Building a recruit pipeline

College football recruiting is an intricate and often frustrating process.

College coaches canvas hundreds of high schools around the country, and evaluate thousands of players to try to fill a couple dozen roster spots. While trying to find a needle in a haystack, those coaches are often fighting against other coaches to find the needle first.

Then there’s the other side of the recruiting.

While college coaches are searching for players, high school coaches are doing everything possible to get their players noticed.

With all those schools and players to look at, it often falls to the high school coaches to help foster relationships with colleges, help make highlight tapes and focus the eyes of recruiters on the talent on their teams.

The entire thing becomes a dance of phone calls, text messages, letters and in-home and on-campus visits. It involves off-season camps as much as in-season games and measurables as much as statistics.

“It’s stressful,” Glacier football coach Grady Bennett said of the process.

“It’s stressful for (the kids) and I see all the struggles that they’re going through trying to make these decisions and their parents are going through. There’s a lot of unknowns and a lot of questions. I try to provide some guidance.

“Luckily, I’ve had 24 years in it now. You learn the ins and outs of the game. Because, it is a game, there’s a lot of salesmanship that goes on.”

To simplify the process, college coaches look to programs that have had success in the past, with coaches that have proven to produce high-level talent.

After all, the haystack is a lot easier to search when you know where the needles are hidden.

In only its eighth year, Glacier is still looking for its reputation on the recruiting scene. The Wolfpack’s first recruiting class just graduated and most of the talent that has left the north end of Kalispell is just now seeing playing time on the highest level.

For many college coaches, even with the run of success Glacier has had on the field, the book seems to be still out on the Wolfpack.

“As good as we were as a team, I think a lot of players were surprised that we didn’t have more scholarship offers from the Montana, Montana State and the bigger type schools,” Bennett said.

“That’s just the way it works sometimes.”

However, the momentum is slowly building.

After sending six athletes to the top in-state programs at Montana and Montana State in its first five senior classes, Glacier has sent six in the last two years, capped by four on Wednesday along with a fifth that signed at Lehigh University, a program on the same level in Pennsylvania. Four of those players took advantage of walk-on opportunities, hoping to prove their worth at the top-level.

“I didn’t want to have the regret of saying, ‘What if?’,” Glacier senior Brady McChesney said. McChesney will walk on at Montana State this fall along with teammate Logan Jones, who echoed the same sentiment.

“That’s what’s so exciting to see these guys believe in themselves and believe in their abilities to want to give it a shot,” Bennett said of McChesney, Jones and Andrew Harris, who will walk on at Montana. Glacier running back Noah James walked on at MSU a year ago after finishing his senior season as one of the state’s leading rushers.

“(They’re) great examples. They had great offers from, really, all the Frontier schools.

“They’re taking that chance to walk on at the Division I schools, feeling like they’ve got the skills and got the abilities to do it. I encourage that. Why not give it a shot?”

Bennett is hoping those players, along with scholarship players that have earned their way into the starting lineups in Missoula and Bozeman, make an impression that makes the process easier for future Wolfpack players.

“That’s what you hope is that colleges start to believe in our guys, that they can play,” Bennett said.

“That they see the success they have had and they want to go to Glacier to get those players.

“You hope it keeps growing and year after year these guys are setting the standard, raising the bar to let that keep happening.”

Joseph Terry is a sports reporter and columnist at The Daily Inter Lake. His column ‘Sidelines’ can be read every Thursday in the DIL Sports section. He can be contacted by phone at (406) 758-4463 or by email at jterry@dailyinterlake.com.