By Joe Davidson
Sacramento Bee Staff Writer
(Published Feb. 7, 2001)

Grayling Love will eye the stash one last time tonight, relishing the notion that he has the final say now.

The overflowing laundry basket has served as his personal recruiting melting pot, each letter a temptation island that has exposed his every nerve and emotion.

Valley High School's monstrous offensive lineman will sign a letter of intent with Arizona State this afternoon, bringing to an end a paradoxical experience of cat-and-mouse, a whom-do-you-trust mind game where the sun can be offered one minute and be eclipsed the next.

Goodbye university logos, cheesy punch lines and broken promises. Hello recycling bin.

"Signing with ASU will be a great moment in my life, but I'm glad I only have to go through it once. I wouldn't want to wish this experience on anyone," Love said.

Recruiting can be a funny thing. Love wanted to believe each pitch was sincere, that he really was the difference, that he was as good as the schools told him.

"But you learn early that you're just a piece of meat to some schools, that the only thing that's for sure is when you sign, otherwise it can all be fake," he said.

Today casts a large shadow over all other signing days for high school athletes for one reason: College football is big business.

By colleges securing top prospects, jobs can be spared. Revenue to the schools is at stake; lose that prospect and risk losing everything.

For the prep star, the experience can be as grueling as it can be rewarding. Sacramento serves as a microcosm of how athletes can be left twisting in the wind.

Love knows.

At 6-foot-3 and 295 pounds, with a 1,200 SAT score and a near-perfect grade-point average, he seemingly was a perfect package. He can do chin-ups on the goal posts. He can skunk the guy next to him on a calculus exam.

He can have an impact athletically and academically.

That's what Notre Dame told him when he received hand-written notes. He was offered a recruiting visit in December.

But when Love called to shore up plans, he was told in so many words, "Sorry, son. Nothing personal."

Colorado and Oregon were hot pursuers with letters and calls. Then they stopped. Those schools dropped him from the pecking order when a bigger, stronger "can't-miss" prospect said yes.

From the perfect fit to no longer fitting the bill, Love was floored.

It was a tough lesson, realizing he was easily expendable.

Just the same, "It would sure be nice to get a courtesy call," Love said. "They bug you for the longest time only until they get something better, I guess. It can take such a toll on you.

"One day you think you're special, and the next you're rejected and wonder if you're any good. You can't let it get you down, because it can."

Shortly after he was discarded by Notre Dame, Oregon State jumped into the fray, the same Oregon State that pummeled Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl. Love is still trying to figure that one out.

He settled on ASU, falling in love with everything from the accounting programs to the JumboTron that had his name in lights to the sparkling jersey No. 72 with his name on the back resting on his bed. And he picked up another trick of the trade along the way.

He kept his other college options in the mix until the end, realizing now that leverage counts. It was a ploy he learned from Dave Hoskins, the Elk Grove coach who has helped dozens of Sacramento-area athletes move on to college because he understands that portion of high school football so well.

"Recruiting can be so cutthroat," Hoskins said. "For one thing, you can't sound too excited about a kid because recruiters may think you're over-hyping him. The one thing that works is leverage. That's the name of the game for both sides."

Jonah Russell came away from the Nebraska summer camp with Big Red dreams. He was named the camp's best defensive back and soon thereafter the calls and mail from the Cornhuskers came in. That's rare stuff for an athlete from Capital Christian, a tiny private school nestled off Highway 50.

But Russell has skills. He's 5-11, 185 pounds, versatile, has a 4.5 time in the 40-yard dash and a 36-inch vertical leap. He went on a recruiting trip to Nebraska, watched the game with Baylor and thought it would be a matter of time before the scholarship offer came.

"I never got it," Russell said. "It just stopped. I had turned down other colleges that had called, thinking I was headed (to Nebraska). Then I was, 'OK, what do I do now?' "

Russell contacted schools that he originally told thanks but no thanks. He took trips to Idaho State, Saint Mary's, Cal Poly and had a home visit with UC Davis. He will sign with Cal Poly to play slotback, wondering now if the summer breezes on the Central Coast aren't a little more refreshing than the cornfields of Nebraska.

"I know what athletes go through now," Russell said. "I think some colleges just thought I couldn't handle big-time college football. No one told me for sure. I'm glad the way it turned out, but it's been crazy."

High school coaches agonize over how their players are perceived in the recruiting game. Will they qualify academically? Are they big enough, durable enough, fast enough?

Unlike the 1960s or '70s, when colleges could load up rosters with 90 scholarships, Division I programs are more limited now. Most offer from 15 to 25 scholarships a year and, contrary to popular belief, recruiting mail means little. Only the signature on signing day matters.

Said a Pacific-10 Conference recruiter, "Anyone who's got talent, size and decent grades and has been seen will get mail. Sending mail is the easy part. Keeping in contact is the next challenge, and landing him is the hardest.

"High school kids and parents and coaches need to understand that this is a business, that their kid isn't the only one getting looked at."

For some high school coaches, the pursuit of a scholarship never wanes.

Dave Humphers of Nevada Union will do a mass mailing, picking through any number of the 688 colleges across the land that offer football, from Division I to NAIA. Résumés of his top players, with academic and athletic highlights and a transcript, are provided.

He has had players move on to some of the most obscure places at small colleges in Nebraska or Michigan, but they're playing, and sometimes getting an education for free.

This year, Humphers plans to stuff the mailbox with information on Jason Leach, a 6-3, 315-pound All-City lineman with good feet, good grades and a hungry heart.

"It just ticks me off when colleges use size" to determine their selections, Humphers said, noting that some schools only want players of a certain height and weight.

"I'd love to see Leach go up against some of the kids that are being recruited. It would be inhumane what he'd do to them."

As much of an emotional roller coaster can be for the prep star this time of year, it can be equally as maddening for the college coach.

Jeff Tisdel coached at the University of Nevada for five years, where he had a good program that played in bowl games. Recruiting was the high and low of his job. He's now coaching at Sierra College, serving as a safety net for the overlooked and the late bloomers. And he much prefers this grind than the old one.

"I called the whole recruiting thing 'The Chase,' " Tisdel said. "If you end up grasping air at the end and you're left holding nothing, it can really hurt your program. It causes a lot of sleepless nights for the coaches, too, believe me.

"I thought as I got older, I'd deal with it better. But it's painful every year."

Don Dillon, the American River College coach and the former recruiting coordinator for the University of Hawaii, and Troy Taylor, the former recruiting coordinator for Cal, said colleges often overextend offers.

If a school has 20 scholarships, it might offer 30 deals with the expectation that athletes will pull out late and choose somewhere else, not qualify academically or get hurt.

And what happens if not enough pull out? "Then you're left to think up all kinds of things to say. A lot of colleges do it and it can get ugly," Dillon said.

Taylor, now coaching and teaching at Christian Brothers High, said colleges should strive to be honest from the start. To leave a teenager bitter can serve as bad publicity for the next recruit.

"My wife would cringe when I got on the phone and had to drop a kid, but I did it," Taylor said. "And after letter-of-intent day, it starts up all over again. It's the necessary evil of college football."

© 2001 Sacramento Bee

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