Recruiting Rolls On Despite Unusual Circumstances
For most college football teams, the spring not only signifies the start of prepping for another season, it is also one of the more critical times of the year for teams from a recruiting standpoint.
Now that the Tigers spring has been cut short due to the threat of COVID-19, head coach Dabo Swinney is determined to ensure that the beat goes on as far as recruiting. He is even planning to get a jump on some of the work usually reserved for the summer months.
"For me personally, there is a lot we can still do recruiting-wise," Swinney said. "Obviously we can't host any recruits, but we can still communicate with them. We are still having recruiting meetings with my staff. And a lot of the summer work that takes me a lot of time to get through, I can get ahead on that. So I'm excited about that opportunity."
At Clemson, Swinney takes a different approach to how his program recruits during the spring compared to many other schools. While they do allow potential recruits to visit, they do not host any official visits, and yet the spring game still remains a huge recruiting event.
"The only change, is with a couple weeks of spring ball left," Swinney said, "is we would typically have kids coming into practice, and the spring game is a big day for recruiting. So that's gone away. Other than that, we don't do officials in the spring. I know a lot of other schools do, but we choose not to. Really not being able to interact with recruits is different."
Swinney and the rest of his coaching staff are trying to keep everything as normal as possible under unusual circumstances. However, the unknown of it all makes it hard to know what the future holds.
"Who knows what's going to happen," Swinney said. "We are supposed to be on the road the month of May recruiting. I don't know if that's going to happen. My guess would be probably not. You can't talk to them anyway on the road in May. It's more evaluation. We have a lot of boxes we have to check in our recruiting process, so that will be a little different. So we will have to make sure we do a great job with our film evaluation and gathering all the academic data that we need."
Although the sport is traveling unchartered territory currently, Swinney likes where the Tigers stand regarding the next recruiting class. The coaches are focused on controlling what they can and making the most of the difficult circumstances.
"I feel great about our 2021 class right now," Swinney said. "I believe we've got ten commits right now and we are off to a great start. Very focused on the guys we want to fill our last spots. We can still text these guys and them call us. So that's what we are doing. Just trying to be creative with the technology available to us."
