Today I came in at 9 am to work on updating a the high school coaching list for one of the coaches on the staff. He is stepping down to a lower roll on the team so I needed to update the contact list of high school coaches for the new coach that will be contacting these coaches for recruiting leads. I took me longer than I had anticipated but almost all of the contacts listed for the high schools had changed their head coach. In order for me to find this information out I had to search the school website to see if they had it listed or updated or I would have to search local newspaper articles in order to find the new information. Doing this is very time consuming because a lot of the high schools do not list their current head football coaches on their website. However, I was able to get everything completed and up to date so when the new coach starts he has good recruiting contacts available.
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Today, my new project was to go through about 10 local conferences and make up a document that listed the 1st team all-conference players and 2nd team all-conference players. As many of these conferences grow they are updating their websites and often list this information on their website. However, if they do not have a website or do not list the information on their website it is my job to hunt down the information through old newspapers or postings online. Thankfully, about half of the conferences had up to date websites with the all conferences teams listed. The other half I had to track down in the newspapers and as luck would have it found one paper that hit on all the conferences I had left. However, just a quick copy and paste just doesn’t’ work because it becomes unreadable for the coach’s. What I did was copy and paste into a word document but then went through and adjusted the font and spacing so that it would be a easier to read so that the coaches could pinpoint the players that they wanted to look at this upcoming season. I’m not sure when I will get back into the office, hopefully in a week or two but I have football camp starting up for my youth team as well. So now the busy time of the year is officially kicking off. I have attached a copy of one of the conferences that I put together for the staff. Today I was focusing on updating the rest of the state of Ohio football coaches. While I haven’t been getting to spend as much time in the office as I would like I came in today with the purpose of updating as much as possible. The reason being is that recruiting is getting ready to start heating up and we want to make sure that we are able to get in contact with the correct coach at any particular school. So today I spent around 2 and half hours working on updating any school listings that we did not have a current head coach for and updating those schools that had just recently made a change at head coach such as Lima Shawnee and Patrick Henry. Also, today has been very busy in the office because of an open coaching position that has come open. So there have been some interviews going on and a lot of people wanting to talk with the coach about the open position.
I made it through about a quarter of the high schools here in Ohio and will continue to work on this list outside of the office as well in order to just help out as much as I can. I will be back in tomorrow to work on a new project to help get recruiting started. Today I am finishing up the rest of NW Ohio. I have a lot of Toledo schools to go through so today will be a little more time consuming than yesterday was. In order to find out if there is a new high school coach I often just go straight to the schools website. However, if you have ever visited a high school website in search of athletics, very little information is offered about the programs. Therefore, I often have to look for any local newspaper articles announcing the hiring of a new head coach. I also look at the Ohio High School Athletic Associations web page but it is not always up to date either. So, while it is time consuming it is an important task for the coaching staff to have the correct information in hand when trying to contact the school about a recruit.
Today I spent my afternoon updating the new high school coaches in the area of Northwest Ohio. The reason I was doing this was for the purposes of recruiting. It is important for any college to have contact with the local high school coaches so that they can get information about their top players. What I did was go through several local counties and the go through each high school in that county and update any new high school football coaches that had been hired. After doing that I would put together a recruiting sheet with the new coach or existing one and the schools win loss record from last year so the coach that is responsible for recruiting that particular area would have an idea of how the team performed the previous year. Today I was able to get through about half of the counties I needed to and will come back in tomorrow to finish up.
Today I spent my time working on updating the incoming freshman's emails for the roster. The coaching staff has a list of all the incoming freshman but did not have their new school email addresses or their personal email address on file as of yet. My job was to go through the school directory and obtain their university email addresses and update the freshman roster with those email address.
Once I completed this task, I had to go through the admissions list for all of the football team and obtain the freshman's personal email address. Once I went through the list I would then take the email addresses and update the roster again so the coaches then had both their university and personal email address in order to keep the players up to date with any news. With Coach Paul gone and most of the other coaches, I spent the afternoon helping with inventory of the teams equipment. While this isn't the most glamorous of things to do it is something that is necessary. This is especially true at the Division III level where having equipment managers would be considered a luxury. Since Ohio Northern does not employ a equipment manager it is up to the staff to do inventory on all of the equipment, right down to counting and sorting out the chin straps. While this was one area in which I helped, I also helped inventory the practice jersey's and their condition in which they were in. Basically, myself and one other coach went through all the white and black jerseys that were on hand. We would see what numbers we had and if they were in good condition or needed to be sewn. This was decently time consuming but something that again was necessary so we could see what needed to be ordered.
I spent yesterday going over some of the local universities to look at what kind of renovations projects that they have done most recently. I looked over Bluffton, who has built a really nice indoor facility that had been in the works for about 6 years before it opened. I also looked at schools like Defiance, Tiffin, and Findlay. Findlay actually has the approval to build a new stadium for its football team but for some unknown circumstances has hit a bump in the road. The stadium was expected to be opened last season but they have failed to even break ground as of today. I have finished up with this project unless the Coach would like to have me look at any other schools. I will be working with some of the other coaches today at the stadium tomorrow getting things setup for this upcoming weekend.
Today I did not get to spend as much time as I would have liked to get everything going but was able to dive into some new schools. I wanted to start looking at the Heartland Conference since it was a local conference. I don’t expect to find a whole lot of new renovations because the schools, even though Division III are smaller with a lower enrollment than the OAC and NCAC schools. Today, I started looking at Bluffton University since I am very familiar with the school and their recent projects.
Today I finished up with the NCAC schools and the renovation project that they have done with their athletic facilities. Again, it is amazing to see some of the additions these smaller schools have done with their facilities. Some have done a lot and have spent a lot of money, while a few others have done the bare minimum with their facilities. What I have noticed is the donors that have contributed. With the schools that have done a lot of renovations, they donor base contributions have been very significant. While the other schools that have not done very much have very little in contributions from their alumni. To me it just shows that if you have a strong alumni that really loved their school they will be willing to donate back in order to make the school even better for future students. Tomorrow, I will spend time reviewing the NCAC to make sure I covered everything and start looking at some local schools as well.
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