It doesn’t have the shady palm trees, the sandy beaches or the crystal clear water, but an official recruiting visit is truly a paradise for a high school football player.
At only 18 years of age, recruits are treated like kings on their official recruiting visits, which include free meals, free entertainment and free transportation for two days, all provided by the university.
By NCAA rule, a recruit can have only one expense-paid (official) visit to a particular campus beginning on the opening day of classes of his senior year. This means that recruits can go on as many official visits as they want, they just cannot go on an official visit to the same university more than once.
Normally, visits last from Friday night to Sunday afternoon. An official visit may not last longer than two days, or it is seen as a secondary NCAA violation Mississippi State Coordinator of Compliance Bracky Brett said. If a recruit is on a visit longer than that amount of time, it has to be reported to the NCAA, he added.
“We get most of our guys in here (in Starkville) about five o’clock on Friday afternoons,” said Mississippi State recruiting coordinator Shane Beamer. “Once they set foot on campus to begin their visit, you’ve got 48 hours.”
In that 48 hours, recruits experience true Southern hospitality.
Friday
The extravagant weekend begins Friday night at the Holiday Inn Express off of Miss. Highway 12 in Starkville.
The hotel is not only where the recruits and their families (or whoever they brought with them) spend the next two nights, but it serves as the introductory meeting place for coaches, recruits and parents.
“That’s where we all meet each other … kind of like a little social hour,” Beamer said. “We’ll have some appetizers from Harvey’s or the Veranda. Coach Croom will introduce the staff and introduce the players to each other and then basically lay down the ground rules for the weekend.”
The “ground rules” Beamer is speaking of are NCAA laws that prohibit coaches and recruits from doing certain things over the two-day span. Head coach Sylvester Croom said he stresses a particular rule to recruits.
“There can be no pictures in the media,” Croom said. “If they take a picture, I have to make sure they understand that, that picture can’t end up in the newspaper.”
Normally, the NCAA allows a university to invite 56 recruits on official visits a year, but this past year the Bulldogs were limited to only 45 visits due to NCAA sanctions handed down to the university for violations that took place when former head coach Jackie Sherrill was at the helm.
This past year the NCAA instituted several new laws governing official visits.
Universities used to be able to put the names of recruits on the back of that particular university’s jersey and present them to the player, but the NCAA cut that out after last year.
Announcing a recruits’ name over the stadium speakers or just putting a recruits’ name on the scoreboard is also illegal.
“The curfew is the biggest thing,” Beamer said, talking about the 1 a.m. curfew for recruits on Friday and Saturday nights, which is not an NCAA law but one mandated by the Southeastern Conference.
It all falls under the new excessive entertainment law, which was implemented last year after the late night parties at the University of Colorado.
“One coach will be at the hotel at 1 a.m. to make sure the guys get in for curfew,” Beamer added.
The players, families and coaches then depart from the hotel and go to The Veranda to eat dinner together. There, the recruit meets his player host, a current member of the football team who takes the recruit out on Friday and Saturday night.
“We (the coaching staff) sit down and try to do a good job of matching up guys personality wise,” Beamer said about choosing player hosts for recruits. “The coach that’s recruiting that particular recruit has a pretty good feel for what kind of personality he has, and what he likes to do off the field and stuff like that.”
After dinner, the recruits and the player hosts are free to do as they please, while the families and coaches go over to athletics director Larry Tempelton’s house for dessert.
“That’s a big big time for us because the parents get to know each other, and we get to socialize with the parents, and our wives are there as well,” Croom said of the after dinner social at Tempelton’s home.