What is the source of the story? Unnamed informed sources? Most likely at least third hand hearsay at best or maybe just based on speculation. I expressed the speculation somewhere that a parent who posts on a message board a couple of weeks before his daughter commits is not the type of parent to whose daughter Geno makes offers but I called it high octane inference based on speculation. The history of the last 10 years is evidence that many elite level players who get UConn offers choose to go elsewhere. It just seems that some can't accept that. Then there are some who, because UConn didn't win the NC for 2 years, are announcing the end of the line for the UConn dynasty. Over on the Irish board there are some who think that Brunelle, Bueckers and Fudd are inseparable. Again, inferences based on assumptions. Speculation is the heart and soul of wcbb off-season boards but some are having a cow as a result.
Bingo. You won't hear the staff talk about it, but in the past, Geno has passed on players who had overly involved parents. Geno recruits the family almost as much as he recruits the player, and a parent who will be calling him and/or the staff way too often once a kid gets on campus is not a situation he wants to deal with.
Levar Ball is a perfect example of a parent he would not want to deal with. Delino Deshields is a bullet I'm sure he was happy to dodge (publicly called out Holly Warlick for not playing DD enough). Not sure how involved Omar Calhoun Sr. was with his daughter, but his son played for Ollie, and that whole experience would not have flown with Geno.
Of course it's all speculation. Did the UCONN staff change their minds about Brunelle after the initial offer? Were her parent(s) overly zealous in their interactions during her recruitment? Was it something else? Her father's (?) last post said he would have loved to have seen her at UCONN. He also noted that the coaches stopped recruiting her. It's possible that close to the end, Brunelle still wanted to come to UCONN, but we will never know for sure unless the family tells us directly, which is highly unlikely.
