“For the good of the game, it needs a good, long, hard look,” said Morgan Wootten, who won 1,274 games in 46 seasons as the coach at DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, Md., before retiring in 2002.

It is common to find as many as 15 coaches from Washington-area private schools watching a summer tournament game involving middle school players. Suber said nine of his players were recruited to the ultracompetitive Washington Catholic Athletic Conference, which features traditional powers like DeMatha, Gonzaga College High School and Archbishop Carroll High School.

Pete Strickland, an assistant coach at George Washington University who began his career as an assistant at DeMatha, said that high school recruiting in Washington was more frenetic than college recruiting because of the career goals of the young assistants involved.

“It’s almost like Nixon’s White House,” he said. “There’s a lot of guys with blind ambition.”

Suber said the schools used a “shotgun approach” to recruiting, focusing on as many players as they could, not just the stars. That means continual communications from coaches to players through social media, letters and phone calls. The process can be overwhelming for parents.

But players at a recent tournament seemed to enjoy the attention. Chris Lykes said he was “flattered” when he saw a coach watching him from the bleachers.

Andre Boykin, a 6-foot-3 center on a 13-and-younger travel team affiliated with the club Team Takeover, said: “It’s pretty cool to say a coach comes to my games. I know that’s when I’ve really got to play my hardest.”

Rhonda Green, whose son Samuel is a 6-5 eighth grader, said that high schools first began speaking with her about her son when he was in fifth grade and already 5-11. She said that when Samuel was in sixth grade, he asked, “Why are these coaches asking me to come to the camps?”