Nor do college coaches as a group distinguish themselves through their ethics. Technically, they are not allowed to talk with prospective high-school recruits until June of a player’s sophomore year. But in the last two years, coaches at major schools have offered scholarships to highly regarded eighth graders, which has put an even greater focus on players in Trier’s age group. Tim Floyd, head coach at U.S.C., made two such offers in the last two years, and he hired the father of one recruit to be on his staff. (“College Basketball Coaches Are Now One Step Away From Recruiting Embryos,” the Web site FanIQ headlined an article after the Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie offered a scholarship to another eighth grader last spring.)

In January, the N.C.A.A. expanded its recruiting rules to more explicitly cover seventh and eighth graders, putting them largely off-limits to college coaches. Jim Haney, the executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, explained to me why coaches were aggressively dipping into the lower grades. “You can talk all you want about ‘coaching players up,’ ” he said, using the phrase for improving players through intense instruction. “But you can only get so far with that.” To qualify for the N.C.A.A. tournament, and certainly to advance through the regionals and into the Final Four, he said, requires “the top talent, and you go out and find it where you can. It’s a competitive business.”

N.C.A.A. recruiting rules tend to be arcane, with mystifying exceptions. For example, college coaches cannot make calls or write personal letters to players before the end of their sophomore year of high school. But they can signal their interest by sending “questionnaires,” without personal letters, to players of any age. When I was with Trier in Seattle, he was excited to have just received a questionnaire from Memphis, one of the premier college teams, which conformed to the rules because it did not include a personal letter. It’s possible that Trier could have been a recipient of a random mass mailing, but considering his reputation, he was probably right to assume that the school’s head coach, John Calipari, or someone on his staff, knew something about him. (Marcie Trier told me that she receives regular text messages from a coach with another college team, which would be an N.C.A.A. violation.)

The recent agreements with young players lead to the question of how you offer a scholarship to a kid, and have it accepted, when you’re not really allowed to communicate with him. The answer: While college coaches and their assistants cannot mix with under-age recruits at all-star camps, they can host players of any age at their own on-campus summer camps. If one of the really heralded players shows up, coach and player — even, in theory, a second grader — can make a deal (though it has to happen after the camp is over).

Trier has already attended a couple of camps where he was sought out by on-campus coaches and asked if he was considering the school. At one, he told me, a coach took him aside for a private, behind-the-scenes tour of the team’s locker room and then upstairs to a pavilion above the court that contained trophies and other memorabilia. “It caused some resentment,” according to his mother, “because other campers saw it. Parents got upset.”

None of this was necessarily against the rules, because these were coaches’ private camps. Floyd, the U.S.C. coach, explained in an interview posted on a college-sports Web site two years ago how such innocent-seeming encounters can quickly lead from Point A to Point B and all the way to “S” — a scholarship offer to a kid who has not yet begun high school. “I think that we all recognize that young people can have great talents, and if those players have dreamed about going to your school, they tend to ask you if they’re being offered a scholarship by your school,” he said. “And if you don’t tell them that you are, then you offend them. If you tell them you’ve offered, sometimes you have to be prepared for them to accept it.”

The scholarship offers are not binding on either party because they cannot be put in writing until a player’s senior year. But Haney, of the coaches’ association, and others say they are unwise because they bring the hurly-burly and distractions of recruiting to kids too young to handle them, and they bind parties to each other, at least verbally, well before either can know if it’s a good match. The early recruiting also brings what Haney calls the “nonscholastic influences” to children — shoe-company representatives and others who have a commercial interest in befriending young talent.