Neal Brown and Staff Taking Recruiting Challenges Head-On
The Big 12 Conference recently announced that all team activities are suspended through May 31st due to COVID-19 and that also includes recruiting. This is a crucial time of year for college football recruiting where coaches can bring in promising young prospects and take them on the tour of the facilities and show them what their program has to offer.
West Virginia prides itself on having a top-notch facility that continues to evolve and is on the cutting edge of nutrition and recovery. However, for some, it’s about seeing what head coach Neal Brown and his staff have to offer.
Of course, with the country essentially locked down that is no longer a viable option, but the staff is taking the campus to them.
“What we’re missing now is, you’re not getting some of the information you would normally get from the national camp circuit, you’re not getting that. The other thing you’re missing is the on-campus visits. We had a lot of people, especially a lot of recruits, especially those in the southeast had made plans to come up during their spring break and watch us practice during our spring practice, but also do it during spring break where they’re not missing class or anything like that where they can spend a little more time and so, we’re not having those.”
"So, the people who’ve already been on our campus, especially here in our primary area within a four to six-hour drive of Morgantown have been on our campus multiple times. So, with those guys and their families, we’re maintaining communication – multiple phone calls, Facetime calls, those type of things and probably doing so at a higher rate than maybe we normally do because we don’t have practice going on, we don’t have meetings and some of those type of activities to take us away from recruiting. So, the communication is probably a little bit more so,” said Brown.
“The real challenge is with those recruits and their families that haven’t been on our campus. And what we’re trying to do is, trying to take West Virginia, what’s great about West Virginia – what we have to offer here, we’re trying to take that to them via different videos and conversations with different people within our organization.”
Nonetheless, Coach Brown and the staff is looking ahead and starting the evaluation of future classes.
“The evaluations continue and most of those are game or highlight tape evals,” said Brown. “Actually, probably getting ahead of that. Most of our ’21 class evals have already been done. We’re into ’22’s and ‘23’s now, so we’re probably getting ahead as far as video evals.”
Obviously, it’s just not West Virginia being affected by not getting recruits on campus, but Brown doesn’t believe the NCAA will move around lost recruiting periods.
“I think moving around the recruiting periods is going to be a really complicated deal because so much of that spring eval period is based around schools in session. And so, I’m guessing here but I’m very doubtful we’ll have a spring recruiting period,” said Brown. “I don’t think I’m going out on a limb on that. Will they move some of those things to the summer? I don’t think so, just because I think that’s really complicated. We are moving forward as if we’re going to have camps. Moving forward with every bit of understating that the NCAA could say at any time, “Hey, you’re not having camps.” Or our university could say, “you’re not having camps.” But I would rather have everything prepared like we’re going to have those camps and then if they get shut down then we’ll deal with them. That’s kind of how we’re operating.”
“That’s going to be a huge piece. Live evaluations are very, very important. I think, not only for ourselves but most college football teams at this level make their decisions on live evals. Whether it's in a camp setting or spring football, whatever it is, so you’re not going to have those live evaluations. And so, it's going to change the landscape. It’s another information point or a piece of data that you’re collecting that you’re not going to have the opportunity to have. Which is unfortunate but that’s just part of it and everybody’s on the same playing field.”
