The Recruiting Guy

Recruiting assistant makes living behind scenes

Arkansas fans cheer during the Razorbacks' game against Mississippi State on Saturday, Nov. 21, 2015, at Razorback Stadium in Fayetteville.
Arkansas fans cheer during the Razorbacks' game against Mississippi State on Saturday, Nov. 21, 2015, at Razorback Stadium in Fayetteville.

Arkansas Razorbacks assistant recruiting coordinator and director of personnel Daniel Bush wears many hats as director of recruiting E.K. Franks' right-hand man.

Bush joined Coach Bret Bielema's staff in April 2014. While recruiting is a big part of his job, that's not where the work ends.

"A lot of kind of the behind-the-scenes stuff like managing our recruiting database, managing our recruiting boards, fact finding, getting transcripts, getting accurate heights and weights, finding video, identifying players," Bush said. "All of those sort of things kind of fall into that window, and then on the recruiting side of it any time there's kids on campus, I'm helping out with that, invite guys to camp, official visits, game days."

One of the biggest guessing games in recruiting is whether a prospect's height and weight match what's reported. The University of Arkansas, Fayetteville and other schools measure and weigh recruits when they visit the campus.

"Anything we can measure ourselves is ideal," Bush said.

Camps and combines hosted by the likes of Nike and Under Armour are other good sources for measurements.

"As these combines become more and more common ... if we got a guy on campus that we know has been to some of them, we'll try and compare to what we have to how they measured him," Bush said.

Accurate heights and weights weren't the norm during the early years of combines and camps.

"I think they've done a better job over the last few years," Bush said. "Initially, there were a lot of discrepancies, and it was almost useless, but for the most part they've been pretty close here recently."

One of the more enjoyable parts of Bush's job is the chance to interact with prospects and their families when they visit campus.

"You can watch them on tape all day, but being able to be around guys in person and get to actually meet them and their families, that's the fun part for sure," Bush said.

During the spring, the Hogs had about 10,000 prospects from several age groups in their recruiting database. The list of athletes is accumulated through several sources, including NCAA-certified scouting services.

"There's a few services we purchase," Bush said. "That's one source. We'll try and track with what's going on around the country, whether that's through Twitter or some of the public sites that cover recruiting.

"Basically whenever one of our targets gets an offer we want to know about it. So we take pride with some of our students that help us. They're assigned an area they're responsible for, and they take a lot of pride in updating the guys that have an offer in their area.

"We also get emails, or when coaches are on the road and find out about guys, we get phones calls, all that stuff goes into it as well."

Arkansas makes sure to keep the number of prospects to a manageable number.

"We don't want to have ... thousands of guys because then you get into a mess, and you get into there's a John Smith in Arkansas, a John Smith in Texas and a John Smith in Florida," Bush said. "Even though we're only recruiting one of them, it's going to cause some confusion.

"If you just took everything you get from the recruiting services and dump it all in there, you'll have 50,000 to 60,000. Those services are helping schools at all levels."

Email Richard Davenport at [email protected]

Sports on 10/08/2017

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