Will Tyndall expected to spend this school year touring colleges to decide where to continue his basketball career next year. He just didn’t expect to be doing it over Zoom.
The senior is one of many East Chapel Hill athletes tasked with navigating the recruiting process during the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, the NCAA recruiting dead period has restricted recruits from having any in-person contact with college coaches since March.
“It’s definitely tough because I’m a big believer in the vibes of a school,” Tyndall said. “There are so many things that you can’t fully experience over the computer, and [coaches] can’t fully experience what type of player you are.”
Tyndall has been forced to adapt to speaking to coaches and virtual facility tours over Zoom.
“The biggest part of [the Zooms] for me was just having a conversation with the coaches and getting to see if I could relate to them on a personal level,” Tyndall said. “All of the coaches tried their hardest to make it work over Zoom, but it was definitely a disadvantage.”
In a normal year, East’s athletic programs would be constantly immersed in recruiting.
“Usually this time of year, we’ll have a football coach walk through our building every day,” said Athletic Director Randy Trumbower.
Due to the postponement or cancellation of some high school seasons throughout the pandemic, however, college coaches have recruited more through club and travel teams, many of which have continued to compete.
“A lot of club teams are playing, but I think the sports that don’t have clubs are in a little bit more of a pinch,” Trumbower said. “In a sport like football that doesn’t have clubs, [college coaches] are going off film from last year. So a lot of kids who have gotten bigger, faster and stronger are not being able to demonstrate some of those things.”
Senior Sydney Lang’s travel softball team continued to play, but only in tournaments in North Carolina and neighboring states.
“Because I was looking up North, it was difficult to find tournaments that my team would want to go to and the coaches would be there,” she said. “Normally [coaches] would come to your tournaments throughout the spring and summer, but obviously that didn’t happen.”
Lang has applied early decision to Bowdoin College (Maine), where she hopes to continue her softball career. She was able to visit the school last January before travel restrictions kicked in.
“I went to campus and I was like, ‘This is where I want to be,” Lang said. “So after that, that was in the back of my mind like, ‘I think Bowdoin is the place.’”
During the spring and summer, Lang stayed in contact with the Polar Bears’ coaches over text and Zoom and sent them videos of her game film or of herself practicing her skills.
“It felt like to me that I was just bombarding them with texts, emails and videos,” she said. “I felt like I was really annoying them all the time but that’s what they were asking for.”
Thanks to video platforms like Hudl, East athletes can still send old game highlights to college coaches. However, many athletes also worry that a few clips from their games don’t represent their full array of skills, or intangibles like work ethic and leadership.
“If coaches didn’t already know you before the summer then it’s hard,” said Tyndall, who said that only the top recruits were garnering much attention at that point. “For people who are trying to go mid or low-major Division I, it’s a lot tougher.”
As for the big picture of recruiting, Trumbower believes it won’t be greatly altered, except for two major situations. The first would be when colleges cut sports entirely, which has happened, with Power Five schools such as Stanford, Iowa and Minnesota all discontinuing certain programs. The second problematic scenario for recruiting comes from the NCAA’s decision to grant an extra year of eligibility to all current student athletes due to the pandemic. When athletes who would have graduated instead return to play their extra season, this will create a logjam for roster spots.
“All of the incoming freshmen now are kind of stuck in limbo,” Trumbower explained. “You know, ‘Can you make the team? Are you better than a kid that’s four or maybe five years older than you?’ That makes a huge difference in sports like football, where you’re going to keep that five-year guy because age and size make a huge difference.”
Despite the challenges, the lack of opportunities to play have led some athletes to expand their college search, particularly now that it’s easier than ever to make a visit to a college virtually.
“If we hadn’t been in the pandemic, I probably would have mostly been talking to local schools and schools that would have been at my tournaments already,” said Tyndall, who now plans to either play on the JV team at UNC or pursue varsity basketball at a Division III school like Washington University of St. Louis (Mo.) or Williams College (Mass.). “But since we weren’t having tournaments, I reached out to schools that are further away, highly-ranked academic schools that I probably initially wouldn’t have thought of or wouldn’t have seen on the baselines at my games.
As the pandemic rages on, however, the challenges continue, and Trumbower and East athletes are tasked with navigating recruiting’s new and volatile landscape.
“The [COVID-19 protocols] change pretty much daily,” Trumbower said. “And so I think the hard thing for us is, how do you adapt?”
Basketball photo by Samuel Kornylak/The ECHO
