Silence from Payne camp peculiar
by Javier Morales on Oct. 13, 2009, under SportsWILDABOUTAZCATS.com LINK: Your vote on who is your favorite UA athlete of all-time
In this day and age when high school recruits have their Facebook accounts readily available to anyone, and some of them (re: Ray McCallum Jr.) are even tweeting on Twitter, it seems odd that Dayton (Ohio) Jefferson center Adreian Payne is not making himself available to the media.
On one hand, it’s refreshing to see a kid not want to talk about himself, but on the other hand, interest in recruiting is about as strong as it ever has been. I believe it would be a good move by him to give reporters a clue about what intrigued him about the weekend visit to Arizona. What does he think about his chances to immediately make an impact at Arizona at the post? Players his age talk about playing time being paramount.
Payne can play significant minutes right away for Arizona.
I respect the fact that Payne does not want to talk about the recruiting process — he is 17 and only a senior in high school, after all — but what confuses me is why his coach Art Winston did not clear up some misinformation I was given about the recent weekend visit. I left numerous messages with Winston following the weekend visit after I was told by his athletic director Dan Fernbacher that he got on a plane with Payne on Friday morning — at 4 a.m. to be exact — to arrive in Tucson. Winston was not at his Jefferson office at that time.
“They should already be there,” Fernbacher said from the athletic department office when I phoned him in the late morning.
Evidently, Winston told Josh Gershon of GOAZCATS.com today that he did not go to Tucson and that Payne visited Tucson with his grandmother instead. For that bit of wrong information, I want to apologize, and that’s primarily why I’m writing about this. Otherwise, I don’t get into why a subject did not return my phone calls because I don’t want to bore you.
At the same time, I can assure you that I’ve tried to get an accurate account of the weekend by phoning Winston numerous times and even trying Payne’s cell phone (although I know he won’t answer) plenty of times. I don’t want to say that I’ll give up because I know you all are starved for information. But I will just respect their silence for now.
As expected, with the commitment of Phoenix North guard Daniel Bejarano to Arizona, Mouth of Wilson (Va.) Oak Hill Academy guard Doron Lamb has crossed Arizona off his list. He reportedly is down to three schools: Kansas, Kentucky and Oklahoma. Bejarano and Lamb both play the shooting guard position, as does Mount Pleasant (Mich.) senior Trey Zeigler, who never talked about an official visit to Arizona.
