I
decided to go a little different route this week with the blog. I get a lot of questions about recruiting and
how that part of my job goes, especially from people who aren’t college coaches. I thought I would share what types of
recruiting trips there are and details of a trip I went on last week to give
anyone interested an idea of what a recruiting trip is.
Recruiting in general
In
virtually all sports at the collegiate level, recruiting should be one of the
most important parts of the job. There
are lots of great coaches around the country that don’t have very good teams
because they don’t spend enough energy and attention on recruiting. At Wichita State we try hard to balance
coaching our teams to their potential with recruiting the best athletes we can
possibly get.
Recruiting
at Wichita State is very different from recruiting at a place like Oregon or
Florida. It’s also very different from
recruiting at a non-DI school. So my
comments are solely reflective of my experience at a mid-major type DI program. Both of my college coaching jobs have been at
similar type institutions (WSU and Kent State).
However,
I don’t want to get into recruiting philosophy here, but more what an actual
recruiting trip is.
Types of recruiting
trips
At
WSU, we have several different ways of recruiting. I would divide them into four categories:
Home
visit
– This is where a coach goes directly to the recruit’s home and talks with the
family. Sometimes it’s to get a recruit
initially interested in your school, other times it may be to try to “close the
deal” after a recruit has already taken an official visit to your campus. Home visits are always a lot of fun for me. I also think it’s exciting for a family to
have a college coach in their home and they usually do a great job of being
hospitable.
School
visit
– Most of the time these visits are done during the school day and coaches are
usually part of the visit at some level.
They are shorter meetings (because the kid usually has class) and it has
the same goals as the home visit.
Getting the high school coach involved in the recruiting process is an
important part of the equation so we tend to do a lot of school visits during
the year.
Attending
a practice session
– Sometimes you might attend a practice at the school (or club) of a
recruit. This way you can actually see
how the recruit interacts with their teammates and coaches in a practice
setting. You have to be careful,
however, and not talk to any athletes that aren’t old enough to be “recruited”
yet.
Recruiting
at a meet
– This type of recruiting takes on a variety of different circumstances
throughout the year. Actually seeing an
athlete compete in person is the best thing you can do to evaluate them. But you can’t actually talk to them until
they are done competing for that day so sometimes you end up watching a lot of
track meets where you aren’t seeing any recruitable athletes for a long
time. I’ve been to a lot of meets where
there is only one DI level athlete in the entire meet.
Miscellaneous
recruiting
– There are all kinds of ways to find athletes.
Nowadays with the prominence of the Internet you can virtually recruit
athletes without even seeing them in person.
Obviously communication with recruits is another significant part of the
process whether it be by phone, email, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, etc. DI track coaches aren’t allowed to text
recruits yet but that should change soon.
You have to be open to any route of recruiting to find the right type of
athletes for your program.
My trip last week
Ok,
just so everyone knows I can’t get into details about where I went and who I
talked to because of NCAA rules. So feel
free to make those details up with your favorite locales and athletes haha.
My
trip was a combination of all the type of recruiting trips I mentioned above. I had been planning it for a little over a
month. Sometimes these trips are very
spur of the moment but this one wasn’t.
Our budget at Wichita State is very good but we aren’t able to just hop
on a plane and spend $5000 without a thought.
Six weeks prior to this trip I found tickets for around $300 and went
ahead and bought them. Details like
hotels and rental cars can be last minute but Coach Rainbolt wouldn’t have let
me go if the plane ticket was $1000.
On
to a journal of my trip … We had got
back from the MVC Indoor Championships early Monday morning so I had 24 hours
to unpack, do laundry, repack and try to get as much work done at the office
before I left again.
Tuesday – I picked a late
morning flight (I really hate 6am flights) out of Wichita that had a layover
before reaching my final destination in the early evening. My destination for the week was a large city
so traffic and parking would be an issue.
I have a friend that runs a bed and breakfast in the city so I decided
to take their room. It actually worked
out great because it was cheap and I had people to hang out with in the
evenings. After getting checked into the
B&B, I went to grab some dinner and a few drinks with my friend.
Wednesday – When you have been
somewhere for a while (this is my 10th year at Wichita State), you
start to get to know people from all over the country. We’ve got several athletes from this
particular area of the country I was in, so I planned having lunch with a
current athlete’s parents. From where I
was it was about an hour drive to meet them.
Luckily I was near a high school where I met with an athlete after lunch
at his school. Next was a 90 minute
drive to a junior college where I know the coach and they have several good
athletes every year. He let me attend a
team meeting where he introduced me and talked about our program and then I
attended practice and met with several athletes until late in the evening. Even though I had only been to two places
today I had chatted with about eight really good athletes and they all seemed
pretty interested in Wichita State. I
got back to the B&B later that evening and went to a movie with a couple
friends before hitting the hay. I was
tired and slept really well.
