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After late start to '13 recruiting, DPU coaches focused on future
The coaching staff for the DePauw football team has a plan, probably not much different than any other coaching staff at any other college or any other sport. They want to recruit the best players they can get, fill all the holes in the team and use that talent to win games.
When you have to recruit for an NCAA Division III program, and you can't offer athletic scholarships, things aren't quite as easy as they sound.
"Division III recruiting is a marathon, not a sprint," DPU head coach Bill Lynch said recently. "It's not like D1 where you offer them a scholarship and they either take it or you move on to the next guy. There's a process."
That process got off to a late start this season. Lynch was hired in January to replace interim coach Scott Srnka, now back to being the team's defensive coordinator and assistant head coach. Because Lynch had been out of coaching and because the Tigers were starting the new Lynch-era with changes to philosophy and strategy, the staff started searching for any recruits they could get.
"Right now we can sit and when we kind of get an idea of what this football team is (on opening day), then we can say with recruiting, 'OK, we need to get eight offensive linemen, two quarterbacks and three running backs,'" Lynch said. "Well, we didn't have a chance to do that so we had to recruit what we could."
DPU still miraculously ended up with 42 incoming freshmen players, but the numbers aren't quite balanced the way a team needs to be. Of the incoming players there are nearly as many quarterbacks as offensive linemen.
Lynch said the coaches worked hard in January, February and March to get commitments, but they hadn't received a single one prior to his hire. It took work to get them, not just from the coaches but also the campus faculty and admission staff.
It looks a bit odd at practice to see as many red jerseys on the field as there are guys pushing a blocking sled, but that doesn't quite tell the whole story. Lynch loves his quarterbacks, but what the linemen lack in numbers they make up for with talent.
It will just take a bit of extra work to keep them healthy.
That will be less of a problem in the coming years when the coaching staff has a chance to focus on specifics instead of generalities. The head coach being out of coaching, and away from recruiting circles, also couldn't have helped much.
Lynch worked as an administrator in the athletic department at Butler prior to being hired at DePauw. He's been a head coach in Indiana for years and knows the recruiting trail, but he didn't get to watch a lot of high school games last year and even the ones he did watch were from the perspective of a fan, not a coach.
Not that he was away from the recruiting game completely.
"I've got three sons that are college football coaches and two of them are in the state of Indiana, so those guys talk recruiting all the time," Lynch said. "We'd be together at family functions and they'd be talking back-and-forth, and I'd listen a little bit, but it didn't mean anything until all of a sudden I was coaching again. Then it meant a lot.
"(The DePauw coaches) are catching up. We've studied it over the summer and we've worked summer camps. We had recruiting days that brought in seniors-to-be so we got them on campus. We've got an idea, we've just got to go (execute it)."
Lynch said he plans to focus on recruits in Indiana, St. Louis, the Chicago-area and Ohio, a high school football hotbed that also includes many of the North Coast Athletic Conference schools DPU will be facing.
The focused recruiting plan will help the Tiger in the years to come. This year, though, they'll need to keep themselves healthy and keep an eye open on high school football Friday nights.
"We'll get through it," Lynch said, "and we'll be out looking."