Let me preface this with an acknowledgement that I do think recruiting folks at UK and other places are aware of this, at least in a general sense. But what I am advocating here is based on a theory I have that's based on things we know from other fields of knowledge.
A school's most important recruiting focus should be getting kids on campus very early.
Dan Berezowitz made mention of this in our conversation, so he knows this. I'm just reiterating the point with a little more background information. He noted that in the spring game or other events, you never know what young kid will show up and what kind of impression it will make, and you might not know the impact until well on down the line.
Here's something to bolster that point:
I don't have the study handy, but my college did a survey of fraternities on campus and found that membership in fraternities had very little or nothing to do with personalities, common interests at the time a person pledged, etc., and almost everything to do with proximity and who a person was introduced to during the first weeks of school. I think we like to believe that we have our freedom and our choices and preferences and these inform our choices, when in reality, we're more the product of circumstance, environment and surroundings than we believe.
As far as relationships go, the fraternity study illustrates it perfectly. The people we form relationships with in life have less to do with choices and more to do with circumstances. A person is more likely to join a fraternity, a clique, a social network, etc., if they are introduced to them early at that particular stage in life. In fact, this is the single most determining factor in a person's choice regarding relationships; it's so important that it casts real doubt on how much choice we really have in these things. There are extremes: Certain people hit it off right away and some people are so polar opposite they steer clear of on another.
It stands to reason, in my mind, that this would be very true of colleges. So what I would advocate for any school is a policy of focusing attention on junior high athletes and early high school students (e.g. 9th and 10th graders). You can't really reach out to them, but focusing on youth football teams/leagues.
Another point from social psychology (I'm putting my first and second-year undergrad work to good use here, people) would be this: I'm forgetting the name of this particular label, but the point is, the first thing we're exposed to really does set the bar.
Here's an example. If there's a group of five people and they're asked to look at a huge jar filled with, say, jellybeans, and guess how many are in the jar ... the first person's answer is going to shape the answer the others give. Sure, there are some contrarians here (vandal, I'm not looking at you at all here - actually, I have this tendency myself) that will go out of the way to play devil's advocate or be different. But on the whole, the large number of people's guess/opinion/framework will be largely 'fixed' by the first thing they hear/experience.
So it stands to reason that the first school a recruit is exposed to will, in a very large number of cases, set the bar and probably in a positive way.
Why do I say in a positive way? Because more often than not in my experience a kid taking his first unofficial visit to any school, whether it's Grambling, Florida or Iowa State, is wide-eyed, youthfully optimistic about his own standing with that particular school, hopeful and maybe a little naive.
In other words, the first school a kid visits as a recruit, even if it's way earlier than we think is really helpful, has a huge influence on his psyche and probably in a way that's not known entirely to him.
There are other factors at work here. Kids are subject to peer pressure and this is the great unspoken fact in recruiting. Many kids that would have picked Kentucky in the past, because of relationships with the coaches, proximity, etc., have picked Ohio State or Tennessee because they are convinced it's a 'cooler' choice. If you remember yourself at that age, you can probably acknowledge that your overriding concern in life (or one of them) was how you believed you were being perceived by your peers in any particular activity.
Here is another factor that prevents schools from adopting this very sound strategy of way-too-early focus on kids, especially with regard to visits: Coaches have short shelf lives. Assistant coaches are often at a school for just a couple of years, so as a matter of career benefit there's very little sense, selfishly, in investing in a 13 or 14-year old recruit that, A) May or may not be any good 3 years from now, or B) You may not be recruiting 3 years from now because you're likely to be somewhere else, or C) Your job security depends on the next 1-2 years of outcomes, not the next 3-4.
My proposal here would be for schools to hire one or two people in recruiting roles to long-term contracts that are expected to last beyond, hypothetically, the average shelf life of a staff of assistants or even a head coach. This is a bit counterintuitive and might be a turn off to some head coaches, who want total hiring power when it comes to their staff, but I think it's valuable and altogether reasonable to have one or two people within a football program that last well beyond one or two or even three coaches.
Just as politicians make silly statements and take bad positions (no matter what your beliefs are, hopefully you can acknowledge this) because they often have to stand up for election every two or four years, and term limits (or in the case of the judiciary, lifetime appointments) are often seen as a remedy to bad short-term choices/policies, I think hiring a couple of recruiting staffers with this longer-term vision would be in the interests of most athletic departments.
