By Ryan Leshko & Laura Lydic
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writers
The Problem
Top high school athletes spend a lot of time thinking about where to go to college. They reach out to schools and, in many cases, are recruited by coaches. Recruitment often involves road trips or a plane ride. Once athletes meet the coaches in person, they usually go on a campus tour and look at the facilities. They also meet potential teammates and professors as part of this tour.
Coaches, in normal times, scout players in person and speak to coaches and parents. That often means traveling across the country during the off-season or between games to visit recruits.
But during the COVID-19 pandemic, most of that travel and in-person recruiting came to a halt. Over the last year, recruiting has largely consisted of Zoom meetings, phone and FaceTime calls and virtual tours. Whereas larger athletic departments often had an advantage with big recruiting budgets, this year everyone was on a more level playing field.
A study conducted by the Aspen Institute asked people who work in sports what innovations and/or disruptions to sports during the pandemic will likely become permanent after the pandemic? On the recruiting front, Ross Dellenger from Sports Illustrated said there’s an upside to virtual recruiting.
“Virtual recruiting has been a hit,” Dellenger told SI. “Not only has it given coaches more of a life outside of football — less travel, for example — it has created deep bonds between player and coach. I expect more dead recruiting periods (when coaches can’t recruit) and fewer contact periods in future NCAA calendars.”
The organization Next College Student Athlete gathered data from a survey of 380 college coaches about recruiting. It took place in two different time frames: March-July 2019 and March-July 2020. The study found there was a 20 percent increase in college coach logins to do virtual recruiting from March-July 2019 to March-July 2020. In addition, in the same time frame, there was a 17 percent increase in recruiting profiles that showed up on searches from college coaches.
According to this same study, athletic department recruiting budgets have been impacted by the pandemic. Twenty-seven percent of coaches expected their recruiting budget to be intact, which leaves at least 73 percent of coaches who believed that there will have to be cuts to their budget.
At Towson University, the pandemic made it difficult to recruit not only outside the state, but inside it as well. Coaches could only look at film of players through live streams of games and, in some cases, highlight mixtapes. This proved problematic at times. Live streams would sometimes malfunction. In other cases, when coaches received the games, they got the games in full, which made it difficult to focus on the specific recruit they had in mind.
With recruiters unable to attend the athletes’ high school games in person, as well as prospects not being able to visit campus prior to committing to the university, forming relationships has become even more difficult during a global pandemic. This has affected the way Towson University women’s basketball coach Diane Richardson recruits new athletes.
Because Towson is considered a mid-major school, it does not receive the same financial support and resources as other top-tier schools, like the University of Connecticut, which has one of the top women’s basketball programs in the country.
“Typically, you’ll have smaller schools or mid mid-major and we’re considered a mid-major school and then you have the major schools where, you know, when you’re recruiting physically, you can be there just like they are,” Richardson said. “But the difference in resources during a pandemic, they’ve got all these fancy videos and they have all these fancy Zooms and all that because they had the money and resources to do that where we don’t and, and recruiting, you know, I can sit next to Geno Auriemma and we’re seeing the same thing. So that makes it more, you know, more parody in recruiting.”
The NCAA implemented a “dead period” in recruiting on March 13, 2020. This meant that coaches in all athletic departments could not host nor visit recruits. It will be just over 14 months since in-person recruiting was halted by the time the dead period is set to be lifted on June 1.
The Solution
Towson women’s basketball coaches were no longer able to attend games and tournaments over the last year-plus. Instead, they have utilized game film and streaming services to find prospects.
Another big part of the recruitment process is college visits, where athletes are shown the campus. Seeing SECU Arena and meeting the team was an integral part of recruitment for women’s basketball players — but that had to stop when the pandemic struck.
Towson made a virtual tour for prospective students to resolve the issue of not being able to come see campus. Since the NCAA was in a dead period there was no in person contact allowed. Prospects were only able to see the campus and the facilities virtually.
In addition to phone calls, Zoom and FaceTime, another creative way of connecting the team and staff with prospective athletes was social media. Meeting the staff and players is an instrumental part of getting a recruit to sign with a school. Towson was able to contact players and staff with prospects in their social media accounts, as well as on Zoom meetings.
“Social media, staying on on Twitter, staying on Instagram and posting stories and posting highlights like we did with Kionna Jeter, being drafted, things like that,” Richardson said. “We signed a couple recruits that are big recruits that were transfers. So we posted them in a new town in uniform and their stats. All of us as a coaching staff have tried to do something on social media every day, because kids are watching social media.”
Insights
With the pandemic, players have mostly had similar experiences given the restrictions. They communicated with their coaches through phone calls, text messages, emails and Zoom meetings. Mariah Wilson is a senior at Lancaster Mennonite High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and she is one of Towson’s newest recruits for the women’s basketball team. Her decision to come to Towson was easy because she was able to visit Towson before the pandemic.
It was important for her to be recruited by colleges, even though it came during the pandemic. Additionally, it was during the pandemic that her expectations of the recruiting process were adjusted.
“I didn’t expect a bunch of colleges to really like start recruiting me and keep at it because it’s going to be harder.” Wilson said. “Like, I didn’t want to go super far now because I’m like, ‘I don’t want to go across the world’, and then COVID happened and say, ‘this keeps going on now, how do I get home? What if I can’t go there? What if I can’t play?’ So just thinking about like staying local, too, was like a main thing and being close to home.”
For coaches, building relationships was the most difficult part of recruiting online. Coaches had to adapt. For example, coaches at Towson would be seen throughout campus trying to give virtual tours over FaceTime to prospective recruits. In addition, prospective recruits would receive the opportunity to talk over FaceTime or Zoom with current athletes.
As part of adapting, coaches used resources such as FaceTime and Zoom, which were the methods to recruit international students pre-pandemic, to recruit domestic students. The key to making it work was the ability of coaches to use the resources to their advantage and how creative they can be with those resources. This also depended on how coaches could adapt to a Zoom meeting over a phone call. Coaches had to be well-versed in these methods in order for it work. The goal remained the same: to give students the chance to see if Towson was the place for them.
Evidence of Effectiveness
Virtual recruiting saved universities money while still allowing coaches to build relationships with recruits. Because of the success of virtual recruiting, the NCAA may include more of this type of recruiting instead of in-person recruiting into their calendar.
Most of recruiting consisted of looking at footage from high school games and determining whether or not the college would target that prospect. B.J. Dunne, head coach of Gettysburg College’s men’s basketball team, told NCSA: “For us as a staff, we were like, who are our top 30 guys. Let’s just identify those and go all-in with our chips. We are just going to really build relationships with these guys, we’re going to talk to their high school coaches and AAU coaches, we’re going to try to get to know a ton of information about them. We’re going to be hopeful that this pays off for us.”
Both Dunne and Richardson were able to fill out their rosters with players from out of state.
“I drove to campus and gave a tour while the family was in the car behind me and we communicated through the Bluetooth in the car,” Dunne told NCSA. “He committed, so I may have to try that more often. You have to get creative. You have to go above and beyond.”
Limitations
Although these solutions have been effective, there are limitations. Just like with online school, online recruitment was reliant on technology. Low-income families, areas and schools have great athletes who could be prospects. However, low-income areas potentially lack the needed technology to get seen by universities.
In addition to the probable limitation in the prospect pool, there is hesitation from coaches and players. Richardson mentioned in an interview how not being able to attend games has led to hesitation as to who she is recruiting.
“It’s just not the same, some of the photos you can’t really tell or get a good look at a recruit,” said Richardson. “So, we’ve kind of had to hold back a little bit because the film doesn’t look that good or, the player may not look that well.”