Date: October 19, 2006

Resource: Daily Herald

Recruiting: Tough Call For College Coaches

Norries Wilson had worked as a football coach for a decade before he became an assistant at UConn in 1999.

But his promising career could have been derailed had he succeeded in landing one particular recruit.
 

"He decided not to come to UConn," said Wilson, who is now the head football coach at Columbia. "It turned out he was an armed robber and a counterfeiter. Had I brought that kid to UConn, Randy [Edsall] would have had to fire me. He would have had no choice and there would be nothing I could say because he would have been right."

Edsall's dismissal of five UConn football players last week for buying beer the night before a game was minor news in the sometimes lawless world of college football. But the fact that four of those players had arrest records, three of them stemming from incidents that occurred after they arrived at UConn, dinged the university's reputation and caused some to wonder if the school no longer exercised such caution.

"We are very cognizant of the responsibility we have to do everything we can to safeguard the integrity of the school," UConn Athletic Director Jeff Hathaway said. "When you deal with the 17-22 age group, you're going to run into some kids who make bad decisions."

Preventing players from making bad decisions is not as easy as it once was.

"You've got this myspace.com thing and this facebook thing, you can find out a lot about your kids," Wilson said. "But there are so many things to distract kids now that you have to really be focused on what they're doing. With so much going on and so many distractions, they have too many things that can possibly lead them astray if they're not strong-willed mentally."

A photo preview of recently dismissed UConn football player Harold Stanback's facebook.com page shows Stanback preparing to do a keg stand, in which a person is held upside down over a keg while consuming beer directly from the tap.

Such incidents aside, there is no doubt that UConn has been helped by athletic success.

The acclaim gained from multiple national championships in men's and women's basketball, as well as a football victory in the Motor City Bowl, has made the school, once thought by some to be located in Alaska, recognizable in every corner of the nation.

But with success comes increased scrutiny, and that makes it vital for coaches to maintain control of their programs and avoid incidents that could harm the school's reputation.

An ugly on-field incident, such as Saturday's melee between the University of Miami and Florida International University, can scar a school's national reputation.

"If you look at it from the perspective of the university, the football team can be a positive in terms of brand awareness and with the alumni," said Jay Gladden, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts who does research in the field of sports brand management. "The downside is when you have a situation like Miami, where there are graphic pictures of a fight and where that comes to represent the image that people have of the school."

Off-field missteps, while not usually accompanied by vivid pictures, can also take a toll on a school's reputation, especially among its most loyal fans. Of the 83 scholarship players on the UConn roster at the start of the season, eight are known to have had brushes with the law in the past 18 months.

"Incidents of that type are typically a negative for alumni," Gladden said. "They want to feel good about UConn but some of them might be saying, `Do they have to do it this way?'"

Edsall said last week that the school makes every effort to examine the character of potential recruits and then instruct them when they are on the campus.

"You go out and recruit these kids and you do the best you can to find out everything that you can," Edsall said. "All of a sudden they come to a university and get out there on their own for an amount of time, and maybe they're not as strong people as they should be and they end up following people and they get themselves in trouble.

"You're never going to know all that in recruiting. If you knew that ahead of time that they were trouble, you're not going to recruit them."

Wilson said evaluating the character of recruits isn't always easy.

"I think it's going to get to the point where people start doing background checks through private companies. ... I think that's what it's going to get to," he said.

A recruit's basic character is more difficult to assess than it was a generation ago because the NCAA limits personal contact with athletes during the recruiting process.

"They don't allow you the access," said former Southern Connecticut State University Athletic Director Darryl Rogers, who coached the Detroit Lions as well as four colleges, including Arizona State and Michigan State. "It was much easier before to see kids in a longer period of time, to talk to their coaches.

"There's a two-pronged thing here. It's good for the kids who don't get inundated with coaches visiting. But now you have to a make a decision on a player you know less about. Now you can't just say, `Let's go to Coach and find out what kind of guy he is.'"

Contact Matt Eagan at meagan@courant.com.

Courant Staff Writer Tom Puleo contributed to this story.