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What football players, parents need to know about recruiting

Since this column's best ideas are often someone else's, Dave Trumpy's topic sounded great when we ran into him this summer.

Dave and Beth Trumpy are the parents of 2009 Wheaton North graduate Mike Trumpy, a star running back and track athlete who played football at Northwestern. Dave's also the younger brother of retired All-Pro Cincinnati Bengals tight end Bob Trumpy.

Dave said he'd like to see a piece on "scholarship realities" - pressures recruits face, specialization pros and cons, gauging college interest, riding the roller coaster of touchdowns and injuries and more. It was a wide-ranging discussion.

Dave said his son, indeed the Trumpy family, "hit the lottery" - a free education at one of the nation's top universities, a school that even with Mike's honor roll standing "he could never get into" were it not for football.

After earning bachelor's and master's degrees at Northwestern (plus a broken wrist and a torn ACL), today Mike Trumpy is an associate broker in commercial real estate for a downtown firm. It worked out.

To keep the reins on this thing somewhat, we've focused on recruiting lessons and advice from several coaches, parents and players. Hopefully, Dave, this is OK.

One of his top tenets was working through the process with the high school coach. Most coaches accept this as part of the job; those who don't draw ire and maybe the ax.

Every summer, Wheaton Warrenville South coach Ron Muhitch visits each incoming senior for a lengthy sit-down. Muhitch produces charts of strength benchmarks required for different college levels, lists of schools broken down by division. He interviews each player, elicits their current and intermediate goals and expectations. If college football is not a goal, Muhitch still offers to explore options.

"I try to get the kids' names out there," said Muhitch, who since succeeding John Thorne as coach has helped 49 Tigers reach Division I programs, many more at lower levels. With Thorne they've produced most of the Tigers' 86 Division I players.

Muhitch uses multiple methods to expose players to colleges and visiting coaches - weight room sessions, off-season throwing, 7-on-7 competitions, highlight video, possibly a paid scouting service. Competitive activities at colleges have become key.

"They have to go to the one-day camps in the summer to be seen by the coaches," Muhitch said.

Glenbard North's Jace James can vouch for that. The senior receiver and defensive back - and state-caliber hurdler - attended Northwestern's June 10 camp. That day Northwestern, Western Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Buffalo and Ball State all offered him. Two days later James committed to Northwestern.

"Pretty quickly it picked up," James said of a recruiting process that started slowly with a September 2015 Twitter message and intensified in May. James' play with the Midwest Boom private 7-on-7 team certainly enhanced his standing.

"Don't get caught up in all the stars and all the big-time offers the kids are receiving," said James, whose mother, Gwyn, was heavily involved in the process. "Just keep your head down and work and it'll come."

He advised to identify goals and stick to them, in his case a nearby location and academics. A Big Ten program was the cherry on top.

Emphasizing non-football factors is a recurring theme. Injuries happen, coaches leave. Does the school stand on its own?

"Make sure kids go to a school that they like and they'd go to even if football was taken out of the equation," said Naperville Central coach Mike Stine, who has 17 former Redhawks in college programs.

"You need to talk to the family about costs, about the distance away from home, do they have your major. All those things play into it."

Stine asks players to list their 10 dream schools regardless of football, then winnows the list according to social, academic and personal preferences, a place they like.

"That has to be the No. 1 priority," he said.

The NCAA reported 2.6 percent of high school players go to Division I programs. In the past, Stine said, proud DuPage County players may have been hesitant to drop levels. Due to national Division III powers such as North Central College and Wheaton College right in their backyard, Stine said players "don't see that as a step down anymore."

New St. Francis coach Joe Lepsche can talk all day about this stuff. He was hired out of the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, where he was an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator for the Division III school.

He opines on multisport athletes ("You want kids that compete"), potential regret and dissatisfaction due to myriad options ("the paradox of choice"), the perceptions of playing for a high-caliber Division III school compared with a lower-level Division I.

Again, to him it comes down to non-football factors and, particularly for post-career, location.

