Given the 1 year annviersary of Katrina, I thought this was an intersting article...
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Storm tossed recruiting into disarray
Many players fell off radar, but some landed on their feet
Monday, August 28, 2006 By Billy Turner
Staff writer
The floodwaters that devastated New Orleans also destroyed the chances for college football scholarships for many high school players in the city, several coaches said.
Players evacuated, schools were closed and some never reopened.
The city's football players scattered to as many as 20 states, especially Texas, Georgia, Florida and Ohio, but as far away as Nebraska and Massachusetts.
In the past 15 years, the state has been among the top three in producing NFL players per capita. The state has produced 50 to 60 Division I prospects annually, according to Jeremy Crabtree, national recruiting director for Rivals.com, an Internet recruiting service.
The city was responsible for some of the cream of that crop. Past NFL MVPs Marshall Faulk and Peyton Manning played high school football in New Orleans.
But the high school recruiting ground of years past has changed dramatically. The number of players in the city this season is less than half of last year's 1,000-plus. There are 12 schools playing football in Orleans Parish as opposed to 25 that would have played last year. Of those 12, only Jesuit has more players on its roster than last season before the storm.
It is affecting how national programs look at the city's talent.
"We are still going to recruit the city," said Georgia Tech assistant coach Curtis Modkins, who has recruited the New Orleans area for years. "But maybe not with the intensity we did before. There just aren't that many players any longer."
"We simply don't have the players we did in the past," said new St. Augustine coach Wayne Cordova. St. Augustine has led the area in signees during the past decade.
Last year St. Aug didn't play. Cordova said he believed five players signed somewhere, but he wasn't sure.
Now?
"We used to be two-deep in talent. Now we're struggling to be one-deep. We have 70 to 80 players (in grades) 9-12," Cordova said. "We have a couple of guys who would have been Division I who are gone. Chad Jones is ranked one of the top safeties in the country and is playing at Southern Lab."
St. Augustine officials don't know where defensive lineman Justin Hampton is. Nor do they know where prospect Andre Heyward, a fullback/running back, is. David Rue, a big, talented tight end, is supposed to play at Richwood in Monroe, and Cordova said offensive tackle Rishaw Johnson is at O.P. Walker.
In years past, they might have been part of the St. Aug legacy of signees.
Search and recruit
When Katrina forced the players' evacuation, the race was on to find the players when they landed elsewhere. College recruiters had to find them. Internet recruiting services had to find them.
"It's just part of the job," said Allen Wallace of Scout.com. "We worked our contacts."
"You really had to do your homework," Crabtree said. "Kids were showing up everywhere. We went down the list of our top 40 or 50 and called or text-messaged every one of them. In some cases, you sort of had to find buried treasure. Two months into it we began to find some of them.
"Most in-state players we were able to track down quickly. But it was wild. Some kids, you couldn't get an academic reading on at all. There was no tape. You couldn't tell if they had improved from their junior to season seasons, which is so important. Some just couldn't be offered last year because of the circumstances."
"It's very evident how Katrina has affected the city, last year especially. The kids who were on the map fell off the map and came back on the map somewhere else. There are a lot of very happy coaches in east Texas and Houston.
"Some never surfaced again. I believe there were 20 to 30 guys who would have been stars in the city who wound up in east Texas or in Houston. I'm not talking Division I necessarily. The top 100 kids, everyone kept up with them. But the second tier that needed to get film out or needed to be seen in some cases weren't seen at all. There is still plenty of good talent down there. But maybe not in the numbers that existed before."
According to an Internet search, during the 2006 signing period in February, four Orleans Parish players signed with Division I schools. Ten signed with Division I-AA schools.
Ole Miss alone signed three players from the city in 2005, among 16 who signed from the city in February of that year with either Division I or I-AA schools, according to signees lists. The Rebels signed wide receiver Kendrick Lewis this year. Lewis played at Gainesville, Ga., as a senior, but he would have played at O.P. Walker. He had committed to Ole Miss before the storm, and the Rebels stayed on him.
