Muschamp: Getting prospects on campus still the key
South Carolina head coach Will Muschamp plans for his staff to participate in the frenzy that the allowance of satellite camps has brought to college football -- but the Gamecocks' first-year head coach maintains that getting prospects to visit Columbia is still the key to signing them.
"You get an opportunity to evaluate more players (a satellite camps, but) again the most important thing for us is getting them on our campus," Muschamp said Tuesday in Myrtle Beach. "But when you do have an opportunity to step off your campus and evaluate a player that you're recruiting, we're certainly going to take advantage of that."
South Carolina will be one of several programs -- including Michigan -- that will be present at nearby Ridge View High School for the South Carolina Elite Prospect Camp.
The Gamecocks are also among several SEC programs scheduled to attend the Mercer Elite Camp in Macon, Ga. in early June.
But the new ability to go see prospects in such a setting, is far more valuable in evaluation than it is in signing a prospect in Muschamp's eyes.
"If we don't get a young man on our campus before his senior year, you're not getting the guy -- he's going somewhere else," Muschamp said. "He's going to make the effort to get to your campus (if he's interested), even if he's further away.
"Sometimes there are exceptions, if you're recruiting across the country and a young man wants to come on an official visit, but he needs to do it early in the season in order to expose him to the gameday atmosphere at Williams-Brice Stadium, for us personally."
Muschamp is reiterating what he said this spring: if his staff gets a player on campus and the player gets the complete picture of what the program is about, and still chooses somewhere else, so be it. But getting them on campus is the key.
“If you don’t get a prospect on campus, you’re not getting them,” Muschamp said. “When you look at the numbers, the chances of signing a player when he doesn’t visit your school is very small.”
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