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Hasani, a 6-foot-3, 190-pound shooting guard, videotaped some of his own games and collected various discs of others. He then broke them all down on a computer in his house and put together a DVD mix showcasing his highlights.

Then he e-mailed the coaching staffs of more than 300 Division schools with a link to highlights of himself he had put up on YouTube.

If they responded with interest, Hasani would send them one of his DVDs via FedEx or DHL.

"It was my idea," Hasani said recently. "I would e-mail the whole coaching staff -- head coach, associate head coach, assistants."

Hasani said the schools that showed the most interest were Rutgers, Vanderbilt, Florida International and Longwood.

Rutgers assistant Jimmy Carr monitors foreign players for head coach Fred Hill and Carr e-mailed Hasani back asking to see more games. At that point, Hasani sent Carr about eight games. At the same time, Carr reached out to Boban Savovic, a Montenegrin player who played at Newark East Side High School and Ohio State and could vouch for Hasani's game.

In September, Hasani accepted a scholarship to Rutgers, which opens the 2009-10 season at home Saturday against Marist.

"He's just a solid, fundamentally sound player, a tough hard-nosed kid," Hill said of Hasani. "I would compare him to Rimas Kaukenas, one of the toughest, hardest-nosed players I have ever coached. He's one of those guys who was under-recruited coming out of high school who turned out to be a terrific college player."

Of course, when Kaukenas came from Lithuania to Seton Hall in the late 1990s, the Internet wasn't nearly the powerful tool it is today.

Players around the world can now use the Internet to promote themselves. Coaches, in turn, can use it to evaluate players they would never be able to see otherwise.

"The Internet has become an incredible tool for recruiting," said Bryant College coach Tim O'Shea, who has seen Hasani play both in person at an event in Belgrade, Serbia, and on video. "It's just an incredible resource for recruiting now. It's just amazing how you can research from your desk a kid 7,000 or 8,000 miles way."

He added: "In the old days you got a VHS tape in the mail of some kid with some highlights. Now a lot of kids will send you a letter of introduction and link you to YouTube where you see video of them. They are all very sophisticated about how to market themselves."

O'Shea estimates that every coach in the country gets 50-100 e-mails a week from players looking to hook on with their program. He estimates about 5 percent of those come from foreign players.

The NCAA is still in the process of collecting data on how many international players are on rosters for the 2009-10 season, but Rob Orellana, the director of the Canarias Basketball Academy in the Canary Islands, said his program sent seven players to the Division I ranks this year alone and six more last season, including former St. John's and current Monmouth big man Phil Wait. The Academy now has 55 players from across Europe attending.

"This year we have our most talented group of players where we will have a minimum of 12 D-I players," Orellana saud in an e-mail.

The Bryant roster includes players from Australia, Senegal and Russia.

"That never would've happened without the Internet," O'Shea said.

"The recruiting game has become very international. For schools with more limited budgets like Bryant, the Internet has been a tool where we can do a lot of this international stuff and it basically costs nothing to research a prospect."

Sometimes those prospects turn into megastars that can turn a program around.

Dreaming of playing American college basketball, 7-3 former UConn star Hasheem Thabeet would sit in Internet cafes in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, and use Google to search for American colleges.

"That's what I used to do," Thabeet said last year. "Google something and just send e-mail to the basketball staff. I sent so many. Some of them I get a response, some of them I don't.

"I never thought one day I would play for a big school like UConn."

More often than not, the players who reach out to coaches on the Internet turn out to be unworthy of a scholarship.

"Most of the kids are not what we're looking for, which is code for saying they're not good enough," O'Shea said.

The best a coach can often hope for is that the player is a serviceable Division I talent.

That is what the Rutgers staff is hoping will happen with Hasani, who projects as a backup shooting guard behind budding star Mike Rosario.

"Rutgers was looking for an academically qualified point guard very late in the recruiting process," O'Shea said. "I think he was good take at that point under those circumstances. I think he can contribute."