Why Cant Wisconsins Recruit a Blue Chip Quarterback
Bryce had only been playing football for two years, but as his father, Craig, watched him perform week after week in the YMCA Leagues of Pasadena, Calif., he came to believe his son was special.
The way Bryce intuitively sidestepped defenders and delivered throws, the way the ball came off his hand, Craig just knew it: His boy was a prodigy.
It was decided. Bryce "was going to be a quarterback," Craig said. And that felt less like a position they picked for him and more like one that had chosen Bryce. It was destiny.
At the time, Bryce was 5 years old.
Thirteen years later, this past November, Craig and his wife Julie were in the stands at Bryant-Denny Stadium watching their son — 19-year-old Bryce Young — a freshman at Alabama, a former five-star quarterback prospect, and the future face of the Crimson Tide's offense. With 1:51 left in the third quarter against Kentucky, Young took the snap, evaded a Wildcats pass rusher, rolled to his right and threw an off-platform dart between a pair of defenders to wide receiver DeVonta Smith, the first touchdown pass of Young's college career.
In that pass to Alabama's eventual Heisman Trophy-winning receiver, Craig felt some validation. He knew his son could play at this level, and Bryce was out there proving it. But he also saw "micro-glimpses of all the events that led up to that," all that it took to get Bryce to that point.
Sessions with a quarterback guru at $100 a pop. Private strength and conditioning coaches that were almost as spendy. Seven-on-seven leagues. Summer camps. Campus visits. Each year, the Young family spent thousands of dollars to help develop Bryce into a blue-chip quarterback.
That is now more the norm than abnormal. Many high-profile signal-callers performing on football weekends are the products of an intense (and expensive) process of development. Personal quarterback coaches. Strength and conditioning trainers. Speed and agility tutors. Mental coaches. Raising a blue-chip quarterback now involves an aggregation of gurus to help refine and usher a prospect along. It also requires a boatload of money, with families like the Youngs spending thousands of dollars each year.
It was, in part, why that touchdown pass by Young to Smith felt like a culmination of all that work.
"That encapsulates what he is," Craig says.
It also, in his eyes, justified his investment.
Young will get a chance to take the reins at Alabama this fall. (Nelson Chenault / USA Today)
Craig Young is doing some tablecloth math.
"We'll just average the QB coach to $100 a week, which is on the low end," he says. "That's $400. We'll add another $100 for speed and weight training. Let's say that's $800 to $1,000 a month on training. So we could say about $1,000 a month on training. So if we add that up to a year, that's going to be about $12,000."
That total doesn't include the $300-500 fee for the seven-on-seven teams Bryce played on or the registration fees for participation in youth football, most notably the Inland Empire Ducks, which Bryce led to a national championship as an eighth-grader. It doesn't include travel costs to camps, tournaments, games and, later, unofficial campus visits.
Craig Young estimates that his family spent upwards of $15,000 a year on football training and participation for Bryce, with most of that spending coming during his high school years, and some in middle school.
"There was a point in time where I was wondering if I was overdoing it," Craig says. "Was my anxiety of, 'Hey, am I doing everything I can to make sure he has everything he needs to be successful? Was I spending too much? Could it be maybe just once a month instead of once a week, or once every two weeks?'"
Young had early quarterback coaches and then in middle school started working with Danny Hernandez, who runs Team Dime Los Angeles and is one of the most prominent quarterback developers in the nation.
Southern California is heavily populated with private quarterback coaches. There is Steve Clarkson (Steve Clarkson's Dreammakers), George Whitfield (Whitfield Athletix), Hernandez and Taylor Kelly (3DQB), who has trained Young recently, among others. Atlanta is another guru hotbed — Ron Veal (QB Collective), Quincy Avery (QB Takeover) — and further south in Mobile, Ala., there is David Morris of QB Country, another noted tutor.
Craig's concerns that he might be overdoing it faded when he saw the impact Bryce's work with Hernandez had on his son's performance.
Compare Young's touchdown against Kentucky with some of the drills he was working on in middle school during training sessions with Hernandez, who made a highlight tape of those workouts and sent it to college coaches.
The mobility, the accuracy on the move, the use of different arm angles. One can understand why in that pass Craig saw years of work.
But he's not blind to how that amount of training and the cost of it all might look to others, especially his wife, who had wondered why her husband was spending so much money on quarterback training for a six-year-old. Both Youngs work, Craig as a mental health program administrator, Julie in education.
"I think a lot of times when someone's starting that young," Craig says, "my wife is thinking, 'Am I living vicariously through my son? Am I pushing him into doing something he doesn't want to do? Am I sacrificing his childhood and development in other areas?' Which are all valid concerns."
Craig and Hernandez, who trained Bryce and was his QB coach at Cathedral High School through 2017, never once sensed that Bryce wasn't enthusiastic about the tutoring.
"I've had situations where I've had a parent come in and say, 'Hey man, I'll do four or five privates with you a week and we'll do this,'" says Hernandez. "And they think I'm going to give them this magic recipe to make them this amazing quarterback. If I see little Junior isn't all that into it, 'Hey man, maybe we need to talk about it and reassess this thing.'
