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Bemidji coach uses Internet recruiting

By Eric Stromgren (Read this story at fortmilltimes.com)

BEMIDJI, Minn. — For Collin Stoffel, Internet networking played a big role in picking the Bemidji State football team on national signing day.

Stoffel, a linebacker out of Willow Canyon High School in Surprise, Ariz., took a proactive approach to reach college football through the Web site beRecruited.com.

"For me, I was looking to outsource the information about me any way I could," Stoffel said. "It was a way that I could reach as many coaches as I possibly could."

Similar in Facebook's ability to be an Internet social networking tool, beRecruited.com is a bridge connecting high school athletes wishing to play a collegiate sport to recruiting collegiate coaches.

Each athlete on the site has their own personal page that showcases their abilities. Coaches can then search the site looking at the database of athletes without leaving the office.

Among the items viewable on Stoffel's beRecruited.com page is his biography, academic achievements, game photos, athletic testing information and football highlight video.

That page was where Bemidji State running backs coach Bryan Stoffel noticed Collin, who is listed at 5-foot-11 and 209 pounds.

"Coach Stoffel contacted me by e-mail initially and told me that he loved my info and loved what he saw on the page," Collin Stoffel said. "He also said he liked my name and it seemed like destiny that I would be coming to Bemidji after seeing that."

Stoffel made the trip from Arizona to Bemidji in January to check out the campus and the town.

He happened to visit on one of the coldest weekends of the winter.

"It was minus-28 when I came up there with about a 20 mile per hour wind," Stoffel said. "I have never been in anything under 20 degrees in my entire life. It was pretty intense but at the same time it was very cool."

Early on National Signing Day, Stoffel updated his beRecruited.com page with a posting to show his commitment to Bemidji State football and added a comment: "I have officially committed to Bemidji Sate University in Minnesota! I am looking forward to playing tough, aggressive football at this D2 level. Bemidji has the best coaching staff I have ever met and I look forward to working my hardest and giving everything I have to give to help them and my new team be successful!"

Stoffel said he picked Bemidji State over other collegiate choices that included Ivy League schools, Division III schools and some Division I schools.

He plans to major in international business and minor in Spanish.

"I'm just counting down the days now until I can get into my dorm room, start training and be the best player I can be for the Bemidji State football team," Stoffel said.

In the digital age, Stoffel's story will become more common with recruiting sites like beRecruited.com

"Stoffel is a high-motor type guy and can run very well," Bemidji State head coach Jeff Tesch said. "But there's no doubt about it, we would not have found out about him - about a kid all the way down in Arizona - if it was not for that site."

For coaches, recruiting sites can be a valuable but also maddening process of the recruiting season.

Tesch said there are several recruiting sites that will flood his e-mail inbox with highlight videos of high school players looking to play college football.

"Sometimes you have to fight looking at all of them because after all they are just highlight videos," Tesch said. "Things can look a lot different when you ask for game tapes. You have to be careful because sometimes the kids can exaggerate things like their height, speed, grades and things of that nature. We don't know how good they are until we can get them up here and test them."

For Tesch and Bemidji State football, recruitment sites are often the initial point of the recruitment process.

"You can't just rely on the profile or video pages when you are looking at a recruit," Tesch said. "It is important to also meet the player, their parents and their family. You need to get on scene."

Tesch said that the 2009 recruiting class marked the first time Bemidji State made inroads into Texas, a state known for producing top-tier football players much like Minnesota is known for producing top-tier hockey players.

"I went down to Texas and visited 12 schools in three days," Tesch said. "It is very important to meet the parents because Bemidji State is a long ways away and they want to be sure that sending their son 1,000 miles away to attend school and play football is a good decision."

Tesch is embracing the new technology and using the recruiting sites as another tool to uncover football players in a more modern collegiate recruiting process.

"It definitely saves you some shoe leather, costs and it exposes us to more of the base of players that are out there," he said.