September 2021 Newsletter

Recruiting during the COVID-19 pandemic

This is the first of a two-part series examining how the college baseball recruiting landscape changed during the COVID-19 pandemic and what lies on the horizon. Part 1 deals with the extended recruiting dead period and how college coaches coped with having to alter their methods of recruiting. Part 2 in October will examine the impact of the transfer portal.

Christmas came early for college coaches and recruiting coordinators in 2021.

After having to deal with an extended dead period for 15 straight months due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Division I coaches had their restraints removed on June 1 when the NCAA officially ended the dead period, allowing coaches and recruiters to return to some sense of normalcy in attracting and getting players to campus.

College baseball coaches will enter the second full contact period on the 2021-22 recruiting calendar on Friday (Sept. 10), where for the next month they can continue to bring recruits to campus, show off facilities, display the atmosphere of college football gamedays and put on their best recruiting pitches to entice the next wave of college baseball standouts. The difference is that, as opposed to a quiet period, coaches can now visit players on their high school campus or in their homes, and evaluate them during games.

It is the sense of normalcy that has eluded college baseball coaches for the better part of two years.

“For us, anytime we get a player on campus at Georgia Tech, any and all negative connotations or perceptions that they have about anything are absolved,” said James Ramsey, an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator at Georgia Tech and former All-American at Florida State. “I think not being able to put a recruit’s two feet on campus and in our new $12 million facility was challenging. But I also think that for the families that also wanted to actually be on campus, it’s one thing to say a campus feels like home on a Zoom call. It’s another to say it feels like home when you’re actually at the campus.”

Some sense of normalcy
During a recruiting dead period, coaches are not allowed any in-person contact with recruits and/or their parents. Coaches are not allowed to bring recruits to campus, cannot talk to them at the athlete’s school or an athletic camp. Not even a random meeting at the local convenience store is allowed.

Athletes and coaches still are allowed to communicate by phone, email, social media and other forms of digital communication. But it’s not the same. The phone can tell the college coach only so much about the athlete, and the athlete can learn only so much about the school in an email.

It’s hard enough to get a leg up on recruiting while having to do that for a few weeks during the normal recruiting calendar, none of which are consecutive. Imagine having to do that for 15 months straight.

The NCAA initially shut down college recruiting and instituted an indefinite dead period on March 13, 2020. Then, in September 2020, the dead period was extended again through the end of the year. The NCAA finally announced last April that the dead period would end June 1 and schools would return to their regular recruiting calendar.

For college baseball coaches, it was almost two full seasons of having to rely on highlights, videos and the kids’ words as to just how ready they were to be a Division I player. While video can show quite a bit about a kid, it can show only so much.

“You don’t get to see what happened or what they do away from the game,” said Jim Schlossnagle, who was recently hired as head coach at Texas A&M after 18 successful seasons at TCU. “You’re only seeing their best pitches, you’re only seeing their best swings. You don’t get to see them run the bases, you don’t get to see them play a ton of defense. You don’t get to see the intangibles that come with being in the ballpark and watching them interact with teammates and coaches and parents. You’re just seeing the best of everybody versus the entirety of the skill set and the full picture.”

The extended dead period forced coaches to not only get creative about how they evaluate players and decide whether to offer them scholarships almost sight unseen, but also forced them to practice restraint. While the dead period was extended for more than a year, the NCAA did provide relief by relaxing roster and scholarship limitations in order to give coaches more leeway in building a team during the 2021 season.

“You’re certainly taking some risks that you would never have taken because you didn’t see them with your own eyes,” said Cooper Fouts, an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator at Louisiana Tech, who joined the Bulldogs staff after three seasons at Purdue. “So, you're probably trusting some people that maybe you've trusted, but man, you just didn't know. So that was a challenge.

“But I think the biggest piece was just, when you get a guy committed, and you just don't quite know. You want to think that guy's pretty good. But no matter what, you're always going to miss on guys, and I think the mystery is just going to be so much higher because you didn't see him with your own eyes. And it's not just the talent evaluation, it's the personality evaluation. We didn't get to spend time with them on campus, you didn't get a chance to meet their parents, you didn't get a chance to really have the interaction you normally would, where you would on the personal side of the recruiting process.”

Looking ahead
So now that the extended dead period is a thing of the past, and coaches are into the current recruiting calendar, just what will college baseball recruiting look like going forward?

The NCAA is providing some relief through various recruiting waivers. One of those, applicable to all sports, will allow full-time institutional staff members, current students and all coaches, including volunteer coaches, to initiate recruiting calls (telephone or video) involving prospective student athletes at an institution they're permitted to call. This waiver will extend to Dec. 31 and requires all staff who do not normally make recruiting calls to pass the NCAA recruiting exam before making or receiving calls with prospective student-athletes.

A roster limit will be put back into place for the 2022 season, but it will be extended to 40 spots whereas in 2021 there was no cap. Also, the number of players on scholarship will stay at 32, where it was in 2021, and for the second straight season the 25 percent scholarship minimum – requiring all players on a roster to be at least at one-quarter of a scholarship – will be waived.

