Dantonio Addresses the Importance of Summer Camps In the Recruiting Success At Michigan State

Dantonio Addresses the Importance of Summer Camps In the Recruiting Success At Michigan State When you are not a top heralded recruit, and very few recruits

Dantonio Addresses the Importance of Summer Camps In the Recruiting Success At Michigan State

When you are not a top heralded recruit, and very few recruits are, you have to go on the road in the summer to maximize your exposure to college coaches. That search for the elusive college scholarship is hard work. Mark Dantonio continues to receive national attention every year when people see how he consistently gets less than top tier (allegedly) talent and transforms it both to win big at MSU and also to become draft eligible for the NFL.

One of Dantonio’s secrets is the importance he puts on summer camp. When recruits come here and work out in front of the coaches, It allows the MSU coaches to see them first hand, get to know them a little better, and to open a dialogue that often becomes a solid relationship.

Dantonio talked about the summer camp portion of his recruiting success recently saying, “We get a lot of guys on our campus, no question about that. A lot of this year's 2016 guys are on campus. But I do think camps give you an opportunity to look at a guy, and a player can look at you, too, and say, okay, he can develop me. It's a little bit more than talking on the board. It's about working with the player and doing some of the drills that maybe you would do at a later time. And obviously it allows the coach to look at the player a little more closely, too.”

Dantonio went on to explain that, “So there's no real science to all this. Some of it is projections. Some of it is seeing and understanding and implementing and developing people. I think that our camps are very beneficial for players that have come, such as Trae Waynes, such as some of these guys who didn't have as many starts.”

Finally he added that not all of the kids they like at camp are lower tiered, but it doesn’t lessen the impact. “And then you've got other guys who come, and they were four star guys and they've excelled as well. Camps are important to us. And we're going to continue to work on those and the players and start developing. That's when you start developing that player/coach relationship on the field. And those take place first in camps probably.”

There is an old adage in business called “selling blue sky.” It simply means that you are selling potential. Selling hope. We all know that hope is a good thing, but it makes selling more difficult. Imagine trying to sell a TV as a pre order before anyone had ever seen one.

If you’re under 40 you will laugh at this, but I remember being at the store when someone tried to sell my mother a microwave oven and no one knew what they were. Looking back it is comedic. I remember with clarity of 20/20 vision my mom purchasing, “A giant eight track tape player” for the TV called a VCR. In our case we were the first home to have both. To this day I remember my father erupting in the early eighties that she had spent nearly $1,600 on that VCR. “That will never last, no one wants to see a movie after they’ve seen it once, and no one would ever skip a theatre to watch at home.” That is blue sky.

When Dantonio arrived he had to sell recruits on blue sky. Unless you dug deeply, you only saw he was a .500 coach at Cincinnati. Those who dug knew more, but most didn’t dig. Today the times have changed. If he could recruit when he only had blue sky (and he did), you know he can recruit now.

Dantonio addressed how times are now in the Spartan Nation. “As I said earlier, we're selling results. We're not selling hope. I think that said it all right there. We've been to these games. We've won bowl games. We've won a championship. We've won a Rose Bowl. We finished in the top five this year, did some good things. Our players are being drafted. We're graduating our players. There's a lot of positive momentum moving in this program. And I think you always you're always going to need to get better or you get worse.”

That doesn’t mean Dantonio is content. “The bottom can fall out on you at any point in time. So you need to continue to push forward and reach higher, as we said earlier in this spring, we've got to reach higher in what we're trying to accomplish, because it's all a part of this, too. But I think there's traction right now, and a lot of that is based on some of the people who have committed, and what they're doing in terms of trying to gather their class together, and those are positive things for us right now.”

Finally he added, “It's just like our senior class this year: This is just the beginning of everything and everybody's gotta play their way to the top. In the NFL, to do some different things, they've got to play their way up. The same with graduating; they've got to work towards that. And the same with winning a championship--those are works in progress.”