Rewriting Sam

Sam Monroe

In collegiate sports the road to success starts well before the season does.
“Great players make good coaches great,” said Vincent Maloney, the Lyndon State women’s basketball coach. And in order to find those great players coaches need to look for them through recruiting.
“Recruiting is the life’s blood of your program,” said Bill Johnson, Lyndon’s sports information director, who coached basketball for 28 years before coming to Lyndon.
Most coaches will agree that recruiting starts with networking. This is when coaches set up relationships with high school, prep school, and junior college coaches through out their area. Johnson liked his network to extend through a 100-mile radius. While other coaches will travel through New England and the northeast, larger schools travel nation wide to recruit.
However being a smaller, division three school Lyndon State does not have the luxury of offering scholarships or having a big recruiting budget with lots of recruiting coaches which makes it harder. Maloney says a team camp he runs in the summer helps his recruiting. Chris Ummer, the LSC cross-country coach and athletic director said he also used a summer camp to help recruit. Ummer no longer runs the camp however.
“Recruiting is selling,” said Johnson. The coach needs to sell the school and entice athletes with the small things that they can’t get at other schools. Johnson also said that he would never mention another school during a recruiting visit.
Joe Krupinski, the men’s basketball coach at LSC, says he try’s to sell the improvement of the team and the individual to a prospect. He tells his recruits “you can be a building block in turning this around.”
Ummer try’s to sell the area around the school. He sells the mountains and the plethora of outdoor activities to his prospective runners.
Maloney often uses the size of the school and the size of the classes at the school as a selling point. Selling the player on the fact that they will have access to their professors and they will be a name and a face instead of just a number in a computer.
Johnson stressed that recruiting is more than sitting in and office and looking at stats. “Recruiting is leaving campus, because players don’t walk in your door,” he said. Seeing the player play is an important part of recruiting as well.
“Students are very excited when a coach walks in to see them play,” said Maloney. However that can be a difficult beast. This is because most high school seasons run at the same time as the college season. Both basketball coaches stressed using the semester break in Dec. and Jan. as well as summer tournaments as important times to do their recruiting.
The cross-country season is very short and runs at the same time as high school seasons. This means Ummer is very rarely able to actually see the runner compete. “It involves doing a lot of recruiting through results,” said Ummer. He also said that he likes to go and watch the athletes in other sports as well, just to let them know he is interested.
Once they have player’s names coaches will start sending letters and e-mails, followed up with a phone call to try and entice a campus visit. Most will agree a campus visit is the most important part of recruiting.
During the campus visit Ummer will often try to introduce the prospect to a current runner. “It makes them feel like they are already part of the team,” he said.
“Bringing in solid athletes to make the program stronger, builds the team and helps the campus as well,” is how Maloney sums up recruiting.
While Krupinski puts it into one sentence “it is about finding your niche and finding guys who are a good fit at your school and your level.”