Friday, February 20, 2009
Prospects popping up in unfamiliar locales
Tech, UVa change recruiting strategy?
Doug Doughty
Doug Doughty's College Notebook Plus is exclusive to roanoke.com and is posted by 5 p.m. Fridays.
Find his College Notebook from The Roanoke Times in Thursday's college sports section
Miss the Insider column? Check out the Insiders blog
See Doug and Randy talk sports every week with the Sports edition of the TimesCast
Recent columns
Illinois has become the first Division I-A football program to make an offer to South County High School junior Andre Simmons, but the Illini soon could have some company.
Virginia Tech and Virginia are both mulling offers to Simmons, a 6-foot, 195-pound defensive back who is a 3.7 student.
While Tech could make an offer to Simmons as early as next Saturday, when it will hold a junior day, the Hokies already have offered his teammate, Ronnie Van Dyke, a 6-3, 180-pound defensive back who will be a junior in 2010.
“He looks a little like Kam Chancellor,” said Pete Bendorf, South County coach.
South County, located in Lorton at the southern end of Fairfax County, has been open for only four years and played with mostly ninth- and 10th-graders in 2005.
“My brother [Mark] gets so much traffic and, when I was at Oakton, we got so much traffic,” said Bendorf, whose brother is the long time coach at Robinson in Fairfax.
“This year is the first year that it’s really picked up here. I’ve had a couple kids go on for our program, but these are our first two legit [Division I-A scholarship] kids.”
Bendorf had an all-state kicker who walked on at Virginia Tech before transferring to Delaware (research was unable to his name as deadline approached).
“Truly, with all those mailings that go out, it took a while for us to get our name out there,” Bendorf said. “I had to send a lot of information out on my own.”
Simmons’ emergence as a prospect may be all it takes.
“As things seem to be heating up a fair amount on Andre. I’m sure it will be even moreso on Ronnie,” Bendorf said.
Van Dyke is a decent student, “but when I roll out the transcript on Andre, everybody is like, ‘OOOhhhhhh!’ When you have that, it heightens it even more.”
Bendorf thinks Simmons will have multiple I-A offers.
“I sent tapes to Northwestern, Duke, Penn, Yale ... all those kinds of schools,” he said.
“I talked to [Tech assistant] Bud Foster today and he said they want to do a little more evaluation. I think they want to get him down there one day. With UVa, I talked to coach [Anthony] Poindexter and he said coach [Al] Groh wants to review him. They just got the tape two days ago.”
Bendorf said puts Simmons’ time for 40 yards at 4.6, which might seem slow by some standards.
“He’s a track kid, or at least he was a track kid,” Bendorf said. “That’s what he grew up doing. He’s run 23.2 in the 200 [meters]. I don’t have a legit 100 time for him. I was at Oakton forever and we always joked about ‘Oakton speed.’ We were good, but we never had really legit fast kids.
“Down here at Lorton, I’ve had five or six kids who could really run and Andre can run with them. I’ve timed him in 4.56. Of course, that’s a hand-held time, So, he’s legitimately fast.
“You would categorize my teams as an athletic teams. My Oakton teams were big and physical. But these teams that we play, they’re probably wondering, ‘Do we kick the ball to them?’ "
ANOTHER VETERAN COACH who has taken over a start-up program is one-time Virginia Tech quarterback Mark Cox, who is the coach at Battlefield High School in Haymarket, which is in Fauquier County.
Battlefield’s 2008 team was the school’s first with players who had started their careers at Battlefield. Cox’s early teams were made up of ninth- and 10th-graders and assorted transfers who had been unable to make the varsity at their previous schools.
Kids who were playing elsewhere and lived in the Battlefield zone generally took the option of remaining at their old school.
“There were a lot of growing pains,” said Cox, previously the coach at Falls Church and Woodson, “but our classes have started to fill out and our younger teams are starting to develop really well now.”
Battlefield had a run-oriented offense last year but figures to open up this year with 6-6, 230-pound quarterback Bo Revell, a rising senior. The top two college prospects on the team are Revell and 6-1, 185-pound wide receiver Blaine Mason, also an all-region defensive back this past fall.
Revell, a 3.9 student and the son of one-time UVa linebacker Bill Revell, was lost for the 2007 season when he suffered a broken thumb and had his first full season as a starter this past fall.
“We didn’t throw the ball that much this year,” Cox said. We had a running back who was all-region for two years, but he’s graduating. Now, we’ll probably start throwing the ball around more with Bo.
“He can throw the deep ball very well. And, for a 6-foot-6 guy, he has pretty good feet. He’s not a running quarterback, but he could [run] if he had to. He’s had letters from just about everybody. Everybody tries to get the inside track.
“He’s been [unofficially] to UVa, Carolina, Georgia. He’s getting heavy stuff from Alabama. I just think they’d like to see a little bit more of him before offering. I would like to see us throw the ball more, too.”
WHEN ASKED ABOUT Tech’s upcoming junior day and apparent change in recruiting philosophy, John Ballein, associate athletic director, said, “It’s not a junior day. It’s a prospect day.”
OK, so there will be some rising juniors on campus next weekend, but Ballein’s feeling has been that uncommitted prospects are likely to make only “x” number of trips across the state and he’d rather have them come in April than February.
He may have been out-voted this year.
Virginia has held February junior days for a while, but it seems that the Cavaliers have changed their approach and added one or two junior days while reducing the number of prospects they invite to campus at one time.
