Golf Recruiting Pro
Presson Norwood-
The recruiting process for college golf is much different than that of most other collegiate sports. There’s no ESPN 300 for the top high school golfers like there is with football.
In order to even find out who some of the best golfers in high school are you have to go to the National High School Golf Association website. ESPN and other big recruiting websites, like Rivals, or 247 Sports don’t even have recruiting rankings for high school golf.
How do high school golfers get noticed by major college programs then if there are no major websites to help get their name out there?
“There are a lot of tournaments that you play in and you’ve got 15 to 20 college coaches that just come to the tournaments to watch you play and they’ll follow you around, but also I know when I came to App, every school has a perspective questionnaire that you fill out and send to the coaches and if they like what they read on your paper resume then they’ll come watch you play,” said Alex Burris, a junior on the Appalachian golf team.
Burris wasn’t sure how many teams he reached out to and filled out forms for but he knew that Appalachian was the best fit for him.
Roles are reversed when it comes to recruiting for golf according to Chance Watson, another junior on the team. Watson said that with golf “you have to recruit the team, not the other way around.”
According to Watson, if you want to get noticed then you have to put your name out there and contact universities directly.
With football recruiting, universities will seek out certain players and try to convince them to join there team. When it comes to golf, players must convince a team to take a chance on them by introducing themselves and showing teams what they can bring to the table.
Bo Redman, head coach of the men’s golf team at Appalachian, has an easy job when it comes to recruiting for the team.
“We get a lot of interest from other kids that we haven’t signed to a scholarship yet and people that want to come to this area. We get a lot of inquiries for this team, which actually for golf with recruiting makes it pretty simple. I hate to say it like that but it is,” said Redman.
The only difficult part about recruiting for the team, according to Redman, is the weather in Boone.
“I get a lot of emails from recruits that see we’re in the Sun Belt conference and they say ‘great I wanna be able to practice with the team all season,’ and I tell them that maybe you haven’t done your research on this school. It’s got its negatives but it also has some positives. Some athletes like to do a little snowboarding and stuff so we can give them the opportunity to do that,” said Redman.
The Mountaineers spring season began on March 5 and runs through the end of the academic year.