Thursday – I had two more
locations today to visit that were about 100 miles apart so I got up and left
around 9:30am to make it to the first high school to meet an athlete during his
lunch period. This was one Coach Yost
had been recruiting. Meeting athletes
for other coaches on the staff is something we do often because, in the end, we’re
all on the same team and want to win so if taking a couple hours out of my trip
will help the team then that is what we need to do. Our head coach Steve Rainbolt is constantly
meeting with athletes that he doesn’t coach on recruiting trips and the rest of
us do the same on a smaller scale. The
next part of the day was one of those “hurry up and wait” deals. I wanted to see a particular athlete compete
in a meet and she was going to run at 3:15pm in her main event. I had about two hours to get there and
traffic was not helping. I roll into the
high school at 3:10pm and didn’t know the track wasn’t located on campus. Once getting directions from a fine member of
the custodial staff, I drove about a half mile to the track where there was no
parking available. I ended up parking on
a road about another half mile away and got a good workout running to the
track. I got there about 3:25pm and
luckily the meet was behind schedule and I got to see her run. Because she was scheduled to run the 4x4 at
the end of the meet (and run 2 other races), I wouldn’t be able to talk to her
for several hours. This is where the
waiting part of the day comes and every coach who is reading this knows what I’m
talking about. I got some food,
responded to all of my emails and text messages, sent a couple Snapchats to
friends and talked to a couple HS coaches at the meet. The 4x4 rolls around and it turns out this
particular athlete isn’t running. As the
meet ends I ask the coach if I can talk to the athlete and he thinks she may have
went home already. Awesome. He trying to call her with no answer. Her mom was running the concession stand so
she tries to call with no answer. I’m
about ready to give up and she walks up to meet me out of nowhere. She had been getting some treatment after the
meet. Whew! As the lights to the stadium came on, some 6
year old kids took over the infield for soccer practice. We had a great chat about her track career,
goals and Wichita State. Hopefully we’ll
get her on an official visit soon. I got
back to the B&B around 9pm that night and met my friends at what I was told
was a “Jazz Bar”. It ended up being a
local (and interesting) bookstore with an elderly French couple singing songs
(in French) to a crowd of 14 (I made 15).
It was such an intimate “concert” that when I opened the door to the
bookstore everyone turned and gave me a dirty look for not being on time. It was quite the bookstore as well, I almost
bought a book called “How to talk to you cat about gun safety.” Like I said it was an interesting bookstore.
 |
| My hotel key collection |
Saturday – This was my last
full day of the trip and the plan was to go to a couple of track meets. It’s early season competition so I wasn’t
necessarily going to see a lot of great stuff so I mostly went to meet more
coaches and say hello to the ones I had met the previous day. After four straight days of recruiting I was
getting pretty tired so I decided to finish the business part of the trip and
go to the beach. Sometimes on these
trips you get into such a groove that you forget where you’re at so I wanted to
enjoy a little bit of paradise while the sun was still up. I ended the evening by having dinner with
parents of another athlete on the team before driving to the original city I
had been in for a flight back to Wichita Sunday morning. Traffic was moving well and after getting bad
directions from my GPS a couple times, I finally arrived to my hotel around
11pm.
Sunday – Two flights (where
I wrote my previous long blog) and a long layover and then I was back in
Wichita by early evening. I had a few hours to do my laundry again and sleep
before BEGINNING the work week on Monday.
In
summary
– you never know if your recruiting efforts will yield the results you want
until athletes 1) sign to your school and 2) produce results over time to help
you accomplish the program’s goals.
Maybe in a couple years I’ll revisit this blog to see how it turned
out. The last time I made this particular
recruiting trip it resulted in the eventual signing of four Shockers that have
helped us win many MVC championships.
You don’t always hit a home run in recruiting, howver. Sometimes you just have to fight and claw to
get on base and then you hope to eventually have a big inning. But you’ll never have a chance to win if you
don’t step up to the plate and take a few hacks. I took a bunch of swings this week.
NCAA Indoor
Championships
We
had two athletes compete at the NCAA Championships this weekend and both took
home 12th place finishes and 2nd Team All-American
honors. Pretty solid results for a
couple of first time NCAA qualifiers.
Congrats to Breanne Borman (Pentathlon) and Jared Belardo (Long Jump) on
a great indoor season!
Outdoor season is
beginning!
As
quick as indoor has ended, it’s already time for the outdoor season. We’re gonna change things up this year and
head to San Antonio with our team for a meet over Spring Break. We’ll head out Tuesday and train in Texas for
a couple days then compete Friday/Saturday.
Our multi’s are actually leaving today (Sunday) for a Hept/Dec at Rice
University on Tuesday/Wednesday before joining us over in San Antonio.
