Ready to play football for Division I-AA Gardner-Webb University out of high school, Harper thought twice after a buddy from his hometown of Hartwell, Ga., signed on at Butler Community College in El Dorado.

Harper was intrigued. He looked into it, pondered the possibility of junior-college football in the Midwest, then decided to give it a shot.

“I was like, ‘Let me try to see what I can do at this level,'” Harper said of juco football. “I sent my highlight tape in and they offered me a scholarship.”

It’s paying off for Harper, as it does for many juco football players in Kansas every year. Harper soon will sign a letter of intent to play cornerback for Kansas University next season, after a solid two-year career at Butler.

Harper hardly is the only success story in the Jayhawk Conference. Every year, the jucos in Kansas churn out dozens of Div. I football players and send them out all over the country.

Jayhawk Conference alumni are at 11 of the schools in the Big 12 Conference, as well as places like Arizona State, Florida State, Auburn, Tennessee and Clemson. Commitments this year are headed to places like Michigan, Pittsburgh, South Florida, Georgia and Arkansas.

Other states have juco football programs that turn heads. California is loaded with two-year prospects. Texas and Mississippi jucos continually feed larger programs.

But Kansas, despite not having a wealth of high school talent compared to other states, still has one of the best juco football systems in the country. Harper is just one example of how much a player can grow playing two-year football in the Sunflower State.

“The Jayhawk Conference is a good conference to play in,” Harper said. “Every team is good up here. I think it’s a good stepping stone to go forward and play in the Big 12 against what I know will be better competition.

“This will help me get ready for it.”

Near the top

Rivals.com recently ranked the top 100 junior-college prospects in the 2007 recruiting class. Of those, 44 play in the state of California – not surprising considering the size of the juco system and the amount of athletic talent the state produces annually.

But next best is Kansas, which has 19 players dotting the list of promising prospects. Most come from three of the Jayhawk Conference’s top programs – Butler, Coffeyville Community College and Garden City Community College.

The talent, though, really is wide-spread among the league’s eight schools that play football. In fact, only two failed to have a prospect make Rivals’ list – Fort Scott Community College, which actually finished ranked 11th in the nation, and Hutchinson Community College.

It’s been this way for years. Garden City has six alums in the NFL, including New England Patriots running back Corey Dillon. Butler was the temporary home for dozens of NFL players, including Rudi Johnson, William Bartee and former Jayhawk Kwamie Lassiter. Coffeyville produced Keith Traylor, Leonard Little and Brandon Jacobs, among others.

So why did Kansas, of all places, become the prime pit stop it currently is?

“I think there’s a couple of things that separate our conference from some of the other ones,” Butler coach Troy Morrell said. “Number one being the academic structure that’s available for athletes here in our conference. With the type of education they’re going to get, kids are going to be monitored and are going to be able to transfer out and be academically sound.”

That’s important for many college coaches. KU, for one, prefers its junior-college recruits arrive in Lawrence the spring after their sophomore season, which is done only if an associate’s degree is obtained. In a year and a half, that’s a challenge – but one coaches in the Jayhawk Conference try and make sure is attained.

Most of KU’s recent Jayhawk Conference signees, including Fort Scott’s Bill Whittemore, Garden City’s Wayne Wilder and Butler’s Brian Murph and Blake Bueltel – enrolled at Kansas before spring workouts, giving them extra time to get situated and acclimated to the Division-I level.

Of course, playing in the Jayhawk Conference itself is a fine stepping stone in terms of football.

“I think just the overall brand of football that’s played in this league,” Morrell said, “is something that’s very appealing.”

Collecting talent

The reputation both academically and athletically also helps Jayhawk Conference coaches receive favors from big-school programs.

Placing non-qualifiers is popular in big-school recruiting. That means that four-year schools sign someone that might be an academic risk, then place them in a certain junior college if they don’t meet the required core GPA or standardized test score.

“We do a little bit of it with different schools,” Morrell said. “They usually seek us out more than we’re seeking them out, probably because of our reputation and what we’ve been able to do with our athletes here and all that.

“We get contacted by those schools and we see if we have a need at that position. If we do get those guys in here, they play for us anywhere from one to two years.”

The uninformed belief, therefore, is that the Jayhawk Conference’s reputation – particularly at Butler, Coffeyville and Garden City – allow for its coaches to fill their 55-man roster with a slew of non-qualifiers from coast to coast.

Not so. It can’t work that way.

By rule, football rosters in the Jayhawk Conference can only have 12 players who graduated from a non-Kansas high school. That means 43 players on the 55-man roster are from the Sunflower State.

Several other states have similar rules. Morrell said Texas jucos can only have five out-of-state players on their roster, and Mississippi can have just eight.

“We focus on the in-state part of it first and get those guys taken care of up through the signing day,” Morrell said. “Then late February, early March go and address the out-of-state.”

Kansas has never been a high-school hotbed for college talent, but the Kansas jucos have benefited greatly from local players. Anthony Parks (Olathe East) and Ryan Torain (Shawnee Mission Northwest) played two years for Morrell at Butler and now are at Division I-A schools. – Parks at Oklahoma State, Torain at Arizona State.

Scott Haverkamp, who transferred from KU to Butler, is a Silver Lake native who is headed to play offensive line at Georgia next year. Austin Panter had no offers out of high school in Kensington, where he played eight-man football. After two successful seasons at Butler, Panter accepted a scholarship offer to play linebacker at Michigan. Ryan Lilja graduated from Shawnee Mission Northwest, played at Coffeyville for two years before transferring to Kansas State. He’s now an offensive lineman in the NFL.

Those examples – particularly Panter’s case – show that it’s more than just reputation making the Jayhawk Conference flourish with talent. It’s coaching and development, too.

“They’re very advanced for a junior college,” Nebraska coach Bill Callahan said of Butler earlier this season. “They have all the up-to-date trends and techniques that most of the Division-I schools are utilizing. They are very much on the cutting edge.”

At-home recruiting

It’s tough to say whether having juco powerhouses just down the road can benefit schools like KU. But it certainly can’t hurt.

While coach Mark Mangino and his staff certainly monitor the Jayhawk Conference and offer scholarships to many of its players, they certainly don’t use the in-state league as its only source of two-year transfers.

Former defensive standouts Charlton Keith and Eric Washington came from jucos in Minnesota. Current tight end Marc Jones is from Kilgore College in Texas. Several players in the Mangino era – including Jason Swanson, Rodney Harris, Rodney Fowler and Paul Como – played juco football in California. Gabe Toomey and Jake Cox are from Iowa junior colleges.

But KU’s continuous interest in the Jayhawk Conference can’t be denied. Kendrick Harper is the fifth in-state juco player to pick Kansas in the last three seasons. Considering 43 of his teammates grew up in Kansas and many of them likely rooted for KU growing up, it’s not ridiculous to think that the fandom could have rubbed off in two years.

Harper, for one, is glad he came to Kansas from his native Georgia. So much so, that he’s going to stay for at least two more years.

“It went pretty well,” Harper said of his time at Butler. “It was a lot of hard work I had to achieve before I was able to get on the 55-man roster.”

Considering the chaos that surrounds Jayhawk Conference football around recruiting season, that’s hardly a surprise.