For college coaches, the spring recruiting period is a challenge of endurance and logistics. It's about visiting as many high schools as possible, yes, but it's about making as many high quality visits as the day will allow.
You may have walked in the quarterback's high school, but did you see him throw? Then you drove 30 minutes to the wide receiver's school, but did you see him run? How do you possibly see everyone you need to see when every school works out in one of the same two windows -- before school or after.
In Connecticut and Massachusetts, a group of private high schools banded together to optimize the spring eval period for visiting coaches, and their own players.
The idea was brought to New England by Jon Wholley, head coach at Avon Old Farms School in Avon, Conn. As an assistant at UConn, Wholley learned of a showcase put on by a group of high school coaches in the Cincinnati area, and decided to bring the idea to Connecticut when he got the Avon job.
New England prep schools compete against each other for talent, but Wholley said getting his competitors to unite behind the idea wasn't difficult, even if it may have required a leap of faith.
"The first year it was a lot of 'How do we know who's coming?' Well, we don't," Wholley told FootballScoop. "If you're lining up all the best steakhouses in a row, if people want steak, they're going to find it."
Enough people wanted the steak. Estimates I heard from coaches landed between 70 and 120 colleges on each campus. "We had Trinity College and Texas on our campus," Wholley said.
After a successful launch in Connecticut in 2022, the event added a Massachusetts day this year.
"It was really just Connecticut last year. Hearing the success that they had, I reached out to (Wholley) and said I was going to do the same thing in Massachusetts," Williston head coach Tom Beaton said.
The Massachusetts "Show Day" began at Deerfield Academy at 6 a.m., then hit Williston Northampton School, and worked its way north and east to Boston, wrapping up after 7 p.m.
The arrangement worked for the schools and their kids because they were able to control when college coaches arrived on campus, eliminating the need to pull kid after kid out of multiple classes.
"It can be difficult with all these college coaches on campus. At a high academic school like ours, it's not easy to get kids out of class," Beaton said.
"It was a great day for us. We had ours at 10:30 in the morning -- beautiful weather, great turnout for the coaches," said Dexter-Southfield head coach Casey Day. "Where it landed on the school day was a period where kids could come out of classes and be spectators like it was a game."
And the event was great for college coaches because they got to see players... play.
"One school handed us a sheet with jersey numbers, offers, phone numbers, addresses, GPAs," a Power 5 coordinator said. "The jerseys had the name on their backs, and I was wondering why there were so many kids wearing 24. Then I realized they were all in the class of '24.
"As a coach, you're restricted by time and geography. If Johnny throws in third period, you may spend half your day in the car driving to see him, then see somebody else. The 30 minutes you're at a school might be when his team spends 30 minutes in a run period, which isn't helpful if you're there to see a quarterback. This put them in movement drills, position drills, you get to see them do a little bit of everything."
Those on both sides of the recruiting process reported not a single downside to the showcase recruiting model. The only challenge is getting the requisite high schools on board, and then getting the word out to high school coaches. In Massachusetts, that wasn't a problem at all.
"We had done a standalone showcase, it had been well attended," Day said. "The Connecticut-Massachusetts schools brought the thing to another level. We went from 30-40 coaches to around 100 coaches."
"It's great exposure for all of our schools," said Beaton. "There's truly not a downside. We had over 70 schools on our campus, a lot of them high academic schools."
According to Wholley, there are three keys to coordinating a successful Show Day.
The first is cooperation among the high school coaches. "Everybody's got to lift their pride. If you don't have a high level FBS or FCS guy, you might have to take a step back that year. College coaches aren't going to go trick-or-treating and be friends, they're going to find players," he said.
The second key: shameless persistence. Wholley texted every coach he knew that recruits New England, Sending out a gazillion texts to everyone that comes to our schools, that recruits our area. I have no problem sending 100 texts. As a former college coach, I know if they don't respond it's not because they're not coming; they just didn't see it. The third or fourth time, they will."
The third and final key is strategic marketing. SEC schools aren't going to New England to find wide receivers and defensive backs, but they'll go anywhere for quarterbacks (Avon quarterback Ryan Puglisi is pledged to Georgia, and Cheshire Academy's Dante Reno is headed to South Carolina), tight ends and offensive linemen. Wholley and his fellow coaches marketed the event accordingly.
"No one's confusing New England for Dade County," Wholley said, "but we can make it Dade County for a day."