Top prospect utilizes web to help profile
East St. John QB rated highly on national lists.
Gannett News Sevice
July 24, 2004
Ryan Perrilloux’s name is instantly recognizable among three groups of people: college football coaches; recruiting experts; and fanatic fans of recruiting.
With help from Internet search engines, there soon could be a fourth group intimately familiar with Perrilloux: Web surfers.
For several months now, the quarterback for East St. John High School in Reserve, has had his own Web site —
www.Ryan11.com — complete with video highlights, his impressions of summer camps he’s attended and a list of the schools where he would like most to play college football.
An all-state player as a junior, he is the top-rated all-purpose quarterback in the nation by many recruiting services. In 2003, he passed for 2,404 yards and 26 touchdowns with seven interceptions. He accounted for 3,678 all-purpose yards.
Although there have been other high school athletes with their own sites, Perrilloux seems to be the most prominent high school football recruit to have one — and the first to put such an emphasis on recruiting.
“I’m keeping people up-to-date on my top schools, what I’m doing, stuff like that, so they won’t have to keep calling me and ask me what I’m doing or thinking,” he said. “I’m going to put on there what I think about all the camps I go to.”
Perrilloux provides recruiting information on the “News” page of his site, including his top choices, listed alphabetically: Florida State, Louisiana State, Michigan, Nebraska and the University of Southern California. “LSU, Texas, FSU, Michigan and Miami are running a tight race,” the Web site says.
Perrilloux also summarizes his impressions of camps he has attended so far during the summer and tells anyone interested that he is leaving for the Elite 11, a quarterbacks camp in California, on Wednesday.
StudentSports.com selects the quarterbacks for the exclusive camp, and its national recruiting editor, Greg Biggins, said Perrilloux is not the first to have such a site.
“Typically it’s the lesser known guys,” Biggins said.
West Monroe linebacker Luke Sanders, who signed with LSU in February, had his own place on the Web last year, but it was not as comprehensive as Perrilloux’s.
“He had a really nice color photograph and some stats, but it wasn’t anything like this one,” recruiting analyst Max Emfinger said. “I’d never seen one as extravagant as that one.”
Mark Larose, Perrilloux’s American history teacher, produced and maintains the site.
“School teachers don’t make a whole lot of money, but that was something I could give him to be proud of,” Larose said. “This site wasn’t put there to promote him as much as it was for him to enjoy with the recruiting going on.”
Although there is a commercial link at the bottom, which Larose said is required to use the visit counter, both insist they get no money from the site. A representative of the NCAA confirmed there is nothing wrong with the Web presence as long as it is taken down after he signs a letter of intent.
“I can’t make any money off it,” Perrilloux said. “It’s just for the public, for everybody to see. Instead of having to go to other pay Web sites to see what I’m doing, they can go to my site for free. If they go look, they go look. I don’t advertise it.”