"But it's tough, man. Bringing everything to be an overall quarterback. You're talking about quarterback training, you're talking about with some of these guys strength and conditioning training, a special side coach for that. A special side coach for speed and agility stuff. Some of these kids have mental coaches that they work with that help them with getting their mind right."
Melva Thompson-Robinson had her flight from Las Vegas to Oregon booked. It was 2016, and the Oregon staff "begged, begged, begged," her son Dorian Thompson-Robinson, a four-star recruit at Bishop Gorman High School, to make an unofficial visit to campus.
As a single parent, Melva booked the flight on a lower-priced airline that would allow them to fly straight into Eugene. There was no reason not to go, so she had passed on the optional flight insurance.
Less than 24 hours before departure, a Ducks coach called Thompson-Robinson and informed him that Oregon had accepted a commitment from another class of 2018 quarterback. The coach let Thompson-Robinson know he could still visit campus, but he wouldn't receive a scholarship offer.
"So we lost money on the airfare and things like that," Melva says. "So that's one of those hidden costs. … But after that, I looked at Dorian and said, 'We are not going to go anywhere you don't have an offer. I can't afford it.'"
The Thompson-Robinsons lived in Las Vegas, where private quarterback coaches aren't as accessible as they are in Southern California. Thompson-Robinson worked with a quarterback coach only intermittently because he had to drive to Phoenix for every session, but Melva still estimates she spent $9,000 on private coaching. Melva enrolled Dorian at Bishop Gorman, a local powerhouse, and spent over $50,000 in total tuition during his four years there. She also took her son to satellite camps where college coaches scouted prospects, but she tried to stay away from the more expensive events. If it was more than $300 or $400 for a camp, "then he probably wasn't going," she says. "We were just always very strategic about what we were doing."
Unofficial visits to colleges like the one Oregon pushed for are one of the lesser-known costs of bringing along a QB prospect. Schools push hard to get prospects to attend their summer camps so they can evaluate them up close. Bryce Young went on nearly 10 unofficial visits and attended at least three out-of-state camps.
"The average price per (plane) ticket is about $300 or $400," Craig Young says. "So that would be $800. Hotel is going to be at least $300-plus, that's $1,000 (for two nights). $200 for rental cars, so that's $1,300. Food is going to be another $300. So each trip would be about $1,600."
"These coaches have recruiting budgets," Melva says. "That's what their job is. To get out on the road and find kids. All this begging you to come visit, like a used car salesman. … I almost cussed out some coaches one time. For like an hour, they stood there and talked to me, 'Baby, baby please. Baby please.' You know, and at the same time, it's at one of these satellite camps and a coach from another school came up to me before I even talked to these coaches from the other school and he said, 'I don't even know why they're talking to your son anyway. They already have a 2018 QB commit.' … Everybody wants you, 'Come visit our school. Come do this. Come do that.' Some of the best advice I got was from former Bishop Gorman and UNLV coach Tony Sanchez, who was like, 'Control the process. You can't do everything and don't feel like you have to do everything. Do what you can do.'"
Still, Melva estimates she spent $6,000 on travel related to camps and unofficial visits, which Dorian took mostly in 2015 and 2016, up until her son signed with UCLA, where he just completed his junior season. Minus the tuition at Bishop Gorman, Melva believes she spent over $25,000 in total on her son's QB aspirations, all on the salary of a UNLV professor.
That meant the family had to forego any vacations; Melva drove around with her car's check-engine light on for a year. Because of her expenses raising a QB prospect, "I didn't have the money to afford (to fix it)."
Thompson-Robinson had to be choosy about where he went to get exposure. (Kim Klement / USA Today)
In August, four-star QB prospect Jake Garcia and his father, Randy moved from Southern California to Georgia so Jake could play his senior season at Valdosta High School. The move came weeks after the California Interscholastic Federation elected to delay the start of high school football to January.
It became a national story, particularly after Randy revealed to ESPN that he and his wife legally dissolved their marriage (with plans to remarry) so Garcia could be eligible to meet Georgia's transfer guidelines. (Garcia's mother remained in California.)
But the Georgia High School Association ruled Jake ineligible at Valdosta, so he transferred to Grayson High School, nearly four hours away from Valdosta, to finish his senior year.
Those two moves, which included renting apartments (and the financial penalties for breaking two leases early) cost the Garcia family about $10,000.
"Then you have to rent a car for five months. That's going to run about $4,000. God dang, that is a lot of money," Randy says.
The Garcias dipped into savings they had set aside in case their son needed it for college in order to pay for the moves. Add that to the $20,000 over the past four or five years the Garcias spent on QB training, camps and unofficial visits, and it is no wonder that Randy, a retired law enforcement officer, had to take a part-time security job to cover the costs.
