Raymar Morgan takes a pass along the left baseline, then hurtles toward the basket like a runaway train. The closest defender, realizing the carnage that will ensue if he doesn't do something, scurries across the lane in an attempt to draw a charge.

He's too late.

Morgan flattens him as he throws down a thunderous slam dunk, then stares down at his crumpled counterpart as the crowd erupts.

That happened Jan. 31, 2006, when the then-17-year-old Morgan was playing for Canton McKinley (Ohio) High School against its rival, Massillon Washington High School.

Greg Malone, a McKinley assistant at the time who has since become head coach, didn't think he would see many more plays like Morgan's dunk in his career.

Especially not in his inbox.

A few weeks after that game, a video of the play was posted on www.youtube.com, where it quickly circulated around cyberspace. It has been viewed almost 32,000 times since.

"People who weren't at the game were e-mailing — 'Hey, you had to see this!'" Malone said.

It was hardly unique attention for Morgan, a blue chip recruit who's now a freshman forward at MSU. Every time he made a recruiting visit, played in a big game or tied his shoes, it was documented and analyzed in meticulous detail on Internet recruiting sites and message boards across the country. By the time Morgan arrived at MSU's campus in the summer, it seemed like some fans knew more about him than his own friends did.

"It's a little crazy," Morgan said. "Actually, it's a lot crazy, because sometimes they know a little too much about you — when your birthday is, little stuff that can scare you a little bit."

Welcome to the digital age of college athletics recruiting, where technological advances are compounding an already complex and high-stakes process. It has put coaches and players in constant connection, with e-mails and text messaging rapidly replacing traditional forms of communication. It has given fans an endless white space to criticize, analyze and hypothesize about their favorite teams' recruits — often in the same breath. It has sprouted a host of subscription Web sites focused on recruiting — an industry that is now taking in tens of millions of dollars a year.

It's not unique to the big-money sports — coaches for baseball or soccer are just as likely to text message a recruit as those for football or basketball.

"I've e-mailed kids on Christmas," MSU baseball head coach David Grewe said.

And, most importantly, it's a trend that won't be unplugged anytime soon.

"You can't put the genie back in the bottle," Malone said.

The pros

There are some obvious benefits to the technological revolution.

With all the attention they get from recruiting sites and an improved ability to send game tape and other information to recruiters, players are able to better market themselves to schools they like.

That is especially important in today's climate, in which collegiate athletic departments are being held more accountable than ever for the conduct of their players. With penalties like loss of scholarships looming for teams that don't do well enough in the classroom, it's even more critical for schools to pick athletes that are a good fit for their programs.

That's one way technology can help. The NCAA has limitations on how often schools can contact players, but not on how often players can initiate contact with coaches.

A quick text message exchange between classes can help build the relationships that are hard to cultivate with coaches who are each monitoring 100 other players.

And it can do so in a way that fits recruits' lifestyles. It doesn't take high-profile athletes for Malone to understand how important text messages have become to the way young people communicate. He sees it from the students he teaches.

"If they get a text," he said, "heaven and earth stops."

It's an even more appealing medium for coveted athletes, who often have dozens of recruiters vying for their attention at once. Text messaging gives athletes more control about who to respond to.

"Most of them would rather sit and text than they would talk on the phone," Malone said. "And I think they're definitely more comfortable doing that than they are coming into the office and making a phone call."

And — no surprise — most players like the attention. Malone said when McKinley adds a prominent nonconference team to its schedule, his players will often rush to the Web to find out what they can about the opponent. They also keep tabs on the national player ranking lists that have proliferated in recent years. And when something new is written about them, they're often the first ones to know about it.

"It's just a fact of life that teenagers are constantly in touch with everyone in the world around them," Malone said.

The increased scrutiny on recruiting also has had an unintentional watchdog effect. What used to be a secretive, sometimes seedy process in which schools would often make promises they couldn't keep has been thrust into the public eye.

"Media shining a light on recruiting has helped clean it up," said Bobby Burton, editor in chief for www.rivals.com, one of the country's biggest recruiting Web sites. "You don't hear about $100,000 paydays anymore because they don't happen."

The cons

But there are an equal number of landmines in these increasingly murky waters.

There's the question of how much information the public is entitled to know about recruits, and when they're entitled to know it. (Sites like Rivals start ranking players before they have driver's licenses.) One of the biggest criticisms of recruiting sites is that they keep vulture-like tabs on players, checking in constantly to see who they've narrowed their choices to.

"It was strange," said MSU junior center Drew Naymick, who was rated the 65th-best prospect in the country by Rivals as a high school senior. "I dealt with a lot of calls for interviews — where are you going to go, list of schools.

"Everybody's just trying to get some inside information."

With so many different sources of news, the line between truth and rumor has become dangerously blurred. Earlier this year, whispers started floating around the Internet that Michigan men's basketball player Ekpe Udoh was planning to leave the Wolverines and transfer to Oklahoma State.

"I don't know where it started," Udoh told reporters then, "but no, I'm not."

The communication aspect is equally tricky. There have been plenty of stories about recruits whose parents' cell phone bills skyrocketed because of all the text messages they received from coaches.

It's all combined to create a climate in which recruits are in almost always in a fishbowl. Naymick said it was especially bad for junior guard Drew Neitzel, whose ambidextrous ability became the main talking point for fans who had read about him online.

"Everyone's like, 'You can shoot with both hands!'" Naymick said.

Coming to grips

Technology has largely outpaced regulations to this point, but safeguards are slowly being implemented to keep recruits' privacy protected. In a controversial example, the NCAA Board of Directors voted Thursday to approve a ban on all text-messaging between coaches and recruits. The debate surrounding that ban, which passed despite vocal opposition from the American Football Coaches Association, underscores the fundamental issue facing today's recruits: How much is too much?

Malone, who has coached more than two dozen players who went on to play in college, including four in Morgan's class, said limits should be put on how much schools can text message athletes, but that banning it completely will deprive both sides of a valuable communication channel.

"There seems like there should be some common-sense middle ground," Malone said.

It's not as easy to legislate decency for recruiting sites and message boards, but some protection does exist. Burton said all Rivals reporters must sign a code of ethics, which includes provisions against preferential treatment or active recruitment of a player for the school they cover.

Regardless, the market for information on recruiting shows no signs of slowing down. Burton said Rivals currently has 185,000 subscribers nationwide and is expected to take in more than $30 million in sales revenue this year. Another recruiting behemoth, www.scout.com, also reported an eight-figure revenue in 2006.

That's why Malone sees the sporting world's future relationship with technology as more adaptive than prohibitive.

"It's definitely made it where it's a 24/7, 365-day-a-year thing for colleges, and I think it creates some expectations for the kids," Malone said. "But I think it's allowed the kids to have a little bit more contact, and I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing."

Tom Keller can be reached at kellert1@msu.edu.