Plus, the NCAA granted a waiver for a one-time transfer for all student-athletes as long as they entered the transfer portal by July 1. Almost 3,000 prospective student-athletes were in the transfer portal as of Sept. 1, providing for 2022 rosters across college baseball to be radically changed.

And while all this signals a return to some sense of normalcy from the days before the pandemic, there may not be a complete return to the way it was, at least not anytime soon.

“I don't think we'll ever see the old normal again, because I think you're going to have a higher percentage of grad transfers as well, because you're going to have more young guys who are registered early on and because of the older kids who are still in college,” Fouts said. “So, I think that'll be the cycle that you have to continue to look at is how many guys are grad transferring. Much like football, their first year, they're redshirting. And I think that cycle of older kids staying in college baseball, they’re around for a good amount of time, until that cycle wears out, I still think it's going to be another three to four years before you can see the age of kids in college go back to what it used to be. I don't think it's a one- or two-year fix.”

Artifact of the Month

George H.W. Bush rounds first base in a game against Harvard. Bush played first base for the Yale Bulldogs from 1946 to 1948. Video footage of several Yale games featuring Bush is part of the National College Baseball Hall of Fame archives thanks to a donation by Bush’s former teammate, the late Jim Duffus, and his family. Duffus agreed to donate the footage to the archives prior to his death in 2014. The staff at the Southwest Collections/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University, which serves as the official archive of the National College Baseball Hall of Fame, then was able to digitize the footage to both preserve it and make it more accessible with current technology.

Video still courtesy NCBHOF Archives.

In Memoriam

Robert Hurst, the official artist of the National College Baseball Hall of Fame, poses in his studio with the paintings for the 2013 inductees. Hurst relied on photos of the inductees as well as conversations with them to develop the ideas for the paintings. (Photo courtesy Robert Hurst, A Damn Fine Artist)

Robert Hurst, the official artist of the National College Baseball Hall of Fame, died on May 15. Hurst, who also served as the official artist of the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, recently was honored with a permanent display in the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, according to a Facebook post on his professional page — Robert Hurst – A Damn Fine Artist.

His widow, Pam Utsler, wrote that “Robert would be so jazzed and humbled by this incredible honor. (The phrases over-the-moon and blown-away come to mind.)”

As the official artist of the National College Baseball Hall of Fame, Hurst commemorated the induction of 11 classes of inductees (2006-16), creating both the official portraits that will hang in the Hall of Fame facility, but also prints that are available for purchase through his website, adamnfineartist.com, with a portion of sales benefitting the Hall of Fame.

The following is a feature story written on Hurst for the 2014 Night of Champions yearbook.
By Kassidy Ketron

Robert Hurst was legally blind until he was in the fifth grade.

This is the reason he said he pays close attention to detail in his paintings.

“I remember drawing things like antelope and deer (when I was younger), but I would just copy them out of a book,” the official painter for the National College Baseball Hall of Fame said. “I would also take the little class portraits of my friends and draw them bigger so I could tell what my friends looked like.”

Hurst, who attended a private school until fifth grade, maintained As and Bs in classes because his teachers would accommodate his needs, but when he transferred to a public school he quickly became an F student.

After that, his parents took him to an optometrist to correct the problem, but he did not move forward with his painting career until about 1989.

“(My wife) felt that I wasn’t making enough money at my job and that I really should try to pursue art,” Hurst said, “and so we started doing shows. Then I hooked up with Earl Campbell, the football player, who had just retired from the New Orleans Saints.

“He was best known as the running back for the University of Texas and the Houston Oilers back in the ’70s and he asked me to do a painting for him and that led to a print, which I sold and we split the proceeds. After about a year he renegotiated the contract to where I got 100 percent. He just signed it over to me and says, ‘Here, go with it. It’s yours,’ and that’s what began my sports art career.”

In 1997, Hurst began working with the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, and when the National College Baseball Hall of Fame was preparing to induct its first class in 2006, a board member suggested contacting Hurst about doing its portraits.

“Well, we just contacted him and told him what we were doing and asked him if he would be interested in doing the paintings and he was very interested in it,” Randy Robbins, National College Baseball Hall of Fame board chairman, said. “Since then it’s been a good partnership.”

Hurst’s paintings, he said, stand out not only with the backgrounds Hurst uses, but how personal he is able to make them for each inductee.

Robbins said he has never come across anyone who did not like one of Hurst’s paintings.

“I have not had one inductee that has said anything negative about their painting,” he said. “They have just loved them — all of them. They just thought they’ve all been fabulous. Family members that come just think they’re just amazing portraits.”

Although Hurst said he has painted portraits of celebrities such as Muhammad Ali and Willie Nelson, he has not been necessarily star struck by any of them because he realizes people are people.

Instead of the fame of the subject, he said his favorite piece of work is based on the level of accuracy.

“There have been a few I’ve done, I guess, over the years that I’ve really felt strongly about,” Hurst said. “I think the one that I did of Norm Cash, who’s a native Texan, and who was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame a few years ago, I think is one of the best paintings I’ve ever done. Just technically, to me, it’s as close to perfection as I’ve gotten.”

