New Director of recruiting
- Thread starter kougkurt
- Start date
Faith and Character. I was a little surprised, too, regarding direct from High School to a Power 5. It must be faith and character. An important and perhaps ~ an essential personal qualification ~ for what Coach JD is looking for.
Call me a cynic, but I just don't see this being a wise move. We're not talking about being a coordinator, but the director. That means direct reports, managing the D1 system and collegiate politics. Maybe there is past college experience we are not privy to?
How many years collectively does the staff have recruiting SoCal? This guy knows the region. He may even get bumped onto the field one day too.
He had zero experience in the role. Who knows how much that does or doesn’t hurt him. His value is his knowledge of the region and his relationships there.
This guy probably knows so many coaches in the area. There's something about his knowledge and contact list that stands out.
Especially Considering the changes in the conference, we should place a lot of value on someone who already has a foot in the door at the regional high schools.
WSU needs to be a Southern California based program. That’s where the West Coast talent is. The kids there know if they don’t get a local offer they have to travel. It just is what it is.
I don’t have an issue with kids from Texas or Florida. There is talent to be had there for sure. However, you have to win your backyard. For WSU, and every P10 school for that matter, it’s Southern California.
I'm going to say "I have trust in our coach and he knows what he's doing". Until proven otherwise, we're putting 100% trust in him.
There are a pile of suburban school districts & leagues outside the top 3 leagues in SoCal. You really can't recruit the area effectively if you do not have connections and some sort of footprint, which takes time. If you don't have the time to grow that within your staff, I guess the idea that you may be able to hire a high energy guy who has a lot of those connections already is not a huge reach. Remains to be seen, but may turn out well. As always, it depends upon the individual.
This brought a few things to mind, so I did some rough calcs for N Orange County & SE LA county suburban high schools. In extremely round numbers, we currently have a classic suburban high school with a population of roughly 2K students (most are a bit smaller, but a few are larger) for roughly every 35-40K residents. Higher population ratio in poorer areas, and vice versa, as you would expect, but it is probably fair to use that as an extrapolation. I did some extremely subjective, non-scientific guesswork. The LA basin population is on the order of 17-19 million, if you include southern Ventura County, the high desert, greater Palm Springs, and roughly a million undocumented folks. My extremely subjective view is that you could consider all but about 4 million to be "suburban" by most definitions. Call suburbia at roughly 14 million. If we say 40K residents per high school, that means roughly 350 suburban high schools. The 3 top high school football leagues here add up to less than 30 schools. The next tier of leagues (not considering lausd) is at most another 40-50 schools. LAUSD has about 180 high schools, most of which play football, but probably only 30-40 that are consistently good. So for the sake of conversation, we have a bit over 100 high schools that consistently merit some sort of recruiting monitoring, and another 200 + that only occasionally have a D1 kid. Warren HS (from whence our new DoR comes) is from a league that could arguably lay claim to being on the bottom rung of that "next tier of leagues". At least in some years. It is quite possible that Stacey Ford has only a degree or two of separation from many coaches/asst coaches in what I'd loosely call the "middle level" of LA area suburban schools. That will be helpful. More important is his energy level, personality and follow up skills. If Dickert is happy with him, I think he is worth a try; and it will be interesting to watch!
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