Ole Miss continues to recruit the city.
"We feel like the city of New Orleans still is full of talent," said Frank Wilson, who recruits New Orleans for Ole Miss and is a former athletic director for Orleans Parish.
Wilson said recruiters can't let up, even if there is a down year or two because of the storm. "There might not be a player or two in this class, but there might be ones in future classes, and we have to go after them for when they come around. There's still a lot of quality there. No, maybe not in as many numbers. But it is what it is. Maybe there aren't as many big names, but there are several lower D-I and I-AA players."
Southern, which had 11 players from New Orleans on its roster in 2005, this year didn't sign a player directly from the city for the first time in Pete Richardson's 13 years.
"We had quite a few who we had tracked that we lost," Richardson said. "Last year the city's recruits lost a lot of their luster when the storm came. It was difficult. We knew that some of them had come up here (Baton Rouge), and we knew that some had come to Houston.
"I don't think they fell off the map, as such. Many had academic problems because they were in new systems."
Eligibility was a problem everywhere. The players' records were for the most part at the bottom of the flooded schools.
Southern did sign former McDonogh 35 offensive lineman Joshua Neelen, who played his senior season at Istrouma. Two more players who would have been on McDonogh 35's potentially outstanding 2005 team signed with Division I-AA schools, and one other played in the Nebraska All-Star game. Two more walked on at Division I-AA schools, and Derrick Johnson, a tight end who wound up in Atlanta, has walked on at Southern Mississippi.
Other colleges in the state struggled during recruiting. Tulane lost its entire database of players when the storm hit, for example. Small and large school alike worked to find the displaced players.
"It hurt a lot last year," Modkins said. "We just couldn't find them. Some of their own coaches didn't know where they were."
"It was difficult (for us) because it put you way behind," Tulane assistant Garrett Chachere said. "We lost them. If we weren't already on them, we had no way to locate them."
A Tulane official was quoted in a story last fall as saying that sometimes the Tulane recruiters had to read the Saturday morning newspapers to determine where some of the players had gone.
"We eventually found the ones we were on," Chachere said, "and obviously finding them early was better than finding them later. If we couldn't find those players, we went where we had found other players then."
Again, the blue chips were kept up with. Coaches text-messaged or called on cells and found them.
"The 5-, 4- and even 3-star players, they'll be found," Crabtree said. "It's the kids at the smaller schools, they are the ones being hurt by this."
And the city had a load of those type of players.
Out of touch
The city's coaches and former coaches believe they had players who would have signed somewhere if not for the mass exodus.
"Players like Josh Deese played with Acadiana," said former McMain football coach Sam Hill, who is teaching physical education at the school. Deese was coming off an All-Metro junior season. "I talked to him just recently, and he hadn't signed with anyone. I think the storm affected his signing. Kids were scattered all over the country. The next echelon got lost in the storm."
"Many coaches were calling me," Reed coach Archie Brown said, "but I didn't know where most of my players were. I had 14 seniors and some of them would have been looked at by colleges. Ryan (Singleton) was the only one who signed (Alcorn State) after barely playing for East St. John where he transferred."
Brandon Clark was on the ESPN.com list at the beginning of the season. He played "somewhere in Shreveport," Brown said. Clark wasn't recruited.
"Many coaches lost contact with them, and they just got lost in the shuffle. Arkansas State coaches called looking for Earl Davis. I didn't know where he was. It's a sad situation. They just went on to someone else."
Robert Welch, the former Fortier coach who is now the McMain coach, has but 30-40 players trying out for the team even though his is one of only seven public schools remaining in New Orleans playing football. He said the number of players hurt by the storm "may be even more than we really know."
Still, there were other sides to the tragedy here.
Fate smiles
"Honestly, it is a bittersweet thing," Cordova said. "A lot of the guys were awarded the opportunity to go elsewhere and play."
Darrion Weems fits that bill well. He would have been a two-way starter for McMain last season. He wasn't even mentioned in The Times-Picayune preseason article about the team.
