Known throughout college football by the sport’s purists is that arguably the most arduous conference in the land rests closer to Canada than the Mason-Dixon Line.
The Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference saw 75% of its teams finish the 2022 season .500 or better; its top two teams advanced into the NCAA Division III Playoffs.
So as Oshkosh head coach Peter Jennings examined the foundation of his first year – the Titans had cracked into the D3 Top 25, closed the campaign on an 3-1 finish and just missed out on playoff contention by two games, Jennings had a river of thought to assist his program.
Actually, he thought about the Fox River on the western edge of the Oshkosh campus, and then he about Lake Winnebago on the community’s eastern border.
More importantly for Jennings, he and his Titans coaches thought about what every coach thinks about every day: recruiting.
“As everybody does, we try to find a leg up in recruiting,” said Jennings, who helped rival Wisconsin-Whitewater win three WIAC titles in four years before he emerged as the Titans coach of the future in 2022. “It’s leveled the playing field. Our league, the WIAC, there’s never been as much parity as there is now. We were just trying to sort out how can we maybe get ahead of some of these other programs, not just the best of the best, but also upcoming programs. How do we get back to the top?”
That’s when Jennings decided the Titans could apply a streaming service to their recruiting: getting a boat, powering downriver along the Fox until it feeds into Lake Winnebago, a fresh-water lake with nearly 90 miles of shoreline that stands as the largest fully contained body of water within the state of Wisconsin and helps service nearly a quarter-million people’s drinking water.
“My office overlooks the football field, and across the field is the Fox River,” Jennings said. “Then we’ve got the largest inland freshwater lake in the country. Those are unbelievable perks to have in your backyard.
“So we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we got guys out on the boat? If we could take them out and show them the greater Oshkosh community when they’re here for a recruiting trip?.”
Working with the school’s NCAA Compliance office, the Oshkosh football program did, indeed, receive permission to begin taking recruits on community tours with a large pontoon boat that it boards just along campus edge at Midwest Rentals.
“I actually assumed that utilizing a boat would not be different than a golf cart or car but when we went through Compliance, we wanted to be very thorough,” Jennings explained. “We knew there would be pictures out there (from the recruiting weekend) and folks would talk about it. We wanted to make absolutely certain we do it by the book. We’re not trying to have any recruiting violations; I don’t need that heat.”
There are, perhaps, other D3 programs and those at other levels that are utilizing a water-element in recruiting, but notably Oshkosh joins the likes of Baylor University, the University of Tennessee and the University of Washington as college football programs to incorporate the bodies of water surrounding their respective campuses into a potential recruiting edge.
For the Titans, the move already arguably is paying off. Hosting their first Fox River/Lake Winnebago recruiting outing earlier this month, Jennings and the staff picked up multiple verbal commitments.
“That was the question we all asked ourselves as we’re taking three or four trips over to the boatyard and over to the park where we had a little social event, ‘What’s the over-under on commits we would have?’,” Jennings said, “and it definitely hit the over. You can get guys to say they’re interested but to say on June 7 we had multiple commitments …
“The relationships built since January are key but it’s definitely a culminating day for some of these young men, to come out and say, ‘I want to be a Titan, I want to be in the Black and Gold.”
In the midst of discovering a new recruiting amenity that he intends to at least continue using this summer for his Oshkosh program, Jennings also finds a reminder from the initial experience as to why he dedicates himself to coaching young people.
“Sometimes coaching at this level and how fulfilling it can be, we had two young men who had never been out on the water before, never been on boat, lake, river, pond, nothing,” Jennings told FootballScoop. “So it’s cool to get to give that experience to a student-athlete or a 10-year-old sibling. They were fired up, kids thought it was awesome.
“The feedback we got, DMs, texts, calls, people asking, ‘Hey when can I get out on the boat?’. It’s basically still going. I think that’s been good. I think a couple current players are a little jealous wanting the boat ride, so we may explore that in fall camp if it’s legal. But it’s just such an unbelievable location right on Lake Winnebago and we have such a great community. The caliber of football we play is phenomenal in this state, and then we recruit to this amazing community.”