Part I; Part II

Often viewed as on the other side of the wall, college recruiters have the job of identifying athletes who can help their football team both immediately and down the road, and then they set to work convincing the player that theirs is the best option for college.

The first step is to sort through all the tape that the high school coaches send to the universities.

“The ideal tape is two minutes,” a recruiting coordinator at a BCS school who requested anonymity said. “You’ve got to do something spectacular, different, or special in the first seven or eight plays. There are so many kids who send in tape. During the season we’ll get crates and crates of tape a day, and if someone actually watched it – which is not a guarantee – they want to see something immediately.”

Tape is especially important because NCAA regulations forbid universities from visiting one high school more than once to see them play a game, meaning the amount of in-person impressions are very small, forcing recruiters to look at tape.

“You can only go to a school a certain amount of times,” he said. “You can’t just go to DeMatha every week. You are allowed to go once. There are times you are allowed to go more and you are allowed to go less, but you can only go see DeMatha play one game. If you’re recruiting that school and they have a reputation for having talent, you should know before you go who the players are.”

This adds importance to the internet recruiting sites because it allows the recruiters to sort recruits by school, so they could have a rough idea of who they’re supposed to be scouting when they go to the game that week.

“Generally kids come onto the radar through the internet, but it’s really just a numbers system,” the recruiter said. “Just because kids are on there doesn’t mean these guys are good. It just means that someone thinks they’re good.”

Depending on the kid, a recruiter’s job is to find which tool in his pitch arsenal would be best to sway a kid and his family.

“You try to sell the whole package,” the coordinator said. “You need to find out what is important to the kid, and to his parents, determine how involved they are, and then there’s a lot of things it could be. You have to feel it out, get some background information from the kid’s coach about the situation and then you try to angle yourself towards that individual.”

With a premium on face-to-face interactions, it is only natural that colleges look to find other ways to make potential recruits perform for them before they have to offer the athlete a scholarship. Enter the camp.

“Camps are big, because they want to get you on campus,” Good Counsel coach Bob Milloy said. “They want you to see their facilities, and then when they get you on campus, they get a chance to look at you too. They can compare you to other kids and test you in different events and see you perform. The one-day camps are very, very important, so if your guy is interested in going to a school, you want to go to the camp and you want to impress the coaches on your ability and your personality.”

One downside of camps, however, is that less fortunate families cannot afford to send their kids to distant camps or spend the night any place, so schools have invented one-day camps to alleviate some of the stress, but they still lose out on some athletes who just cannot afford to go.

Another factor that comes into play in recruiting is the sway of the area coaches at the university – meaning they are authorized to offer more scholarships in their area because of their position in the staff or the quality of the area.

“If they get players out of one area, and if the area has a boatload of players and they’ve been successful with the players they got,” Good Counsel recruiting coordinator Kevin McFadden said. “They say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Go back to the same area, because they’ve got a good relationship with the coaches and the players there and we build a relationship with those guys. They’ve got great players and studious kids.”

Some famous pipelines through the DC area include UCONN, Illinois, Louisville and a developing one in Miami (Aubrey Hill coached at Pitt and recruited in DC, and now he has moved to recruiting the area for Miami).

“A lot of schools are making a push to get down to this area because there is an enormous amount of talent,” Friendship Collegiate head coach Aazaar Rahim said. “They make sure that their coach recruits this area hard. It’s not the institutions as much as it is the actual coaches.”

And once a scholarship is offered, the colleges face a waiting game that they’re becoming less and less interested in playing.

“The colleges offer more players now, and they tell the kids “we’ve offered eight linebackers, and the first three to take it we’re going to take.” And that’s the way they do it,” Milloy said. “That’s good because more kids get offered, but they’ve got to make their decision to commit early or they’re going to lose their spot. In the old days the coach would come in December, watch film and then offer him and he’d sign in February and that’s the end of it.”

And if all else fails in getting kids recruited, there’s always false advertising.

“One year we got mail for someone, day after day after day from every university almost, and the boy never even existed,” DeMatha head coach Bill McGregor said. “I wanted to show the parents one day how arbitrary the whole thing was. I put his name out there, and next thing you know he got more letters than anybody. He wasn’t real.”

Some high school coaches are willing to go further in the deception than others.

“Recruiting has become a business,” the recruiter said. “A lot of people see scholarships as a status symbol. It’s possible if you have a decent player, enough money and enough time, you can manufacture a Division I athlete with good video editing, either speeding up tape, or cropping in other guys into their highlight tape.”