Indoor
is always fun but outdoor track is what we really try to prepare our team for!
Movie update
Because
of all the other topics on this blog recently, I haven’t had much in the way of
movie commentary for the eight people who read this blog for that reason. Since I reviewed The Revenant in late January I have seen six movies. Here they are in the order I saw them:
13 Hours: The Secret
Soldiers of Benghazi
– This movie has made headlines because of the political connections to Hilary
Clinton but those connections weren’t the focal point of the movie, and I’m
glad they weren’t. It was focused on the
men who tried to make sense out of the chaos that occurred after an American
ambassador was killed in Libya. Directed
by Michael Bay (Transformers, Armageddon), it did have a little too much “Hollywood”
for me but overall I really liked it.
The struggle these soldiers went through was something I couldn’t
imagine and it’s an important story that needs to be seen by everyone no matter
what your political leanings are because of the sacrifice these soldiers make
for you and me to do what we want everyday.
7/10.
Hail, Caesar! – I’m always excited
when a new Coen Brothers movie comes out (Big Lebowski, True Grit, No Country
for Old Men) and I also like George Clooney (who is from near where I grew
up). And while this movie had lots of
interesting characters and scenes, much of it either went over my head or didn’t
connect. Maybe I’ll need to watch it
again to appreciate it, which is how many Coen Brothers movie are. The basic plot is about how Josh Brolin is a
Hollywood studio executive who is trying to keep all these characters in line
during the 1950s. It has elements of
politics, religion and Hollywood insider info that just came off confusing in
parts. Like I said it might be better
than my first impression but I give it a 6/10 upon initial viewing.
Race – I’ve been eagerly
anticipating this Jesse Owens biopic for some time. When one of my favorite comedic actors, Jason
Sudeikis, was announced as the Ohio State track coach Larry Snyder, I was
further intrigued. One thing I was
worried about, however, is how seriously track and field would be taken by the
director and producers of the movie.
Obviously this movie had a lot of elements in regards to race and
discrimination besides the historical track and field accomplishments of Jesse
Owens so I knew it would get the typical Hollywood treatment in that
regard. Generally I thought it was a
good and entertaining movie despite the over dramatism of the plot with one
exception – the track and field scenes.
Stephan James played Jesse Owens and looked athletic for an actor and
his running wasn’t too bad but the scenes of him long jumping were hard to
watch (as well as German Luz Long).
Jesse Owens jumped over 26 feet in 1936, a mark that would still be one
of the top in the world today, and these guys looked like they were jumping 16
feet out there. Surely they could’ve cut
to some angles and used actual long jumpers that could jump 23 feet or so. The 4x1 handoffs were atrocious as well, not
even close to what it really looked it.
Anyways, other than those goofs that most non-track fans wouldn’t notice
it was a good movie. 7/10.
The Shickles – So when I was on
my recruiting trip, I hung out with an actor friend and we went to a premiere
for this movie that another friend was in.
It was a low budget dramedy (drama and comedy) that was part of a film
festival in the city we were in. A lot
of the money was raised through donations and it was interesting talking to
some of the people who knew how the movie was made, including one of the main
actors. I imagine it only cost about
$100,000 to make and was a labor of love for the director with very little
chance to make any real money. There are
tons of movies like this made every year and I enjoyed getting to see a
different side of the industry. There is
such a large number of actors, directors, writers, etc. that work very hard for
little money to try to make a career out of the arts and usually these people
fail but I admire the effort and enthusiasm in what may seem like a waste of
energy to people around them. Hey I’m a
track coach and people don’t understand that either so I get it. As for the movie it was about an eccentric
Jewish family in the days after their beloved grandparents deaths. I recognized a few of the actors from other
movies or TV shows but there was no one really famous in the cast, however the
acting was very good throughout. The
directing and editing were not as great so it gets 5/10. Go out and support independent films when you
get a chance!
Eddie the Eagle – Another sports
biopic but this was very different from Race.
This was about English ski jumper and Olympian Eddie Edwards and his
sometimes funny and sometimes sad attempt to make the Winter Olympics in 1988. Edwards was a former downhill skier who wasn’t
good enough and realized there were no British ski jumpers so he tried to make
the Olympics in that event. He dealt
with many obstacles, mainly people who didn’t believe in him, and eventually
realized his goal. Taron Egerton played
Edwards and they got Hugh Jackman to play his coach. It was a good movie, just a little short of
being really good because you just knew it was a little over the top in trying
to make Edwards look ridiculous. The
real story is very amazing and I would’ve probably rather seen a documentary on
ESPN about it. 7/10.
Next time
I’ll
be back to talk about our Spring Break trip to San Antonio and the beginning of
the outdoor season!
Until
then, thank you for reading and Go Shocks!!!
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