Jeff KahntroffThink back to January of your senior year in high school. Now imagine you’re sitting at a table with parents and prospective coaches looking on, about to sign away the next four years of your life to play football on a full athletic scholarship at a Division II school.
A sure thing. A bird in the hand, right?
Now imagine turning it down for the chance that maybe, by some twist of fate and some aligning of the ACT gods, you might get into Washington University in April. And then maybe, just maybe, you might get the academic scholarship that you need to be able to attend there.
This was just the scenario that Quincy Davis faced five short years ago.
And he waited.
He waited to hear back from WU, and indeed he did get into this school. Later, he found out that he also received the necessary scholarship money to be able to attend. Last year, Davis graduated with degrees in marketing and computer science, and he is now an employee of Accenture.
There have been dozens of other stories just like Davis’. Recruiting at WU isn’t just about signing on the dotted line; it’s about a relationship. In fact, the second paragraph of head coach Larry Kindbom’s “Football Recruiting Philosophy” reads:
“Recruiting… is the lifelong building of a relationship that will lead to a win-win situation for the athlete and the University. When we recruit, we recruit not for four weeks, four months or even four years… we recruit for life.”
Recruiting at WU is about a family atmosphere and following the principles upon which the program was built. It’s about finding people that want to pursue national championships. It’s why the top scholar-athletes in the nation choose to play football for the Bears every year.
WU is a Division III athletic program, and thus is unable to offer athletic scholarships to entice players to matriculate here. In fact, the first screen on any player is his academic ability. If he does not meet WU’s undergraduate academic criteria, then he will not be considered as a possible recruit.
“We screen out academically a lot so we don’t go through the heartache of seeing a lot of good players that have absolutely no chance of getting into WU,” said Kindbom. “Then you have to deal with his coach, his college counselor and the individual, and that isn’t an easy thing to do.”
The lack of athletic scholarships often puts WU at a disadvantage to the Division I and Ivy League schools around the nation that have a set quota of players they can sign every year. Not surprisingly, WU attempts to recruit many of the same players as Ivy League schools do. There is no better example of this than senior all-conference offensive tackle Tim Gronewald.
During his senior year of high school, Gronewald had actually signed the papers to play football for Columbia University, but later he decided that the swinging New York City lifestyle was not for him.
“All of as sudden, it’s the end of April, and Tim calls and says, ‘I’d like to come to WU if I still can,'” said Kindbom.
“I really liked the atmosphere on campus and the coaching staff,” Gronewald said in the Sept. 7, 2002 issue of The Cub. “The coaches here made it more of a ‘homely’ atmosphere for me. I visited other schools, but I did not get the same feeling that I got here.”
In the end, the three-time All-UAA performer has not regretted leaving the Ivies behind for the WU experience.
“The thing I enjoyed the most about football was being around the guys,” Gronewald said. “I enjoyed going on all the trips and being together on all the two-a-days.”
Another major hurdle in recruiting student-athletes to WU is the time factor. All undergraduate applications for admission must be in by mid-January – athletic recruits are no exception.
In other words, coaches have to do all of their recruiting in a limited window between mid-November (when the season is over) and mid-January (when applications are due). However, recruits don’t find out about their admission status until April.
“Other schools try to get their recruiting done by January or the first week of February, but we can’t let [our recruits] know until later on,” said Kindbom. “So there’s a little juggling there to make sure they know enough about WU. If they are good athletes, they are going to have a lot of options.”
Members of the football coaching staff, including coach Kindbom, coach Aaron Keen and coach Pedro Arruza break down the country into regions and focus their recruiting efforts on players from high schools in those areas.
“Our efforts begin when students are juniors,” said Kindbom. “We send people out to five-state areas as well as selected areas around the country. We write to [high school] coaches and try to get people that they think fit our academic profile.”
The level of talent from state to state and city to city varies greatly every year. For instance, Cleveland and Pittsburgh have fewer solid high school recruits this year than ever before, but this is offset by bumper crops in both Texas and the Chicago area.
The elusive mix of qualities required of a WU student-athlete make them a very rare commodity, and thus exhaustive scouting is of great importance. Coaches often find players through long-running relationships that WU has with certain high schools and other coaches around the nation. Additionally, WU subscribes to some recruiting services that provide statistical and analytical readouts on hundreds of players that it would take too long to scout individually.
The athletic budget allots $31,180 per year for recruiting among all men’s athletic teams. According to the school’s Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act, this money is used for “transportation, lodging, and meals for both recruits and institutional personnel.”
Between January and April, after the last recruiting visit has been made, the coaching staff works closely with the admissions office to get an idea of what chance they have to score the next “blue-chip” prospect.
“We can’t just say that, just because a student has a 30 or 32 on the ACT, then we can recruit them,” said Kindbom. “Our admissions office looks at the same things in those people as they do in every student that gets accepted here.”
Compared to recruiting at the Division I level, which Kindbom has done at Ohio State and Western Kentucky, recruiting in Division III has looser scheduling and therefore extends the amount of work and worry that the coaching staff must go through.
“[In Division I], there’s a starting time and an ending time. You know five years from now in April what you’ll be doing,” said Kindbom. “[At WU], we still have a lot of names on the board of people that may or may not be accepted. They may be the best football players, but Larry Kindbom doesn’t have a magic wand to say ‘I want this guy, this guy and this guy.'”
Another difference between being an student-athlete at WU and being a Division I student-athlete is that, at Division I schools, players on athletic scholarship often have a hard time blending in, and feel as though they are not the intellectual equals of their peers.
“The fact that our star athletes are selected in the same way as all the students,” said Kindbom. “People are gonna say, ‘Wow I can’t believe they’re [playing sports] and doing the same thing I have to do in the classroom’.”
Kindbom considers a good recruiting class to consist of approximately 25 players. Although recruiting would ideally focus on one position or pinpoint certain areas of need, the reality is that WU recruits the best players available and looks for a good all-around freshman class. Once the players are in the system, positional coaches and the weight-training staff can then mold them into successful student-athletes.
To recruit effectively, Kindbom and his coaching staff have to beat out competing schools, do thorough research into the nation’s high school talent, work around stringent admissions time constraints, and find the right kind of student-athletes for their system.
Along the way, they also have to convince potential recruits that going to WU is worth the price they will pay.
“The thing that we stress here is value,” said Kindbom. “Some of these kids, on academics alone, can go to state universities back home for free. At some point – $2,000, $4,000, $8,000, $30,000 – you assess a value to what you get at WU as a student. That’s for them to determine so they can measure up against going some place else for free.
“Our student body has the aura right now, if you go to different parts of the country, of being very active. That really brings value to someone’s education. You’re going to do more than just study and play football here.
“I don’t try to change minds as much as I try to get kids to create the right match,” said Kindbom. “Through wisdom and our presence, we can try to convince kids this is where they should be, but ultimately, if it isn’t, it’s going to affect them athletically, socially and academically.”