Coach Scot Sloan has served as Appalachian’s recruiting coordinator since 2011. The Appalachian sat down with Sloan to discuss the recruiting tactis ASU uses.
The Appalachian: How do you determine the kids you are going to start recruiting?
Scot Sloan: Geographically, we pretty much recruit North Carolina, Virginia, a little bit of Maryland, South Carolina, Georgia and dabble a little bit in Alabama. Basically, we’ve got probably seven or eight coaches assigned to geographical areas of North Carolina, splitting that up into counties and using the interstates to divide the state up. Then I have one that dips into Virginia and Maryland, and then there is about five of us that hit Georgia because it’s a really good state. And then we we’ve got about four guys in South Carolina and three distributed in Florida…We will start with probably a list of 700 guys and just weed them out on an ability level or academics.”
TA: Why do you see more recruits from North Carolina coming to Appalachian?
SS: I think that a lot of it is just the tradition and the success that we’ve had, especially when we made that run of three national championships. That caught the attention of a lot of high school players here in the state. Then of course with the stadium expansion and with the crowds we are able to play in front of, this game-day environment is as good as they will find in a lot of places here in the state.
TA: Occasionally from year to year, you get a recruit from a random state that you wouldn’t expect. How does that happen? How do you get in contact with those recruits in the first place?
SS: What’s happened now with technology and the Internet, I get close to probably 80 to 100 emails a day that have kids’ highlight film. I’m getting them from California, Texas, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania; you name it. Now we’ll probably, at the end of the day, not going to go to California or Texas to recruit a kid, but you know when you see we sign one from Maryland or one from Virginia or one from Miami, Fla., a lot of it is they reached out to us in an email and watched the highlight films, we like these players. So then we follow up with it and one thing leads to another and a relationship is established.
TA: From looking at the span of five years, of course North Carolina is at the top¬, but Georgia is the second. How do you go about establishing a pipeline in a different state like that?
SS: A lot of it is track record and relationships. Georgia has always been a really good state for us. I think we’ve got 21, 22 players from Georgia on the roster…I spent a long time in Georgia, coaching at Georgia Southern and Georgia Military College, so just from recruiting that state for as many years as I did, as well as other coaches that have recruited Georgia-and location, like I said. You know, from Atlanta to here is actually closer than Wilmington to here, so a kid can get in the car, jump on 85 and 321 and be here a little over four hours. So that is attractive to them-playing at a high level football, but is easy for families to get up here and see them play on a Saturday.
Story: ETHAN JOYCE, Sports Reporter