NOTE: This story appeared in the 2007 Ultimate College Football Annual.
By Tom Gillispie
Yogi Berra used to say that baseball is
90 percent mental, and the other half is physical.
"All of the factors go into the
making of a team, although getting the right players is important," he
said.
Each team has its own formula or system
for building a team, he says.
"We go for good character and
talented players, most of all," said Petercuskie, who was the recruiting
coordinator at Boston College before following head coach Tom O'Brien to N.C.
State this year.
"Some say that talent supercedes
everything," he said. "Is it coaching, recruiting or the schedule? If
you ask an athletic director, he'll say that schedule is most important. A
coach will say that coaching is the most important thing, and a recruiting
coordinator might say that recruiting is the main thing."
Petercuskie's been on a lot of staffs,
and he knows about recruiting. After playing center at BC in 1971 through '74,
he was a part-time offensive-line coach at Trenton State College (1975). He
enrolled in the master's program at Penn State in '76 and was a graduate
assistant for the Nittany Lions in '76 and '77. His first full-time coaching
job was receivers/linebackers coach at Brown University from 1978 to '82.
Then
he was linebackers coach at Rutgers in '83, Rutgers' defensive-line coach in
1984 through '88, Liberty University's defensive coordinator and linebackers
coach from 1989 to '94, Virginia's defensive tackles coach from 1995 to '96,
and BC's assistant head coach, recruiting coordinator and special-teams coach
from '97 to '06.
Now, Petercuskie, 53, is State's
special-teams coach and recruiting coordinator.
Petercuskie, who has coached on teams
that went to 12 bowls (two at Penn State, two at Virginia and eight at BC),
says that recruiting coordinators coach players, too.
"I don't think anybody's into just
recruiting," Petercuskie said. "I've been a defensive coordinator,
for instance. Recruiting has been a group effort in any staff I've been
on."
Petercuskie says that the number of hours
he spends on recruiting depends on the time of year and the various phases of
coaching. During camp before the season starts, he worries very little about
recruiting. During the season, he sets up a schedule for coaching meetings on
recruiting, and the coaches do active recruiting.
"From Sept. 1 to December, there are
a total of six days allotted when a player can be physically evaluated,"
Petercuskie said. "I'll leave Thursday night or Friday morning and
evaluate them. After Dec. 1, there is actual contact, and there are six times
when you can visit with a player or his parents."
The recruiting coordinator, well,
coordinates how they go about tackling a pile of players. Petercuskie says that
his staff will start with 3,500 players, with each coach looking at 50 to 60
players. They'll whittle that down and eventually have nine coaches handling
five players each, a total of 45 that they'll recruit. The goal, he says, is a
signing class of 20 quality players.
The head coach is obviously involved
strongly in the process, but he comes into prime-time play as the minutes tick
down to signing time. Often, he'll fly into a player's town at the last minute
to make sure his team gets the uncut gem.
Jim Leavitt, the only head coach the
University of South Florida has known, says his staff was going crazy
recruiting in late May. They had a few coaches out on vacation, and Leavitt was
working hard in the trenches.
Leavitt says he does plan to leave Tampa
in July for a five-day vacation -- his first in 10 years at USF. Then he'll
come back, get ready for the season and more recruiting wars.
"It's all based on the time of
year," Petercuskie says. "All of my energies are spent on special
teams when we go to preseason camp, and it revolves back to recruiting in
December. There's always recruiting, 12 months a year; we just put more
emphasis on it at certain times."
Petercuskie says the new N.C. State
coaching staff has an advantage. First, six members of O'Brien's staff at BC,
including Petercuskie, followed O'Brien to Raleigh, N.C. The coaches don't need
to get to learn each other. They're learning the university and the current
players, and they can hit the ground running with recruiting.
Two other factors favor the new staff in
recruiting. A winning program makes it easier to recruit, and N.C. State has
had success in the recent past. It's not like the last three
national-championship programs -- Southern California, Texas and Florida -- but
winning helps.
Second, the coaches had to expand their
recruiting field far from Boston, since New England isn't a hot bed for
football players. Petercuskie says the BC coaches strayed as far west as
Chicago in recruiting. The state of North Carolina is no Texas, Florida or
Ohio, but it's still a great place to find players. So are adjacent Virginia
and South Carolina.
"We can start in central North
Carolina and work our way out," Petercuskie said.
Leavitt says USF uses every advantage it
can to recruit players, including the instructional camps coaches hold in the
summer. Naturally, the Bulls' coaches use the program's ascension to Division
I-A to help recruit, too.
"Tampa's nice, and we use that as a
recruiting tool," Leavitt says. "And 102 out of our 105 players come
from Florida. We don't have to go out of state to recruit. Being in the Big
East Conference has helped us in recruiting, and we have one of the nicest
stadiums (the $168.5 million Raymond James Stadium) in the country; that's a
big recruiting tool.
"There's nothing that we don't look
at in recruiting."
And Leavitt says coaches can recruit
whether they're in Tampa or Manhattan, Kan. (where Leavitt was linebackers
coach and later defensive coordinator at Kansas State).
"You sell it (the program) any way
you want," Leavitt said. "We recruited at Kansas State. And you have don't
have to win to recruit well, although you have to win eventually."
Often, the biggest offseason news at a
big-time university involves recruiting successes in February, spring practice,
coaching clinics and former players making NFL rosters. Naturally, players
making it in professional football interests prospects, too.
Signing day is huge. Notre Dame head
coach Charlie Weis had these opening remarks for the media on Feb. 7, 2007:
"I think this is almost like draft day in the NFL, where you sit around
and wait for faxes to come across the line after all your due diligence. From
when the season ends right till now, that's the most critical time."
On signing day, head coaches often
publicly thank people who aren't coaches. This February, Florida coach Urban
Meyer thanked director of operations Bob LaCivita as well as two women, Emily
Heater and Alecia Pynn.
"Those are the three people who
really handle all of the on-campus things that we need to make things
work," Meyer said then.
Southern Cal coach Pete Carroll made
recruiting sound like a game within a game when he talked this Feb. 7.
"This is an extremely exciting class
featuring some of the top players in the country," asserted Carroll, whose
Trojans have won two of the last four national championships. "Our
coaching staff competed at the highest level for the fifth straight year and
refused to take a step backwards by putting together one of the best classes in
college football once again."
Petercuskie says that more football and
non-football people than ever are interested in recruiting, particularly since
the recruiting explosion 10 or 12 years ago with the advent of the Internet.
The coaches wade through tons of information on the 'Net, and they make calls
to ascertain which nuggets of information are gold or coal.
Often, even the losing team can benefit
from a bowl appearance. Leavitt and Petercuskie likely have never crossed
paths, but their programs have; N.C. State beat South Florida 14-0 in the 2005
Meineke Car Care Bowl, USF's first bowl game. And that game probably helped
recruiting for both programs.
Leavitt says he loves recruiting.
Petercuskie says the same about himself, and he adds that most coaches, not
just recruiting coordinators, enjoy recruiting. If not, they're in the wrong
business.
Leavitt, whose Bulls have Auburn, North
Carolina and Big East foes West Virginia and Louisville on a tough '07
schedule, was asked if the Bulls will continue to recruit better and better
players.
"I hope so," he said, "or
we're going to be in trouble."
* * *
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