hide his serious coaching deficiencies. 

2)  more to the point of this thread, It doesn’t matter if his lack of belief in GW was an excuse or a valid reason - it was wrong for GW.  Lonergan and JC and Jarvis (and even Penders and MoJo) all truly understood what makes GW special.  Hobbs did not.   The other coaches all understood how to sell GW - and even landed incredible athletes who they could get admitted (like Yinka and Surles, Nimbo and Yegor, the great Chris Monroe and SirVal, Zeke and Yuta, James Bishop and Jameer Nelson).   

It can ritually be done, but the coach has to believe in it.  Nima (and JC) clearly believe in GW and would never publicly attack the product they are trying to sell the way Hobbs did.

Plus, on top of the challenge for recruiting, Hobbs constant trashing of GW was alienating to fans. GW students and alumni are cynical and critical enough, so there’s no way a coach is going to get them bought in for the long term by constantly repeating the shortcomings, rather than the strengths, of the school. 

I love that Nima gets it, along with JC, and it makes me feel a lot more positively than when our coach did nothing but crap on Gw and it’s potential.

I am certain we can all rehash the Hobbs era as well as the Lonergan era all day long.

The one thing I would point out as a defense of Hobbs was that GW made several public efforts to shift the blame solely towards Hobbs (and the program) for Omargate directly or indirectly for which were in reality "group" decisions supported at the highest levels. GW unquestionably knew about Philly Lutheran and the situations of Omar Williams and Maureece Rice. The idea that Hobbs pulled the wool over the eyes of the GW administrators is complete nonsense. Admissions was 100% behind admittance and knew ALL the facts and circumstances. It is only when it became an embarrassing public story because GW inexplicably commented to the WAPO about it, that administrators pointed fingers, deflected blame or claimed ignorance. And for the record, this blame extended to throwing assistants under the bus including one who is now a highly successful HC at Rutgers. This was the thing that really soured Hobbs towards GW plus the inability to get players into GW (examples: Jordan Crawford and Jeremy Wise) who should have been admitted but were not as Administration payback for the Omargate embarrassment.. As you may know, Crawford starred at Xavier while Wise starred at Southern Mississippi. No doubt that Hobbs was bitter and he should not have entertained that bitterness with the public. However, let's not act like Hobbs was solely to blame. GW hardly has clean hands here as they were setting him up to fail post-Omargate. To me the fair thing would be to say Hobbs was mistreated by GW and he reacted poorly to it.

Last edited by GWRising (5/18/2020 2:39 pm)

Chill out everyone. Everyone is saying the same thing. We have had 2 very successful coaches in the past (Hobbs, Lonergan) with very different approaches to recruiting, tactics, etc. What you seem to be in agreement on is that the GW Administration found a way to screw it all up.

I might be splitting hairs or not understand how coach speak has changed. But as someone whose followed the team since 1980 the usual tact is mention how special and academic GW (the degree to which it is or is not is not the issue) but then at some point frame academics as a challenge of some kind.

This time is the first time I’ve heard a recruiter sell and characterize GW as an expensive School with difficult academic standards.

In general I agree everyone says they are the Ivy of their zip code.