Today, July 31, for all intents and purposes, is the last day of the summer recruiting season. August brings with it the start of actual practices for most of the high schools in the country and folks are getting geared up to think about football. For the last two calendar months our entire staff has done extensive work towards recruiting every single day. Whether at a camp, on the phone, evaluating film, working through emails with prospects, or hosting our own camps, every guy every day has been focused on working to assemble our first recruiting class together. To that end, already on the last day of July, we have young men that are expressing possible interest in officially joining the program; months before that has never happened here. It seems as though the entire yearly schedule has evolved to the point that besides the game weeks, the summer season brings with it the most intensity and we are left to wonder in amazement where the last sixty days have gone.
I’ve been really luck in my short coaching career. When I was first given the opportunity to off-campus recruit, it was already the era of SmartPhones, GPS’s, and constant communication with high school coaches via email and other mediums. My brief time as a college coach has also ushered in the “prospect camp” era and all that comes with it. This time period and those tools allow us all to be more well-informed, more efficient, and theoretically more productive in recruiting than coaches in different generations. That being said, I would be fired up to be able to try it the old way that mentors in the profession have described.
A trusted source from a solid high school program calls you up after that season and says he has a great kid that is an outstanding leader with all of the intangibles. You wait for the film to come by enail mail and bam, there it is, one of the pieces of the future of the program before your eyes. The phone call is placed and the high school coach and you arrange for your visit to the school and kid’s home during which time you will actually spend the entire time getting to know the young man, his family, school, and his essential values and character. In addition to this, and more importantly, you and the young man will spend most of your time discussing two things: the education he will receive at your institution and the football he will play there. That’s it. Bottomline. End of Story.
Every single individual coach in college football has their own unique opinion about recruiting. I have never ever met any two who have exactly the same mind-set, philosophy, practices, or methods. This fact has always been amazing to me because the fundamental difference between being a college coach and coaching football at other levels is that we have to recruit; without players there is no game and without good players there is no job. One would think that there would be ONE way to do it RIGHT or some kind of manual to follow. The fact remains that it’s all subjective, persists to be much more of an art than a science, and no matter how hard we try the only point that can usually be agreed upon is that more is better. I know that the above italicized section is an overly idealized and romanticized potential piece of fictional history but it seems that the pendulum has been only swinging the way of more, more, more in and hopefully we may be entering a time where it will swing back.