Year-round ‘grind’
A year-round process will finally come to an end for the Utah State University football coaches today at 1 p.m.
They will announce the 25 junior college and high school players coming to USU to play football – after a recruiting effort that cost the school $130,000, said head coach Mick Dennehy.
The complicated and expensive process of football recruiting takes nine coaches working 11 months of the year.
“It’s a grind,” Dennehy said. “I think a lot of people perceive that once the season is over, we just sit around the office and eat ice cream.”
The logistics
Dennehy and his eight coaches make hundreds of phone calls and dozens of flights to all over the West and Texas and Florida to try to refine a list that starts with 12,000 names and actively recruit 100 to 150 student athletes. They are even recruiting during USU’s football season. Only July is “a fairly relaxed month,” Dennehy said.
And it is at its busiest right before national letter of intent day – today. It is the day when students send a fax with their signature binding them to the university.
Two weeks ago, Dennehy visited 10 prospects at home in four states over two days.
“That’s typical this kind of year,” Dennehy said.
Busy is also typical for the basketball team.
Assistant coach Randy Rahe said the coaching staff that recruits only has two weeks off in a year – one in May and one in August. In the search for five players this year, the coaches have looked all across the nation – most heavily in California. USU went as far as Illinois to find junior college-transfer Ronnie Ross.
And they are done – for the most part.
Unlike football, basketball has two signing days, one in the fall and one in the spring. The first one is in the middle of November and the most important, Rahe said, because most of the good players are taken in that period.
The USU basketball team was fairly successful in the first signing day. The coaches signed five of six players they need for next season.
The pitch
The basketball season signed a former USU player, three junior college players and one high school player – Sky View High School’s Nate Harris.
Harris said he was sold early. He said he got along with the coaches and worked out with the players in the summer. The proximity from USU to his home (he has lived in Cache Valley his whole life) was a major factor, as well.
Harris, who is considered by many to be the best basketball player in Utah, considered the University of Utah and Brigham Young University, but he only visited USU and signed early.
“I wanted to get the whole process out of the way,” he said.
Rahe said getting recruits to visit the campus early is key. Most signees only visit one or two schools before committing.
Dennehy also emphasized the home visits. He and his coaches make at least four house calls.
“It’s so important to get to know the parents,” he said.
There, the coaches can create a rapport with parents, answer questions and get a feel for what the coaches are like.
Both coaches agreed personality matters – on both sides. The coaches want good, coachable kids, while players and the parents want know that they can trust the coaches.
That’s why a coaching change can hurt recruiting. Women’s soccer, which also has its signing day today, is a good example. Even though head coach Jen Kennedy-Croft was a USU assistant coach before, it put them behind schedule.
“Players want to know who they are playing for,” she said.
But in the end, the current players are the clincher.
“They have to like the coach, but the players end up selling [the program],” Kennedy-Croft said.
The problems
All those trips to the prospects’ homes and their paid trips to USU cost a lot of money.
The football, basketball and women’s soccer teams all use around 10 percent of their budgets($45,000 for basketball and $5-7,000 for soccer) . That includes travel, ticket, housing and phone calls.
“And it’s probably not enough,” Kennedy-Croft said. “It’s a huge portion of our job.”
Even with all that money, a player will sometimes verbally commit and then change his or her mind and go to a rival school. One of the more highly publicized examples was Cameron Koford. The Weber State University basketball transfer had verbally committed to USU but bolted to Utah without contacting the USU coaches. But those happen every year, Rahe said. They learn to take them in stride.