This week DCSportsFan is going to be going behind the scenes of the intricate courting process involved with college football. The three-part series will cover recruiting from the three parties involved: the high school coaches, the college recruiters, and - of course - the players.

Today’s entry is the high school coach.

High School Head Coach

Having been with the athlete for some of his most formative years (in the football sense), it is little wonder that the person who begins the recruiting process is oftentimes an athlete’s high school coach.

After a season of football, it would seem that there is little left to do other than lick the wounds inflicted by the gridiron and begin thinking about how to improve next year, but the high school coach’s eyes are even further down the road.

In January DeMatha head coach Bill McGregor sits down to fill out over 100 questionnaires sent out to coaches about their prospective football team for next season. Once these letters get back to the universities is when the true interest begins.

“We ask the kid where are you interested in going?” good Counsel head coach Bob Milloy said. “The colleges come to us. In the month of December, we had 64 Division I schools come to our school. They come to our school and we’ve got the highlight tape, we’ve got the transcript and we have the kid. It’s one-stop shopping.”

Later on in May both schools have workout dates in which college recruiters can drop by and watch prospective recruits work out, which gives them a great opportunity to see the athletes up close and be able to measure their speed and agility.

If the recruiters want to see a player in a game situation, however, he’ll have to use the universal currency of football coaches everywhere – gametape.

This isn’t regular game tape, because instead of having every play, the high school coaches make a personalized highlight reel of the greatest plays that a player makes in the season, which is then sent out to schools that the coaches think may have interest in him.

“You want to put those eye-dropping plays at the beginning to get a coach’s attention,” Friendship Collegiate head coach Aazaar Rahim said. “It can’t be too short, it can’t be a minute long, because a red flag would be raised of how come it wasn’t more? It shouldn’t be too long because they may get tired of looking at it.”

And if those recruiters didn’t get enough tape initially? They shouldn’t worry, because the coaches send out more.

“During the season, all we do is – after the first four games – we send out tapes to colleges,” Rahim continued. “Nowadays, especially with seniors, to wait until after the season for a kid to get a Division I scholarship is going to work against them. Division 1A schools get their commitments in, so what you want to do is get it out as quick as possible. Especially twelfth graders.”

The length of the tape varies from school to school: answers among coaches interviewed range from DeMatha’s total of three minutes to H.D. Woodson’s average of 15 minutes per tape.

Once tape is disseminated, the coaches answer a round of questions from college coaches, but they’re asking about something that may surprise the casual pigskin fan.

“Usually the first question they ask is about character, then into grades, and then what I think about him as a football player,” McGregor said.

With the surging budgets of Division 1 football programs, it’s little wonder that schools are looking to take less and less risks on the character side of their athletes, and athletes that qualify academically also have a huge leg up in recruiting, because it saves the college coaches headaches and time.

“They put a lot of money in these kids, and they can’t have them coming on these campuses and beating up their girlfriend or stealing things or things like that. Character and being a well-rounded person has become a lot more important to them. Personally, I’m very very happy to see that that is happening.”

In the DC public school circuit, there is more trouble with becoming clearinghouse eligible (which is NCAA jargon for having above a 2.0 GPA, which is the minimum to be academically qualifying.) Rahim said that one or two of his athletes is ineligible every year, and Fuller seems to agree with that sentiment.

“The DC area has always been known for good athletes, it’s just a matter of our athletes getting exposed to a college recruiter,” Fuller said. “I think a lot of our athletes fail because of the academic part of their ability. There’s nothing wrong with their athletic ability, it’s more about the academic side of them. All coaches such as myself stress academics first, but it’s up to them to be responsible and take care of that responsibility.”

Assuming a student is academically qualified and has the physical abilities to play football at the collegiate level, each and every coach expressed a willingness to help the athlete find the college of his choice.

“It’s something that I love to do and I look forward to doing, and it’s also part of our responsibility to help our kids to get into college,” McGregor said. “I tell the kids and the parents if you play hard for DeMatha I promise I’m going to turn around and play for you and do everything possible to get you a scholarship.”

Sometimes that can lead to a sticky situation involving playing time, because players need it to amass highlights for game tape, but the coach has to juggle the recruiting aspect and the task of winning the game at hand, oftentimes simultaneously.

“In my situation, I play the seniors more,” Rahim said. “It’s a no-brainer. But if it’s a young kid that’s a lot better, you just hope for certain things. You definitely want to play your seniors, but I’m not going to play a senior if he’s not as good as the underclassman. It’s not good for your team, and that may divide your team.”

Fortunately for these coaches, those duel mandates rarely turn out to be mutually exclusive goals: players who play well both help themselves and their team out by playing well.

“My job is basically to make sure that these players are put in position to be players and to make plays on the field as the head football coach,” Fuller said. “When the recruiting process comes around, if I have put them in a position to make plays, they should get recognized.”

Check back for part two Tuesday and part three Wednesday.