Mike Gustafson, College Baseball Hall of Fame president and CEO, said there is one portrait in particular that Hurst did, which sticks out in his memory the most.

Hurst, he said, honored a request by one of the College Baseball Hall of Fame’s first inductees, which could have been surprising for some people.

“Dave Winfield, in college, both pitched and hit, but in the major leagues — he was a National Baseball Hall of Famer — Dave Winfield was an outfielder in pro ball,” Gustafson said. “So if you didn’t really know the college story that he pitched, you wouldn’t get it. Well, Dave Winfield told Robert Hurst, ‘Hey, I want my College Baseball Hall of Fame painting to be of me as a pitcher, not a hitter.’

“So just a little extra touch not to just draw straight from the pictures, but to actually get the word from the inductee. I think that he’s done a good job with that sort of thing to really make sure that he’s personalizing the way those guys want to be depicted.”

Hurst said it is very important to get the details in a portrait correct not only for himself, but for those in the paintings.

In fact, he said he made a mistake in a former NFL star’s portrait, which the athlete refused to sign.

“I got Tony Dorsett’s shoes wrong once because I actually worked off a picture of an entirely different football player,” Hurst said, “but I thought that the running style was similar to him and so I used this other photograph as a reference. Made it Tony Dorsett and then when he saw the painting, I asked him to sign it and he goes, ‘I’m not going to sign that, you got the wrong shoes on me.’ ‘Oh, that’s right’ (I said).

“He was Converse and I had put Adidas on him. So I changed his shoes as promised and he was happy and said ‘OK, then I’ll sign it.’”

Hurst has not only worked for organizations such as the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the National College Baseball Hall of Fame, but also the Texas Heritage Songwriters Hall of Fame, the College Football Hall of Fame and Rodeo Austin.

He donates his artwork to about 30 different children’s charities, which have helped to raise more than $150,000 in the past few years.

“I don’t have any kids,” Hurst said, “but kids are what makes the world go ‘round. So it’s really one of the proudest things I feel I do, help raise money for so many charities.”

On top of all the organizations he works with, he also finds time to manage a business of his own, A Damn Fine Artist.

Hurst said the name came from speaking with a man he met at the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, Texas, who saw his work and told Hurst he was “a damn fine artist.”

“I thought it was funny,” he said. “It kind of flowed. It had a sense of humor to it and it worked. A lot of people remember it. They may get it a little wrong, most of them say, ‘You’re a damn good artist,’ when they’re trying to remember, A Damn Fine Artist, but that’s all right. They get the gist of it. I think more people know me by that name, A Damn Fine Artist, than they do my real name.”

Inductee Spotlight

Rick Monday, outfielder, Arizona State, 1965

Career Highlights:

Played only one varsity season at ASU
Named National Player of the Year by The Sporting News in 1965 while helping lead the Sun Devils to a national title
Hit .359 that season with a then-school-record 11 home runs including two home runs during the College World Series to earn All-CWS team honors
Also recorded 11 doubles and 12 triples that season
Was the first player drafted by Major League Baseball, as he went No. 1 overall to the Kansas City A’s in the first MLB amateur draft in 1965
ASU retired his number in 1997.

Did you know:

Monday is famous for more than his on-field prowess. On April 25, 1976, Monday became famous for thwarting a flag-burning protest on the field of Dodgers Stadium.

Monday, who was playing center field for the Chicago Cubs, ran over to the father-son duo who had gotten onto the field and snatched the flag away from them before they could set it on fire. He then ran to the Dodgers dugout and handed the flag to a player.

When Monday came to bat in the top of the next inning, “he received a standing ovation from the Los Angeles crowd, and the scoreboard flashed the message “Rick Monday … You made a great play,’” according to NBC Sports.

"What they were doing was wrong, and I wanted them off the field," Monday told VICE Sports before a 2016 Dodgers spring training game in Glendale, Ariz. "I did not want them to be able to desecrate an American flag that some of my buddies lost their lives for, representing the rights and freedoms that you and I enjoy."

Following the incident, Monday requested to keep the flag and when the Dodgers made a road trip to Wrigley Field later that season, Dodgers team personnel presented the flag to him. Monday still has the flag and has taken it to various events across the country and has raised more than $500,000 for military charities, according to NBC Sports.

Today, Monday serves as a broadcaster for the Dodgers, a team he spent eight seasons with as a player. He joined the broadcast team in 1993.

He still gets asked about the flag nearly every day, fellow Dodgers broadcaster Charley Steiner told Dodgers Insider.

“Rick still hears about the flag every day during the season,” Steiner said. “It doesn’t matter which city we visit, the list of fans who want to say ‘thank you’ range from a veterans group that fought in a war to an elementary school student who wasn’t even born at the time Rick was a player. Rick accepts the attention with modesty and grace. He says anyone would’ve done the same thing if they were in that situation. But not everyone is going to have the same reaction or be able to react in such a quick manner. He was the right person for the job.”