The second of a two-part question-and-answer session with Michigan basketball Kevin Borseth. Here, he talks about what a renovated Crisler Arena will mean to his program, recruiting and scheduling.

(Read the first part of the Q&A with Borseth here.)

Michigan women's basketball coach Kevin Borseth.

Angela J. Cesere | AnnArbor.com

Q: Getting the new facility and part of the renovation of a new arena, how much does that help (in continuing to build what you want)?

Kevin Borseth: We were just talking this morning about summer camps. We have players who have come in for summer camps and maybe haven’t had the same experience they had at other places from the dorms being a distance away type thing and not having a facility. Now all of a sudden we’re going to have a facility here in the next couple of years that we can bring kids in and have a good camp experience right over at Crisler. And the PDC is going to have some courts over there, too, so for kids that come in here, when they are younger, parlays into a lot of good things down the road from a recruiting perspective. These kids, if they come to your summer camps, in my opinion, the kids that come to your summer camps genuinely have interest in your program. Now, you have to make sure you show them the right things and that they have a good experience.

I’ve had kids come in and say I was at the camp years ago, and I didn’t have the same experience, so we’re trying to change that. The PDC is going to help us do that, the renovation of Crisler is going to help us do that. It’s going to change the atmosphere and the way people look at Michigan basketball.

Q: Do those camps take on more of an importance at a place like this than at Green Bay or a place like that?

KB: I just came back from a tournament in the deep south and at Boo Williams (in Virginia) and there are seventh-graders playing basketball. Seventh- and eighth-graders, and these coaches are all checking names down saying, ‘Who is the future? Where is the future lie?’ … I went to recruit a kid and she said she’s been to one school. And this kid is a big-time player. Been to one school, and she said she liked that school because she went to camp there. Just based on that. … So there’s a lot in the recruiting base, you’re the first one in the door, how do you get them? So you bring them in and what other way do you have to show them. See them in the spring, get them to a summer camp, get to know the kid, it’s all kind of massaging, they get to know you, you get to know them, the familiarities. The family gets to know the school. I think outside of our own little area, I don’t know how many people can appreciate the education that Michigan provides, I don’t think many people know that. I don’t know how many people know that Michigan is, as they say, the Harvard of the Midwest. We might think that, but when you go out and start to recruit kids and you mention that to them, it’s like, ‘Oh, really?’ So if you get them on campus young, you can kind of show them the things, the commitments that are made to academics, the commitment that is made to athletics, you can show those things to a kid and you get them on campus and it builds. It builds our ability to recruit more and more people, have a bigger pool of people to draw from.

Q: Do you feel like that you’re able to recruit more nationally than you were a year ago, two years ago? Is the door opening more?

KB: Who knows? How do you really know? How do you know? You’re out recruiting players, you’re jotting names down, sending information, chatting with the coaches, kids get back to you. Some are from Michigan, the kid might be from Florida, wherever they are from, might be a Canadian kid. The key is to get the right fit for our program, our university. To get the right kid is really important for team chemistry, the academic perspective, appreciate being challenged in the classroom and want the value of the Michigan education, that’s just natural.

There’s so much attrition in college basketball, so much. It’s because I think sometimes kids go out and make some real rushed decisions. I’d much rather have kids come in and say, ‘You know what, I really like that.’ Kids coming to Michigan because they realize the academic value of what it has and that was their first choice coming here and happen to be a good player on top of that, that’s a pretty good combination. That kid is going to stay and that kid is going to graduate. That’s pretty big. So finding the right kid for our program and the right kid for our school is important for us so we can develop these kids as we go along.

Q: Looking at one other piece, scheduling, how close are you? I know you’ve scheduled pretty tough the past couple of years.

KB: The scheduling is done. We can’t share that at this point but home and away and some neutral site games. There’s a pressure with the NCAA that (teams) aren’t buying too many of their games, that they are playing a certain number of their games on the road, that’s a legislation that’s going on. It’ll be interesting to see because in women’s basketball there are a couple schools that don’t play any away games, they just play home games, that’s it. They buy every game that they have and a lot of these programs go, and that’s how they make money. The smaller schools that don’t have the luxury of that or finances are such that they have to go out and get games, get financial guarantees from schools. The big schools, they give out a lot of guarantee money, go out and buy games.

Q: I know you said you don’t want to share but are there any high-profile games? Anything you can share?

KB: Next year, I’ve got to think. We’ve done that in the past, and I don’t know if it has helped us or hurt us. We’ve played some really good teams (the past two years), some high caliber teams. We finished 6-5 rather than 11-0, you know what I mean. I don’t know, that’s something that in the Big Ten, it’s a league that seems to be a lot of parity. Nobody seems to run through the Big Ten with a 16-0 record, you know what I mean. That said, your non-conference schedule is important, and you really need to do well in your non-conference schedule. In the past we’ve done pretty well. We tried to figure this out, see how we’ve done.

Michael Rothstein covers University of Michigan basketball for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558, by email at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein