Giving Their Best Pitch Face-to-Face
CSU coaches happy to have recruits back on campus
The thought is unpleasant.
Become a first-year head coach in a new state, a new conference and try to recruit the program with minimal contact. Keeley Hagen is thankful that’s not her scenario.
Three days after she was announced as Colorado State’s next head coach for women’s soccer, she was on the road, watching prospective Rams. She was on a field, introducing herself and having a face-to-face conversations, pitching her vision of her program at Colorado State.
“It’s huge. It’s the personal interaction that makes all the difference,” Hagen said. “Student-athletes come to campus, get a feel, meet the head coach and the staff and the players, and that’s the experience. They are going to be around the coaches and the team the most, and that personal interaction is enormous.”
The year prior, coaches in every program at every school across the nation were making decisions on student-athletes based on phone calls, virtual meetings and limited tape to watch as high school programs across the country had seasons pared down at the minimum or lost them altogether.
It was a bad spot for both sides as student-athletes and coaches were making long-term decisions without all the answers.
“I would have hated to be a kid and a parent in that situation,” CSU football coach Steve Addazio said. “That was tough. You’re looking for good marriages, and there wasn’t a lot of dating. From this point forward, it should be normal. But up to June 1, it was the furthest thing from it.”
It was literally a dark period for college recruiting. Due to guidelines stemming from the global pandemic, official visits were cancelled. There were no football games recruits could attend, no seeing what campus life was like when students were shuffling back and forth to classes.
If a prospective student-athlete visited a school for an unofficial visit, they did it on their own dime. And while on campus, they were not allowed to be toured around by coaches or current student-athletes.
Carolina Buffaloe will join Jen Fisher’s softball team this year, and she has never been to campus. Out of Laguna Hills High School in California, she hasn’t been to Fort Collins, but has visited Colorado with her club team.
She could talk to Fisher on the phone, and even players on roster. But meeting them and seeing how the Colorado State program clicks during a practice, which was out of the question. It was a leap of faith in making a decision which will affect the next four years of her life, but Buffaloe felt she did the best she could considering the circumstances.
“Yes, it would have been nice to have the full experience,” she said. “I think talking to some of the players, getting their experience and how they enjoyed campus helped, and I had pictures, but, yes, I feel it would have been nice to go on an official visit and actually see it before making a decision, but I think you just have a gut feeling. You just want to go with it.”
When she finally gets to campus, she has a checklist, some of which seems normal. She wants to find a good burger in town. She needs to know where the nearest Chick-fil-A is to campus.
And most importantly?
“Meet Jen Fisher,” Buffaloe said.
I would have hated to be a kid and a parent in that situation. That was tough. You’re looking for good marriages, and there wasn’t a lot of dating.Steve Addazio
Women’s basketball coach Ryun Williams believes if he can get a student-athlete to Colorado State, the campus and Fort Collins sells itself. He praised the work done by RamVision, producing videos of campus and the surrounding area, but standing on campus and seeing the ‘A’ on the mountainside, or visiting Horsetooth Reservoir or Old Town has more impact in person than via production.
Zoom calls with recruits and their parents were nice, too, but again, they don’t carry the same weight. It’s why he and his staff – like many others in the athletic department – took immediate advantage to extend invitations for recruits to come visit as soon as the window opened in June.
Because it will close again in July.
“It’s just the personal interaction. It’s so important, and learning about each other,” Williams said. “That was really, really difficult to do over Zoom and over a short period of time. Our business, recruiting, is about relationships. Face-to-face is the best way to do that, and you take that out of the formula, you have to get creative.
“It was like Christmas morning when we had some kids on campus unofficially again. Facial expressions, being able to see those, was fun. It’s human interaction, and being able to sell this place that you’re so passionate about, face to face, it was fun. Not just from our end, but for the student-athlete end. To get out and see something with your own eyes and feel it. Kids know when they know. When they step on a campus and meet coaches, to have that open back up, it’s nice.”
It was a rush, for sure, in more ways than one. All of them – coaches and prospective student-athletes – are in a hurry to make up for lost time. Visits and camps may be taking place again, but coaches are months behind schedule in the recruiting process, and so are the athletes. They are all trying to fit in as much as they can.
Hagen noted the 2022 soccer class still is in a bit of a pinch, but for the 2023 class, which she could start reaching out to this week, will likely not shoulder the burden in terms of visits, but it doesn’t mean the class, and even a few beyond, won’t experience the ripple effects of the pandemic.
“The impact is going to be lasting for the next four years, because right now the transfer portal is enormous, and again, people are making decisions based on little information,” Hagen said. “During the pandemic, they were making decisions based off of little to no information, because things are constantly changing. The student-athletes, that’s what they had to do.”
Williams, and a host of other coaches, are saying the same exact thing and seeing the transfer portal fill up in their sports because of it. Some student-athletes are taking advantage of an extra year granted by the NCAA, even if they can’t use it where they started. Some of them are finding their gut feeling wasn’t as precise without the benefit of actually seeing the campus.
As bad as he felt for last year’s class making those hard decisions, Williams knows the next few classes are going to run into a very competitive market.
“There were two reasons I felt bad for this year’s class. One was the transfer portal,” he said. “It became more competitive for them. The second is not being able to get on campus, establish relationships and see things with their own eyes. Each individual student-athlete, they’re going to choose a school for the right reasons, and yours are different than mine. To get on campus and get the experience of, this is right for me, or this might not be right for me … For them to not have that, I think you’re going to have kids choose schools for the wrong reasons and not at their fault. It was the circumstance. I felt really bad for kids that way.”
Back to normal feels good, but it’s only a start. The idea of making up for lost time has led to adjustments for both sides of the recruiting equation. For someone like Hagen, there’s a shift to more of a focus within the state of Colorado, a fertile recruiting ground she is familiar with from her days at Texas, but one which takes on added meaning in her new role. She has built contacts, but she will lean on them even more.
Addazio is still trying to build up his next class, too. He can do little about the lost time in the winter, and while the June window feels amplified, coaches and student-athletes don’t want to rush into the landmine of rushing a decision.
There has to be a strategy, and it has altered the way he goes about building a class. For all of them, because the idea of recruiting back to business as usual is a bit of a misnomer.
“I wouldn’t call this full recruiting. We didn’t have the winter and the spring. Is this better than nothing? Yeah,” Addazio said. “But no, we would have been out there in the winter, we would have been in high schools, we would have been at basketball games, we would have been watching in some cases, film. Some guys still don’t have any.
“Now we’re trying to get this done, and everybody is trying to approach the same kids in a small four-week window. Is this good? Yes. Is it back to normal? No. We have half a cycle. It’s still going to hurt.
If you’re in the Mountain West like we are, you have to develop young players. That evaluation period was cut in a third. I’m glad we’re here and we have camp, but it’s not normal yet.”
But moving in that direction is welcome. Much better than the alternative.