Scouts and online rankings help Division I schools recruit for their respective athletic team. But for Division III schools like DePauw, coaches must get more creative to find talent to help their team.
Division I recruits begin their recruitment at a much earlier age. Kayvon Thibodeaux, the number one ranked recruit in the class of 2019, according to 247Sports, has already received 28 scholarship offers from schools across the country. It would be rare for a sophomore in high school with Division III talent to have already received calls from Division III coaches. Most recruiting done by Division III coaches begins during or after his or her junior season.
Proximity plays a major factor in Division III recruiting too. With the inability to give athletic scholarships, many high schoolers become less inclined to attend a Division III school far away from their home. For Head Football Coach Bill Lynch, this does not affect his recruiting as the football staff likes to mainly recruit close to Greencastle.
“Our biggest area is central Indiana,” Lynch said. “Whether it’s schools in the city or in the surrounding counties, we like to recruit there. The other one is Chicago. We have 14 kids coming from there in next year’s class.”
Division III coaches also rely heavily on players contacting them initially. Sometimes a player may attend a school that the coaches are not familiar with so they are not recruited. In sophomore Nate Orrison’s case, he decided to email the football coaching staff his highlight film during his senior year. They liked what they saw, and he ended up coming to play at DePauw. Orrison ended up leading the North Coast Athletic Conference in sacks his first year.
“I was coming here on a college visit and one of the options was meeting with a coach so I signed up for that,” Orrison said. “I guess Coach Hood liked what he saw so I decided it would be a good fit.”
Many Division I athletes choose their school based off athletics alone because they want to have a professional career in their particular sport. At DePauw, it is practically impossible for one to play his or her way to the professional level, so coaches must sell the school as much, if not more, than the athletic program. Junior women’s basketball player Kylie Morris decided to come to DePauw for both these reasons.
“I didn’t want to choose a school because of basketball,” Morris said. “I was going to choose the school I liked the best, and if I got to play basketball that would be a bonus. DePauw was the school I wanted to go to, and the basketball program being as strong as it is made it even more appealing.”
Creating pipelines from certain high schools is another tactic Division III coaches use. Lynch says his coaching staff does not focus on recruiting players from the same high schools, but it ends up being that way because certain high schools produce the same quality of kids.
“We tend to go after the same type of kids,” Lynch said. “We like the ones with high character, involved in their schools, hold leadership positions. A lot of times it just so happens that we get a lot of these types of kids from the same school.”
Coaches at DePauw may face more challenges in recruiting compared to schools at the Division I level, but they counter these challenges with unique styles of recruiting that are only found at the Division III level. For Lynch, he has seen this pay off with next year’s recruiting class.
“We’re happy with the recruiting class we got,” Lynch said. “It’s a well-balanced group with a lot of great kids.”