Every high school athlete with the goal of playing in college must ride the roller coaster that is the recruiting process. With its ups and downs, twists and turns and a loop or two thrown in for good measure, there’s nothing quite like it.
It’s also not to be taken lightly.
Taking the process seriously requires a lot of extra work on the athlete’s behalf, piling on to what is already a busy schedule with school and day-to-day sport activities. Meanwhile, National Signing Day, commitments and camps tend to hog the national spotlight.
It’s a mix of hard work, patience, persistence and promotion that athletes such as Durant running back Cam Myers are familiar with. Myers has had a swell spring, watching his profile get noticed and racking up NCAA Division I offers.
“When I think about it, when I look back at the times I didn’t have offers and I wasn’t talking to coaches, I’d much rather be in this position,” Myers says.
His mailbox is stuffed with all kinds of, well, stuff. He’s got a pile of business cards, each seemingly attempting to outdo the other in terms of cost, materials and creativity. Rutgers’ foldable cards are followed by Temple’s see-through plastics, adorned with a pair of glaring owl eyes. One almost forgets about Air Force, USF and the others that follow more traditional templates. He’s got Photoshopped images of himself from several schools, often repurposed to show the digital Myers wearing their jersey. He’s got program materials and other correspondence from Appalachian State. He’s gotten wolf-shaped, foldable cards — which his father jokingly refers to as “love notes” — from Arkansas State.
With no commitment set in stone, Myers is firmly in the stage where the most decision-making is required on the athlete’s part. With his game tape already making the rounds and coaches regularly hitting him up, Myers must examine each school from top to bottom and begin the process of making a commitment.
“You have to think about more than just football,” Myers says. “You have to think about academics and what you want to study in college … that determines a big part of your future.”
In this stage, athletes have to navigate crowded waters without rocking the boat too much. Offers that exist one day may be pulled in the blink of an eye, though it’s also true that offers that don’t exist will pop up near the end of the line. It’s the kind of thing that really tries one’s patience, Myers says, and rewards those who don’t jump the gun.
“It was really hard watching local players getting offers from all the schools I wanted offers from,” he says. “I just had to stay patient and wait for my time.”
Every athlete’s needs are different, and Myers is no exception. His ideal school would carry two traits: a need — not a “want,” he emphasizes — to have him on the football roster, and a strong psychology program. The National Football League would be a nice career path for Myers if the opportunity ever presents itself, but it’s not something he’s expecting to do after school.
No matter what program Myers or any other athlete settles on, there are several things that must be kept in check for the coaches that come knocking.
“The first thing is grades, second thing is character and then they look at the film,” Durant head coach Mike Gottman says. “They move on to the next guy real quick.”
Athletes must be held accountable in and out of the classroom, but they may not always be able to do it on their own. That’s where the high school programs can be of extra help, besides allowing the kids to play their sports and collecting film to be used.
High school coaches often act as the liaisons, the middle men, between the athletes and the colleges.
“The colleges come through to us,” Gottman says. “(They) either email or they just come to the school … they know who they’re looking for. We provide film, Hudl accounts, transcripts.”
The coaches’ networks of college coaches can be invaluable. At Durant, Gottman and offensive line coach Wesley Wyatt are known to be particularly active in getting kids and coaches connected. The 2016-17 school year was, in fact, Gottman’s best ever in terms of sending Durant players to college football programs: 17 Cougars will play NCAA and NAIA football in the fall.
High schools’ help may be enough for some athletes, but others will seek out extra help for maximum results. Myers has worked with a pair of organizations designed specifically to get high school football players into college programs: Gerold Dickens’ Next Level Sports Academe and Hasani Harper’s H2 Athletes.
Myers says both Dickens’ and Harper’s support have been crucial to his success in the recruiting scene.
These groups raise profiles through camp and combine attendance, media communications and 7-on-7 exhibition tournaments, among other methods. While Durant and other high schools do like to take kids to summer tournaments to compete, the primary goal in those cases is to make the team better for Durant football reasons over individual spotlights.
Dickens says that the work of programs such as his is meant to complement the work that high schools do.
“It’s an all-around process, whether it’s the high school coach saying a few things, it’s Big County Preps or it’s us,” he says. “Everybody plays a role in the recruiting part of the player. What makes it easy is that they’ve been to the camps and it helps us promoting their name. The more people you have talking about you, the better.”
Myers will hit the camp scene with Next Level this month, touring colleges around the Southeast and participating in combine and live game activities with highly-ranked players from the region.
Like the other athletes making such moves, he hopes that all his hard work will pay off with an offer from the right school. Knowing where his work has gotten him, Myers thinks it’s about to be that time.
“It’s come now,” he says.