Though he stood 6 feet 5 and weighed 270 pounds, he had played football just one season. Deese was the standout on that McMain team, or so everyone thought.
"We expected big things out of him," Hill said of Weems. "We knew he had potential. His sophomore year was his first year of football."
Weems evacuated with his family first to Memphis, Tenn., then to Woodland Hills, Calif., where he had an older brother and grandmother. He arrived one day at Taft High School, without even a transcript, ready to play football.
Before the season ended, he was on everyone's recruiting list. Then he moved in February to Cedar Hill, Texas. Now 6-6, 285, he is a member of the pre-evaluation Rivals 100 team. He was just recently offered a scholarship to Oregon.
But LSU is still after him as well as Tulane and Big 12 schools, according to Cedar Hill coach Joey McGuire, though he might move back to California. Some colleges even thought he might be returning to McMain, but Hill said that wasn't so.
He is now a 4-star athlete on rivals.com who lists Arizona, Baylor, Boston College, Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon, Southern Cal, Texas A&M and Utah as his choices.
"It evens out, though," Chachere said. "Kids were put in a predicament where they went to Texas or Georgia and maybe there wound up in a program that drew attention. They were seen where they wouldn't have been."
Former McDonogh 35 running back Shadrach Angelain played at Tara as a senior.
"He wouldn't have been able to shine much here," said McDonogh 35 coach Wayne Reese. "He went there and he could." Angelain got some scholarship help to attend Southern and play there.
Vernon Pittman, a defensive lineman, would have played for Douglass High School in the city as a senior if not for Katrina. Douglass has the worst record of any of the city schools. Instead, he played in Irving, Texas, and wound up with a scholarship to Grambling.
Then there is the future.
Renewed interest
Before the 2005 season, there were 270 players listed on ESPN.com as senior players to watch in Louisiana. Of those, 30 were city players. None of those played at the school they were enrolled in after Katrina hit.
This year there are 180 players listed on that service. Sixteen are from the city. Of those 16, five are listed as being at schools that no longer exist and one is listed at a school he will not be attending. In other words, no one is sure where they are.
It's for those types of reasons that Louisiana-Lafayette assistant coach Troy Wingerter said this year's incoming seniors will be hurt more by Katrina than last year's.
"It hurt most of last year's seniors badly," Wingerter said. "But the great players, the blue-chippers, it was easy for them. The juniors last season are the ones who will be hurt the most, though, unlike what ESPN and all those others say.
"You don't have enough film on them. Most of them, especially linemen, you don't get a chance to see that improvement that is common. A lineman does much of his growing from his junior to his senior season. We won't have seen what they were like as a junior. Most of these guys played five or six games last year. Some weren't on their teams.
"We go out three or four weeks during the spring and do spring evaluations. Some of these guys we just hadn't seen before, maybe they weren't on their teams last year or they were somewhere else. Places like McDonogh 35, all these kids weren't even there last year."
"It hurts the coaches, but more importantly, it hurts the kids," said Modkins.
But players like McDonogh 35's Delvin Breaux, an LSU commitment, Delvin's brother Lionel, Alex Williams, 6-5, 290, of Walker and Karr linebacker Korey Williams, still will draw the attention of the recruiters as they always have. Breaux played two quarters at Istrouma as a junior but still was offered by LSU.
Crabtree said the colleges will return to the city soon enough.
"Now they're dipping their toes into the area again, knowing that there are road bumps in the way," he said.
The toe-dipping began in the spring.
"This fall, the schools that are playing now are basically the ones that came back late last season with some exceptions. This spring we got on some schools again," Chachere said. "We knew Karr and McDonogh 35 were coming back, to name a couple. So we saw them then."
"A college coach called recently asking about my talent," Cordova said. "They know St. Aug turns out good athletes. They're sympathetic to what we've been through across the country. They understand that we aren't what we were, but we will be back."
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Billy Turner can be reached at [email protected] or (985) 645-2847.