Even with modern technology, women’s basketball coach Kay Yow said recruiting isn’t as relentless as it was years ago — especially with all the restrictions that are now placed on the coaches.

When Yow first started coaching, she said there were very few rules on how coaches could go after players. Now there are periods when coaches can’t watch or even talk to players.

“You could actually go any time and see somebody play as many times as you wanted to,” Yow said. “You could just camp out for like a week at a time — get a hotel room.”

She said oftentimes, when it was getting near to Signing Day, coaches would just camp out where the player went to school.

And when the player signed, the college coaches could be there.

Players were recruited so heavily that, one time, Yow received a call from a local high school coach who warned her about other coaches.

“I remember a player I recruited here in North Carolina, and I remember getting a phone call from her coach,” Yow said. “She told me, ‘Coach Yow, if you want this player, I think that you better get up here because we have so-and-so coaches and they’ve been here a week. I know you’ve been in the lead. But something could happen — you might want to come protect your interests.'”

Even though coaches still have a lot of flexibility in how to recruit players, years ago, Yow said there “was no limit on how many times you could see a player play.”

The most recent change in recruiting was the text messaging ban that went into place Aug. 1. The new rule is one Yow said she is unsure about. Coaches are no longer allowed to text message back and forth with recruits.

When the text messaging idea first came up, Yow said she hoped coaches wouldn’t be allowed to text recruits. However, when it became a normal thing, it’s something the coaches got used to.

“I was never in favor of doing it from the beginning,” Yow said. “But then we did it, now after we’ve done it, to me, it’s a lot harder to stop now. But those are the rules, so we aren’t [texting].”

One thing that made text messaging a positive was that it was another way of building relationships with the recruits, according to Yow. Not only that, Yow said it was also a medium where players could tell coaches things “they won’t tell you on the telephone.”

While Yow said she text messaged, she said her assistant coaches were the heavy users.

Yow did acknowledge what she believes to be the biggest negative of text messaging — the high phone bills for the recruits’ parents.

“It runs up great bills for some kids who don’t have that kind of money,” Yow said. “It’s also disruptive if people are doing it when they are in class or late at night when they should be sleeping.”

The problem with losing text messaging, she said, is that the conversation between player and coach will dwindle greatly.

“Calling is so limited — to once a week. You could text all the time. You could develop a relationship that is harder to do by phone because you can only speak at the most once a week,” Yow said. “If you call the parent instead of the kid, that’s your phone call for the week.”