The phone continues to ring as the coach struggles to answer the call from the prospective recruit. “You press the little green button, right?” asks women’s volleyball coach John Dunning.
It’s his first day with his new silver and blue Treo. The Internet-enabled phone/PDA is très chic, but its several dozen keys are très petite. Still, Dunning is determined to master it. “We have no choice—it’s her world,” he says, referring to the high school senior who’s calling him. “We have to be in the world that communicates with someone that age, and they’re not looking for a letter in the mailbox as much as they are an e-mail.”
In five seasons at Stanford, Dunning has led the Cardinal to two NCAA championships. When it comes to competing for the nation’s top players, he and associate head coach Denise Corlett want to have the latest electronic gadgets at their command. They also rely on a handwritten page covered with penciled-in boxes and circles that remind them who they want to watch in 2006, ’07, ’08 and ’09. Other tools of the recruiting trade? “Good shoes,” says Dunning. “We do a lot of walking,” Corlett adds.
In the recruiting season that typically starts in January and runs through July, the coaches trek to club-team tournaments across the country, where they watch volleyball matches from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Corlett remembers being in a convention center last year where 103 matches were being played simultaneously. The noise level at such events, Dunning says, is “beyond belief.”
But before they can leave campus to scout players, Dunning and Corlett—like all the other varsity coaches—have to take an annual exam about the NCAA rules that govern recruiting student-athletes. Regulations spell out precisely when an athlete can be contacted (as of July 1, following the student’s junior year in high school), and where (the number of home visits are restricted). “The whole idea is to not intrude into their lives,” Dunning says. “If there are 310 Division I volleyball schools, and if I’m a really good player, and all these people want to talk to me whenever they can, my life is going to be crazy.”
On the road, Dunning and Corlett look for the obvious: tall, athletic, skilled players who fill needed spots. They sometimes recruit five to 10 athletes for any one of 12 scholarship slots, and they’re looking for specialists. “Nowadays they’ve played so much that you can’t do a lot of switching positions,” Dunning says. “You can’t recruit 20 middle blockers and hope one of them is a setter.” They spot the naturals as youngsters. “I remember my daughter playing against Kristin Richards [’07] when she was an eighth grader, and knowing if I had an opportunity to recruit her, I would.”
Drilling a kill from the back row will get the coaches’ attention, but players also have to excel in the classroom. As the team’s primary recruiter, Corlett has to predict academic success before students have taken the SATs. She spends hours talking with school counselors, asking about grades and finding out if students are taking honors and AP courses. Some prospects find it daunting that they have to be admitted to Stanford before they can be offered scholarships. “The fear of rejection is scary to some,” Corlett says. “But as coaches, we can’t sit here and say, ‘You’re going to get in.’ We have to say, ‘We think you can get in. Now here’s the application—let’s see how it goes.’ ”
The coaches say they also are on the lookout for fundamental character traits. “We’re in a position to recruit most of the top players,” Corlett says. “But how do they react when other players who are not as good make errors? Those are the things I look for, besides athletics and grades.” Dunning calls it the “down-home” approach to recruiting. “They have to first fit the physical requirements, but if we sat down and made a list of the things that my dad and mom tried to teach me about how to be a good person, that’s what we look for. You’ve got to be with these people for four years.”