A school's most important recruiting focus should be getting kids on campus very early.
Dan Berezowitz made mention of this in our conversation, so he knows this. I'm just reiterating the point with a little more background information. He noted that in the spring game or other events, you never know what young kid will show up and what kind of impression it will make, and you might not know the impact until well on down the line.
Here's something to bolster that point:
I don't have the study handy, but my college did a survey of fraternities on campus and found that membership in fraternities had very little or nothing to do with personalities, common interests at the time a person pledged, etc., and almost everything to do with proximity and who a person was introduced to during the first weeks of school. I think we like to believe that we have our freedom and our choices and preferences and these inform our choices, when in reality, we're more the product of circumstance, environment and surroundings than we believe.
As far as relationships go, the fraternity study illustrates it perfectly. The people we form relationships with in life have less to do with choices and more to do with circumstances. A person is more likely to join a fraternity, a clique, a social network, etc., if they are introduced to them early at that particular stage in life. In fact, this is the single most determining factor in a person's choice regarding relationships; it's so important that it casts real doubt on how much choice we really have in these things. There are extremes: Certain people hit it off right away and some people are so polar opposite they steer clear of on another.
It stands to reason, in my mind, that this would be very true of colleges. So what I would advocate for any school is a policy of focusing attention on junior high athletes and early high school students (e.g. 9th and 10th graders). You can't really reach out to them, but focusing on youth football teams/leagues.
Another point from social psychology (I'm putting my first and second-year undergrad work to good use here, people) would be this: I'm forgetting the name of this particular label, but the point is, the first thing we're exposed to really does set the bar.
Here's an example. If there's a group of five people and they're asked to look at a huge jar filled with, say, jellybeans, and guess how many are in the jar ... the first person's answer is going to shape the answer the others give. Sure, there are some contrarians here (vandal, I'm not looking at you at all here - actually, I have this tendency myself) that will go out of the way to play devil's advocate or be different. But on the whole, the large number of people's guess/opinion/framework will be largely 'fixed' by the first thing they hear/experience.
So it stands to reason that the first school a recruit is exposed to will, in a very large number of cases, set the bar and probably in a positive way.
Why do I say in a positive way? Because more often than not in my experience a kid taking his first unofficial visit to any school, whether it's Grambling, Florida or Iowa State, is wide-eyed, youthfully optimistic about his own standing with that particular school, hopeful and maybe a little naive.
In other words, the first school a kid visits as a recruit, even if it's way earlier than we think is really helpful, has a huge influence on his psyche and probably in a way that's not known entirely to him.
There are other factors at work here. Kids are subject to peer pressure and this is the great unspoken fact in recruiting. Many kids that would have picked Kentucky in the past, because of relationships with the coaches, proximity, etc., have picked Ohio State or Tennessee because they are convinced it's a 'cooler' choice. If you remember yourself at that age, you can probably acknowledge that your overriding concern in life (or one of them) was how you believed you were being perceived by your peers in any particular activity.
Here is another factor that prevents schools from adopting this very sound strategy of way-too-early focus on kids, especially with regard to visits: Coaches have short shelf lives. Assistant coaches are often at a school for just a couple of years, so as a matter of career benefit there's very little sense, selfishly, in investing in a 13 or 14-year old recruit that, A) May or may not be any good 3 years from now, or B) You may not be recruiting 3 years from now because you're likely to be somewhere else, or C) Your job security depends on the next 1-2 years of outcomes, not the next 3-4.
My proposal here would be for schools to hire one or two people in recruiting roles to long-term contracts that are expected to last beyond, hypothetically, the average shelf life of a staff of assistants or even a head coach. This is a bit counterintuitive and might be a turn off to some head coaches, who want total hiring power when it comes to their staff, but I think it's valuable and altogether reasonable to have one or two people within a football program that last well beyond one or two or even three coaches.
Just as politicians make silly statements and take bad positions (no matter what your beliefs are, hopefully you can acknowledge this) because they often have to stand up for election every two or four years, and term limits (or in the case of the judiciary, lifetime appointments) are often seen as a remedy to bad short-term choices/policies, I think hiring a couple of recruiting staffers with this longer-term vision would be in the interests of most athletic departments.
