Tuesday marked the second day of the Team Camp circuit at the Kansas University football facilities, and, like Monday, hundreds of high school athletes from nearby schools braved the heat and took their turn on the turf at KU.
Monday’s camp welcomed 17 teams to Lawrence and 16 returned for Tuesday, pushing the total number of campers in town this week to right around 800.
While the specifics of what they did and how they worked meant very little to the KU football coaching staff, the mere fact that that many bodies were able to come up to campus at one time to meet the coaches, see the facilities and experience the KU way of life qualifies as a huge development, even if it’s not known for a few years just how big of news that is.
Think about it: Six or seven years ago, a young Ben Heeney showed up for these types of team camps and no one knew then that he would wind up becoming one of the best defensive players to ever come through KU.
A guy like that was out there this week. Whether anyone knew it or not was the bigger question.
Of course, there were plenty of guys that the KU coaching staff did know about. And getting to have them on campus in this type of setting was invaluable for the evaluation process.
One head high school coach told me that there were four or five KU coaches with eyes on one of his top players at nearly all portions of the live action the past couple of days. He added that, “there’s always a KU coach within 10 feet of you when things are really moving out here. That’s great exposure for the kids.”
And it’s an even better tool for the KU coaches, who view recruiting as the lifeblood of the program and are in a position where they simply cannot miss on guys if they hope to get the latest KU football rebuilding project off the ground any time soon.
It’s easy to watch highlight tapes or game film and hear good things about athletes from their high school coaches. It’s another to be able to watch them in a camp setting like this, when it’s hot, they’re uncomfortable, they might be getting whipped by another team and they have to really show what they’re made of to get through it.
Watching those things can be huge for these coaches and even the smallest misstep by an athlete can lead to him being crossed off the recruiting board.
That’s not to say this is NFL-combine style serious business out here. These guys have fun, too. Music, from KU’s insanely large loud speaker, is blaring from the hill, they have breaks built in for food and recovery and there’s all kinds of camaraderie and sportsmanship on display, even with players and coaches from rival schools.
It’s likely that the KU coaches only had a list of 5-10 guys that they truly wanted to watch at this week’s camp. But the past is full of guys, in all sports, who got noticed because a coach was watching his hot-shot teammate and happened to catch a glimpse of what he could do. It’s entirely possible that a few guys made that kind of impact — or at least were noticed — this week, and at a place like KU, where opportunity is plentiful, there’s no telling what that could lead to in the future for either player or program.
KU summer camps will continue throughout the week, with a skills camp in Coffeyville tomorrow, a Friday Night Lights elite camp for high school prospects on Friday and a kicking academy on Sunday.