Garcia has received some criticism for attending five high schools in four years. He originally attended Long Beach Poly High School but transferred after his freshman year when Long Beach Poly coach Antonio Pierce was hired at Arizona State. Then he played two seasons for nearby Narbonne High, which was banned from the playoffs at the tail end of his junior season, so he transferred to La Habra High. His stay at La Habra lasted a few months before he moved to Georgia.
The move to Georgia was made because Garcia had yet to play a full high school season — for reasons mainly out of his control — and he wanted to get more game experience.
Every few years, there are stories about the extreme lengths some families go for their quarterback sons, and this is one of those instances, but Randy says he wouldn't have done anything differently – no matter what the cost.
"The end result has been good," Randy says.
Jake enrolled at Miami in January and is considered the Hurricanes' QB of the future.
When Malachi Nelson, a highly-touted quarterback prospect in the 2023 recruiting class was younger, his father, Eric, would receive calls from QB trainers who charged $100 a session, but he couldn't afford to hire them. Instead of playing for the Inland Empire Ducks, as Young and Georgia QB J.T. Daniels did, Malachi played for his neighborhood Pop Warner team, the Garden Grove Bulldogs, a cheaper option.
Until Malachi was 12 or so, Eric trained his son himself.
"I did everything I could not to mess him up," says Eric, a pastor.
Even when college programs insisted Malachi come for a visit, he or his father let the schools know it wasn't financially feasible.
"I think some colleges are taken aback by it but for him, that's of the utmost importance," Eric says. "Everybody's like, 'I can't wait to get you here, and when are you going to come?' And he's like, 'Well, I'd like to come, I just don't know if that's a reality.'"
Malachi Nelson is the No. 6 overall player in the Class of 2023 and the No. 2 quarterback, behind only Arch Manning, the nephew of Peyton and Eli Manning.
In the past, a quarterback like Malachi Nelson, even as he got older and his talent became undeniable, might have not had access to the quarterbacking machine that hones young prospects. Quarterbacks from low-income families were priced out. But the proliferation of quarterback trainers across Southern California and the rest of the country has driven down prices and has led some tutors to scholarship prospects, training them for free or close to it as a way to raise their own profiles.
"I think there's a period in time where it did (hinder minority quarterbacks)," says renowned QB trainer Quincy Avery, who works with Houston Texans QB Deshaun Watson and Ohio State standout Justin Fields. "Like it made it really, really difficult for people, pending their financial situation, to do it. I actually think now with the way things are going, it's easier. There are enough really good quarterback trainers … who see a guy with potential and say, 'Oh, you don't have the money, that's fine.' They'll probably do the same way I do (and help out)."
"I think initially personal training definitely had a class and by extension a race element," Craig Young says. "Where it was something that was just available for people of a higher socioeconomic status which at times excluded people of color. I do think now because of social media, the internet, the access is different. There are more personal trainers and by extension, you can see more African-American quarterbacks are getting trained because I think now the access is different. You can get a trainer at different price points. Does a gap exist between the top-flight elite trainer? Yes. Could their price point potentially be prohibitive to people of color on the higher levels? Yeah. But you can still get good training."
Eric Nelson was fortunate to have a family friend, Tim Chou, who coaches at Los Alamitos High (where Malachi plays) and who trained Malachi when he was young. Then, just before high school, when it became obvious he was a college talent, Malachi joined the ranks of QBs training with Hernandez.
"I've always felt I can't turn away kids for money," Hernandez says. "It doesn't matter if the kid's a blue-chip guy or if he's a guy who's struggling to start on his JV team."
The increase in quarterback tutors does come with a downside.
"There's a lot of really bad information out there," says Avery, "and there are a lot of people without the knowledge necessary to help guys develop. They're really making them worse from the fundamental skills. But the only thing that allows them to be successful is just them doing things over and over again.
"There are a lot of quarterbacks who have become really, really good at being bad."
And if all kids have access to private QB instruction, some parents will try to find a different edge.
Avery claims to know parents of quarterbacks who aren't blue-chip prospects who pay upwards of $100,000 per year to get their son trained, which would far exceed the value of a college scholarship.
Brian Stumpf is the president of Student Sports and leads its football events, including the prestigious Elite 11. He has heard of parents paying into the five figures for intense weekend training sessions. He has also heard of parents who've attempted to pay their son's way into some smaller high school all-star games.
"It's a dangerous thing when that one percent has access to endless resources and their son becomes this science experiment to see what they can do with him," Stumpf says.
Despite starting his QB specialization much later than most elite prospects, Malachi Nelson has offers from Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia, and other blue-blood programs like Texas, USC and Penn State.
"You have this clock in your head and you think if you're not getting things done early, you're behind," Craig Young says. "Having gone through it, I realize that's a self-inflicted urgency and you just really want to focus on getting better, improving and playing well. If you do all those things, it will happen."
(Illustration:
Source: https://theathletic.com/2293170/2021/01/27/five-star-quarterback-trainer-cost/
0 Response to "Why Cant Wisconsins Recruit a Blue Chip Quarterback"
إرسال تعليق