ORLANDO. FLA___The setting was oddly and eerily appropriate. For one morning, anyway.

Three framed color photographs of Skip Prosser in sideline coaching mode rested on easels beside an empty basketball court. The arena was appropriately quiet except for the high, insistent buzz of overhead lights, their electric chirp drawing attention to rafters from which hung oversized photos of famous pro athletes wearing serious looks and thin, ghost-white milk mustaches.

The Prosser photos, the Catholic priest enlisted for the occasion, and the portable podium emblazoned with the logo of “Disney’s Wide World of Sports” faced a set of bleachers occupied by men dressed in the casual summer uniforms of their profession, most prominently golf shirts adorned to advertise the basketball programs they represent.

The service was solemn, respectful, and sad, punctuated by murmured prayers and occasional sniffles, the latter reflecting either emotion or the effects of summer colds contracted passing in and out of air conditioned gyms like this one.

Wake Forest coaches, who arranged the 7:15 AM mass, sat near the court at The Milk House with Wofford assistant Mark Prosser, one of Skip’s sons. Behind and above them, the 70-odd congregants came from programs all over the country, among them coaches with present or past ACC ties such as Paul Hewitt and Bobby Cremins (Georgia Tech), Monte Towe and Sean Miller and Ray Martin (N.C. State), Jerry Wainwright (Wake), and Tom Herrion (Virginia).

A year and a day had passed since Prosser, the 56-year-old Wake Forest head coach, died following a mid-day run in Winston-Salem. He had just returned from the recruiting trail, which took him from AAU tournament in Las Vegas to simultaneous AAU tournament here at the edge of Disney World.

This is where word of Prosser’s death reached both his son and Wake’s current head coach, Dino Gaudio, then a Demon Deacon assistant. Coaches recalled last week how that news reverberated through the fraternity gathered on this same spot in 2007 to watch many of the nation’s best boys basketball players go through their paces.

Basketball is just part of the sports show on a summer weekend during Disney’s 2008 “Year of a Million Dreams.” The corporation's sparkling, well-appointed athletics complex not only simultaneously accommodated tournaments in boys’ and girls’ AAU basketball, boys’ baseball, and girls’ softball, but also hosted the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers for twice-daily workouts.

The Milk House, not surprisingly funded by the milk industry, is the basketball focal point. An Amateur Athletic Union plaque affixed beside the main entrance also brands the building, proclaiming that organization’s motto: “Where Champions Come to Play Sports For All, Forever.”

Certainly sessions that can last 14 hours over each of 11 July days can seem like forever when you’re perched on hard bleachers or unyielding metal folding chairs.

Once seated, coaches follow an itinerary of courts and games that allows them to see players who have committed, or might commit, to join their programs. They also try to project the talents and interests of younger players. “I think the evaluation skills are very important,” said Billy Hahn, a West Virginia assistant who played at Maryland and later worked there for current Terrapins head coach Gary Williams. “I think when we were at Maryland with Coach Williams and we got pretty good, we were signing kids that a lot of people mis-evaluated and didn’t think were as good as they proved to be.”

Those evaluations must be made ever earlier, judging by recent commitments from eighth- and ninth-graders to attend Kentucky, Southern California, and West Virginia.

In June the National Association of Basketball Coaches urged members to refrain from reeling in players until they finished their sophomore year in high school. That already dubious demarcation tracks an NCAA prohibition on “contact” between a prospect and coach until June 15 following an athlete’s 10th-grade season. “The Board of Directors' opposition is based on the fact that these students have not yet displayed sufficient academic credentials,” the NABC declared, “or, in the vast majority of cases, basketball maturity to accurately project them as admissible students to the institution or impact players on the basketball team.”

No kidding. Yet two weeks after the NABC offered its toothless call for a reasonable ethical standard, Marshall and Florida landed commitments from ninth graders.

Such arrangements are orchestrated by parents, guardians, advisors, AAU coaches, or other go-betweens. The talk in Orlando this summer was of a package deal in which a prominent prospect from the ACC region was being offered around with the stipulation a school must hire his handler’s younger brother. Then there was the almost-ACC recruit who skittered from school to school to school, ending up with a Big East program that allegedly hired his trainer.

New wrinkles to bend or circumvent the rules are of course as omnipresent as the avarice that drives practitioners.

One coach told of a competitor’s creative use of the Internet to steer NCAA-banned payments to the father of a signee. According to this scenario, the parent was advised to create a website, post analysis of his offspring’s AAU team and teammates, and then charge a subscription fee equivalent to the cost of round-trip airfare to his son’s school. The benefiting college coach promised to subscribe at the appropriate level.

Some go-betweens take a similar if lower-tech route, creating bogus evaluation reports that are sold to coaches eager to recruit a player over whom they hold sway.

At the no-tech level, the arrangement at the AAUs sends literally hundreds of teams and hundreds of coaches moving about in a confined area. The inevitable result is plenty of  opportunity for recruiters to share so-called "bumps" with players, illegal intersections in the form of a nod, word, smile, or handshake.

Coaches aren’t the only corruptors. This year, several exhibition contests were televised by ESPNU. A pair of ACC head coaches watching the proceedings agreed grimly that the TV coverage strengthened the stature of AAU ball at the expense of more desirable high school affiliations.

The recruiting scene drives some coaches to wring their hands in frustration and alarm over the state of the game, a lament almost as old as basketball itself. Others insist with equal fervor that recruiting is less prostituted than in the past, a hopeful sign. Either way, new machinations and violations inevitably undermine credibility and spawn new NCAA restrictions.

Through it all, top players and teams grow accustomed to a jet-set summer; a couple of AAU squads were flown to Orlando just to appear on TV. Shoe companies supply teams with the latest gear. AAU programs underwrite individual players’ travels.

There are other privileges, like the bump enjoyed by one squad at the Milk House.

Team members meandering along an upstairs corridor were suddenly confronted by the very mature members of the all-female Tampa Bay Buc cheerleaders, traveling in smart order toward the outside doors. Tanned, wearing makeup, and accoutered in brief red tops, short skirts, and long black boots, the cheerleaders’ passage brought the pubescent boys to an immediate halt. Their coach quipped aloud that the women were obviously there to cheer for his squad, eliciting smiles but not a break in stride among the cheerleaders.

The coach’s identity remains a mystery. A professional observer recording the scene was unaccountably distracted, and missed the name of the team.