"No matter what, if you're not a Big Ten kid or a BCS (Bowl Championship Series) kid or an FCS (Football Championship Subdivision) kid, throw out football," Lepsche said.

"I'm going to tell my daughter straight up, go to a college that is in a metropolitan area because there are so many opportunities," he said, such as on-campus interviewing and internship possibilities.

He did acknowledge that if a school is willing to pay a player's way, "you have to take a serious, serious look at that."

Bob Westerkamp has a multigenerational perspective on the process. In the early 1980s he came out of Montini as the state's all-time leader in receptions, receiving yardage and touchdown catches. In 2011 his son, Jordan, surpassed all those records; Jordan is now a senior receiver at Nebraska.

Timing was Jordan's friend but Bob's enemy. More than 40 colleges reached out to the senior Westerkamp, way more than he could respond to in that era's tiny recruiting window.

"Back in our day they couldn't really even contact us (other then letters) until after our senior season," he said.

Though Westerkamp isn't a huge fan of 16-year-olds making life decisions, his son received his first scholarship offer, from Illinois, his sophomore year. Eventually Jordan racked up two dozen more. The nice thing was he had time to make a decision, time to use parameters to eliminate possibilities, time to research colleges.

And time to visit them, maybe even multiple visits that enable objective comparison between campuses and programs.

"The biggest thing I would say is be able to take unofficial visits to several schools," Bob Westerkamp said. "We were able to get to some schools two, three times maybe."

Injury obviously is a possibility. Bob Westerkamp suffered severe knee injuries at Illinois that required lengthy rehab before he transferred to Benedictine, where he became a two-time All-America.

Evan Jakubowski, a Wheaton Warrenville South kicker, punter and 2014 graduate, and his father, Jim, have learned lessons about injury fallout and the "preferred walk-on" status.

During an initial camp at Syracuse, before even summer practices began, Evan sustained stress fractures in both shins. He ended up never even taking classes there, instead returning home to rehab and attend College of DuPage.

He enrolled at Miami (Ohio) in the spring of 2015 and walked on again. Now a sophomore, the news is he'll be kicking off in the Redhawks' opener Sept. 3 at Iowa.

"You're behind the eight-ball as a walk-on. They view you as kind of just another piece of meat. If you produce, great, but if you don't then you're gone," Jim Jakubowski said. "These guys have a tough job. They're Division I coaches and their focus is on the big guys that they recruited."

He said the bottom line as a college student-athlete is "you have to love it."

Particularly in a huge program like Ohio State.

Garrett Goebel was a top recruit out of Montini, both for his line play in football and as a two-time heavyweight wrestling champion. Though he cooled on wrestling, he received more than 30 scholarship offers for football before choosing Ohio State in 2008.

"The only negative experience I had in my recruiting process," Goebel said, "is one coach came up to me and he sat me down and said, 'I'm going to be honest with you ...' and I'm thinking, OK, you're not honest with everybody else?"

He got a kick out of visiting campuses he'd seen on television, tried to gauge which coach would be the most supportive and motivating. In choosing Ohio State he favored a Midwestern college, one that had a chance at a national title while possibly preparing him for the NFL, even if it meant postponing playing time.

"I probably could have gone somewhere else and played a little earlier, but I'd rather be a medium-sized fish in a big pond than a big fish in a small pond, I guess," said Goebel, now an account manager at a landscaping company in Columbus, Ohio. He had a stint with the St. Louis Rams, then an invite by the Packers but chose to move on.

Like Jim and Evan Jakubowski, Goebel realized that college football is a business. He accepted the process and grew from it.

"You're going to go from being a great player to being one of the not-so-great players. It's a transition and the coaches are going to tell you what you want to hear during the recruiting process. Once you get there it switches from what you want to hear to what you need to hear," Goebel said.

"Don't get me wrong, there were days when I went home and I was (ticked) off, but it helped prepare me for the rest of my life. Looking back on it now, tough love is good."

doberhelman@dailyherald.com

Follow Dave on Twitter @doberhelman1

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