Ernie Kent admitted he had an ulterior motive in accepting a two-year post as head coach of the USA Basketball Junior National Team.
“It’s going to enhance our recruiting a great deal,” the Oregon basketball coach said at a press conference Thursday. “Instead of me traveling from city to city, camp to camp, all-star game to all-star game, all of those (recruits) will be coming to me now in one location, where we can evaluate and coach that talent. That’s going to be huge for us in the long run. It became a no-brainer in the regards to the time commitment.”
Kent, the 2002 Pacific-10 Conference Coach of the Year and an assistant on last year’s gold medal-winning USA Basketball Youth Team, said in his new position this summer he will get a first-hand look at some of the top high school basketball players in the country.
“Players, who in the past the University of Oregon didn’t even have an opportunity to even get a phone call from, we will now be able to coach and mentor for three weeks,” Kent said.
“After we went to the Elite Eight, the question that comes up to me all the time is ‘recruiting must be so easy and wonderful right now’ — and it’s not. We are still at the University of Oregon, we’re still here in the Northwest — there are elements with weather and distance that we have to deal with as well as notoriety, continuity and hype, all of those things that Duke, Kentucky, Illinois and Arizona — they’ve all overcome those things. But we’re still battling to still overcome those things.”
Kent said his decision to coach the USA team was a “must-do… because of visibility,” much like his decision to allow ESPN cameras to follow the Ducks during the NCAA Tournament in March.
“We have to do these things still to keep ourselves in the national spotlight,” he said.
The recruiting advantages, however, were not the only determining factor in Kent’s decision to accept the position. Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski and Kansas’ Roy Williams were among the members of the USA Basketball committee who offered Kent the job.
“The honor part of it is huge to me,” Kent said. “The fact that your peers have selected you head coach of USA Basketball obviously reflects well on Oregon and what this program has accomplished.”
Kent’s assistant coaches on the USA team will be Bob McKillop of Davidson and Gary Waters
of Rutgers.

NBA Draft update
It was hard to miss “Big Chris” on the small screen Wednesday.
Chris Christoffersen, the 7-foot-2 former Oregon post, was featured on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” in a pre-NBA Draft workout in Chicago. Of course, Christoffersen wasn’t the main attraction for the 65 NBA scouts and 200 spectators on hand — that belonged to “Bigger Yao,” 7-foot-5 Yao Ming of China, who is expected to be a top pick in the June draft.
Suffice to say, Christoffersen did not steal the spotlight from Ming, but the Denmark native did impress some scouts.
“I talked to Big Chris (Wednesday), I spoke to his agent and (NBA vice president of basketball operations)
Stu Jackson,” Kent said. “Chris was very excited and they all spoke very highly of the job he did and the fact that he really helped himself. He couldn’t help but help himself.”
Kent also said former Oregon guard Freddie Jones is scheduled for his first individual workout with the Phoenix Suns next week.
NBAdraft.net has Jones projected as a first round pick in the draft, while Christoffersen is a projected second-rounder.