Travels With Charlie, '07 | by Jay
(Warning: recruiting-heavy post. Feel free to skip if you don't follow recruiting.)
Right now we're in the middle of the spring evaluation period for recruiting, a month-long window where college coaches can visit high schools and start calling recruits directly for the first time. At this very moment, coaches and assistants from all the big programs are criss-crossing the country, burning up their frequent flier miles in search of the next great recruit. Alamo is out of rental cars. Wallets are overflowing with Denny's receipts. Days Inn stock is soaring.
If you subscribe to the Scout or Rivals recruiting services, you can get a pretty good handle on who the Irish coaches have visited on any given day. Usually there's a daily mention of Charlie chatting up a high school coach, or a recruit talking about the coaches that came to see him that day. Put it all together, and you've got a snapshot of a recruiting whirlwind that would daunt even the hardiest of business travelers.
This year, instead of trying to piece everything together after the fact, we decided to plug in a handy new tool called Google: My Maps and try to follow things as they unfold. For every Charlie visit we hear about, we'll put a pushpin on the map, along with a link to that recruit's profile. It's starting to shape up:
Note that this is a record of visits to-date; as Charlie keeps moving, this map will keep filling up. If you read about another recruiting visit, feel free to drop us a note and we'll add another pushpin.
