These days, the concept of recruiting your own players is mentioned a ton in college basketball and college sports.

And understandably so, the transfer portal, grad transfer movement, the extra COVID year.

Rosters have never been so fluid, especially in college basketball with pretty small rosters compared to many other sports.

But ultimately, there's not a whole lot of coaching

staff can do to, quote, recruit a player in certain situations. And that was the case in the

situation for Michigan women's basketballs forward Emily Kaiser. Emily had all the

information at her disposal. It wasn't as if Kim Barnes-Riko or a member of her assistant

coaching staff or some of the other players on the team or anyone around the program could have

come to her and tried to recruit her pitch her on something that would completely shift her mind.

This was a decision that Emily had to come to herself, and it is not easy, as she'll

talk about today, because a big chunk of her identity within the Michigan program belonged to

and was attributed to and associated with the class she came in with, which obviously is no

longer intact. It was going to be different had she chosen

any path, end her career, play a fifth season somewhere else, or return for a fifth season

here in Ann Arbor. Ultimately, she chose the last of those. She chose to return to Michigan

and to play that fifth COVID year. There are plenty of academic-related benefits to that decision, though Emily didn't really have

to worry about that.

She's a three-time academic, all-Big Ten performer, crazy smart as you'll really get to know

here on this episode.

She really would have had her choice of pretty much any educational opportunity,

whether or not basketball was involved.

But after deep reflection and some distance to really ponder everything after last season,

...