Next fall, 25 new athletes will join the 120-year tradition of Hillsdale College football.
“It takes a very unique individual – a unique 18 year old, high school, male, football player – to choose Hillsdale College,” head football coach Keith Otterbein said.
The incoming class has an average grade point average of 3.7 and an average ACT score of 27.
Hillsdale begins recruiting men for the football team during their junior year of high school. Other schools generally begin recruiting students as early as their freshman or sophomore years of high school. In some extreme cases – like that of Dylan Moses, an eighth grader who already has scholarship offers from the University of Alabama and Louisiana State University – recruiting may begin even earlier.
Hillsdale does most of its recruiting in a few hour radius of campus, encompassing parts of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan.
Hillsdale uses a recruiting service that contacts every football coach in the United States, requesting information about all high school players including names, parents’ names, addresses, phone numbers, and grades. Hillsdale then attains all the lists from the surrounding states that make up its “hub” – “from Chicago down to Indianapolis over to Columbus, Ohio, and Cleveland…plus Michigan, obviously,” said Otterbein.
Each of the 10 football coaches is assigned schools in different areas of the hub. After receiving the lists of students, the coaches will go to their assigned schools to evaluate which candidates are good enough students and good enough football players. The coaches’ goal is to get these students to Hillsdale for a visit.
For the rest of the country, the recruiting service can narrow potential candidates by grade point average of 3.5 or higher. These students will receive a personal letter from Otterbein explaining Hillsdale as an institution followed by a request for the student to fill out an online questionnaire.
“On the national guys, we ask them to do something first,” said Otterbein referring to the questionnaire. “Then we react and kind of get going from there.”
Once it has been decided which students are good enough academically, the coaches will review tapes of the players to determine who is a good player, though Otterbein said this is “extremely complex.”
“The NFL spends billions of dollars trying to figure this out,” said Otterbein. “It’s a very inexact science, so recruiting at our level becomes even a more inexact science because we don’t have as much information as they have.”
Otterbein emphasized the importance of a prospective recruit’s visit to campus.
Sophomore Craig Lewellyn remembered his visit as a very positive experience. He felt like the current players on the team had a genuine interest in who he was and what he wanted from his college experience.
“When I left the next morning, I accidentally left my overnight bag with my toothbrush and razor and what not on the counter,” Lewellyn said. “They even mailed it to me back in Kentucky. That really made it stick that this place was different. None of the other schools I visited after had quite the same effect on me as Hillsdale.”
This sentiment was echoed by his teammate, sophomore Justice Carmie.
“My visit here heavily swayed my opinion on the school,” Carmie
said. “I was fairly certain I wanted to go here.”
While the visit gives the student, the coaches, and the current players a chance to get to know each other, it also gives the coaches the opportunity to explain to the prospective player how the team and the school work.
“We think we’re pretty unique in what we stand for,” Otterbein said. “I think all of us are locked in the fact that we want to compete and we want to win. But we feel it’s very important to win the correct way – the importance of winning with honor, winning by playing within the rules and all of the intangibles. The life lessons that you can learn in any athletics – or, for that matter, in theatre or in art, any discipline – we feel are very important here, I think because of what Hillsdale College stands for.”
Another aspect of a students’ visit is to hear about the school in a direct, honest way, Otterbein said.
“If they don’t figure it out before they come or they try to convince themselves otherwise, they’ll end up leaving anyway,” Otterbein said. “We tell them pretty directly and honestly the way it’s going to be here. And it is a grind. I mean, it’s not easy.”
Carmie noticed this during his recruitment process. He never felt like Otterbein was trying to make the school appear better than it was; Carmie always felt like Otterbein was being upfront and honest about the challenges of Hillsdale.
“The school itself, aside from football, is so far superior to every other school I looked at that it would have been silly for me to go anywhere else,” Carmie said. “As a conservative Christian that really wanted to be challenged academically, there couldn’t have been a better fit.”
Otterbein said one of the big challenges in a student’s decision can be Hillsdale’s size: “We’re that David amongst Goliaths, so we gotta fight an uphill battle.”
“I was a little hesitant about the size of the school because almost every high school guy wants to play football at a BIG school,” said Karmie. “However, I had enough sense pounded into my head throughout my life that I knew picking a school based strictly on football was silly, especially as a guy who was getting limited looks from big schools.”
Hillsdale is one of the smallest of the 148 Division II schools that play football. DII schools range in size from a little over 400 students to over 15,000 students.
“They’ve got to embrace those challenges, just like our school motto says,” Otterbein said.
This year’s recruiting class has a good balance of offensive and defensive players that Otterbein thinks will benefit the team. While the majority of the 25 recruits will not play their first year at Hillsdale, they will practice and train with the team to become acclimated to the new environment.
“We think every one of these 25 that we’ve got coming in this class are good players,” Otterbein said. “But this class is a good fit [for Hillsdale].”
While it won’t be apparent if Otterbein and the other football coaches made the right recruitment decisions with this class for another two or three years of playing as a team, Otterbein said that’s not what shows their success.
“Our true success is going to be judged by the types of fathers and husbands and community members and church members they’ll be 20 years from now,” Otterbein said.
