Derion Gullette had five phone calls to make. And each time he dialed, the four-star linebacker from Teague (Texas) High School could feel his mind starting to race.
Gullette was prepared. Maybe even overprepared. He’d spent hours writing and revising individualized talking points on his cell phone’s Notes app that would help him articulate to coaches at Alabama, Oklahoma, LSU, Texas A&M and Ohio State why he had decided he would not be committing to their schools.
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Still, he was nervous.
“As it’s ringing, it’s like, everything is going through my mind,” said Gullette, who committed to Texas in early August. “You’re telling them and they ask: ‘Is there something that we didn’t do? Or is there something you wish you could have seen?’
“So for me, it was just getting my mind ready to answer those questions and to be ready for that conversation.”
Part of Gullette didn’t want to make these phone calls. How do you tell a coach who has invested countless hours and resources into recruiting you that you don’t want to attend his school? How do you essentially sever a relationship in a matter of seconds that may have been years in the making?
But the more Gullette thought about it — and the more he chatted with his father about the recruiting process — the more he felt as though he had no choice but to make these calls.
So before he committed to the Longhorns, Gullette called the position coach, plus anyone else he had built a relationship with, at all five schools and delivered the news. The last and perhaps most difficult call went to Texas A&M on Aug. 2.
“I built the relationship with (co-defensive coordinator and linebackers) coach (Tyler) Santucci for a long, long time,” he said. “So it was hard doing that.”
This is the not-so-glamorous side of what it’s like to be a top recruit with dozens of scholarship offers. Letting coaches down is never easy, and although Gullette said that the coaches from each school took his rejection well, he could tell it felt like a “gut punch” that shifted the “whole mood” of the call. He’s grateful he had these difficult conversations, though.
Many prospects still send a text message or simply announce their decision — with no advance notice — on social media. But others, like Gullette, say that there’s still something to the art of a phone call to say, ‘Thanks but no thanks.’
“It really makes a man out of you, I would say, because you’re having to tell somebody you built a relationship with for a while that you’re not going to be committing to their school,” Gullette said, echoing a sentiment fellow Texas commit Johntay Cook shared on social media.
Noo caap !
— Derion Gullette ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (@DerionGullette) June 29, 2022
“It was a little heartbreaking for me,” five-star Oregon wide receiver commit Jurrion Dickey said.
“It’s like breaking up with a girlfriend,” four-star Michigan State linebacker commit Jordan Hall added. “But it’s kind of just one of those things that you’ve just got to do.”
As a general rule, recruits who spoke to The Athletic for this story said they typically called the schools that made their final lists and/or the schools they traveled to for an official visit.
There are exceptions, however.
Four-star Alabama offensive tackle commit Olaus Alinen is originally from Finland and played two years of high school football at The Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Conn. Alabama was “a dream school,” but Alinen wanted to keep an open mind about this very important decision. His recruitment spanned across the country from Georgia to Oregon to Ohio State to Miami. And instead of just notifying the finalists on his trimmed-down list, Alinen reached out to 30 of the 46 programs who offered him. Nerves aside.
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“It’s one of the most stressful parts, I would say, in the recruiting process, personally,” he said. “Just to build all those relationships over the years, you have a level of trust and you seem to be close with the coaches — especially the position coaches.
“Usually you’ve met them multiple times. They’ve hosted your family for a visit, put all the money and effort into that. And then you’re going to tell them no? It is hard.”
Alinen said that he didn’t necessarily rehearse what he would say — as Gullette did — but admitted he did have to muster up “a little courage” on the front end, knowing that he was never calling with good news.
But skipping the calls altogether was never an option, regardless of how easy it might have been to send a text message or a DM on Twitter.
TJ Fenton is the offensive coordinator at Los Alamitos (Calif.) High School, where five-star quarterback Malachi Nelson and five-star wide receiver Makai Lemon just wrapped up their prep careers. Fenton is also a teacher at Los Al and has noticed how much his students struggle to communicate when he asks them to put their phones down for five minutes.
“Texting is so normal now and all that stuff is so easy for us, that talking on the phone alone is hard for some kids nowadays,” Fenton said. “Now you’re asking (these recruits) to call and say some bad news. … The default is, ‘Hey, I can text bad news a lot easier.’ But the art of calling someone and telling them, as cliche as it is, as a man, still really goes a long way.”
Over the years, counseling his players through these phone calls has become one of his favorite parts of the job due to the growth moments these experiences provide. Most players deliver the news to their position coach but at times will end up speaking with the head coach.
“You have a teenage kid who’s calling a famous person in the sports world and basically saying, “Hey, thanks, but no thanks,’” Fenton said. “It’s always awkward and funky and really weird. But it’s a really cool thing to watch once it’s eventually over.”
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Francis Mauigoa, a five-star offensive tackle from IMG (Fla.) Academy, committed to Miami in July over Florida, USC, Tennessee, Hawaii and Alabama. That meant a call to a certain head coach in Tuscaloosa, Ala.
“With Coach (Nick) Saban, it’s hard to get to him,” Mauigoa said. “You’ve got to get to the assistant first. But those types of moments, you’ve got to make those phone calls. It was uncomfortable, but you’ve got to get comfortable with the uncomfortable.”
Fenton said that more often than not, the phone calls end on a positive note — a sentiment other high school coaches echoed, as well.
When North Carolina quarterback Drake Maye flipped his commitment from Alabama to North Carolina in March 2020, his coach at Myers Park High School in Charlotte, Scott Chadwick, recommend that Maye call Saban himself.
“I think any time you’re telling a coach that you’re decommitting and going somewhere else, that’s a really, really difficult conversation,” Chadwick said. “But no question, it’s magnified when that coach is quite arguably the greatest college coach of all time. So certainly that adds a whole ‘nother layer of difficulty to that phone call.”
How did Saban take it?
“I’m sure (Maye) handled that professionally and quite honestly, so did Coach Saban,” Chadwick said. “If you’re a college coach and you don’t handle rejection very well — you might want to think about getting another career.”
That doesn’t mean there aren’t horror stories, though.
Bruno Reagan was a three-star offensive line recruit in the Class of 2014 from Clarksville, Tenn. He originally committed to Willie Taggart at South Florida but flipped to nearby Vanderbilt just prior to signing day when Derek Mason’s new staff was scrambling to fill spots following James Franklin’s departure to Penn State.
Taggart somehow learned about the decision before Reagan had a chance to call him, and the coach expressed his disappointment in a Twitter DM about not hearing the news directly.
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Reagan responded by telling Taggart he tried to call him twice and that neither he nor an assistant coach answered, but that if he still wanted to talk, Taggart had his number. Reagan, 17 years old at the time, never heard from anyone on the South Florida staff again.
“Decommitting from USF, because the fan base follows you a little bit, too, that was the first time I realized I don’t ever want to be famous. This sucks,” Reagan said of the stress that ensued. “I felt super bad about decommitting. I was like, ‘I’m one of those people. I’m like a Benedict Arnold.’ … It was crazy. It was the worst I’ve ever felt about myself.”
Eight years later, Reagan has no regrets about his decision and wonders why he ever felt bad about leaving USF for a chance to play in the SEC at a top academic school. His messages with Taggart were G-rated though, compared to what he recalled happening to another teammate who flipped to Vanderbilt from a Group of 5 school that same week.
According to Reagan, his teammate called an off-field staffer to deliver the news and put him on speakerphone so Reagan and another friend could listen in. Things went south quickly, Reagan said.
“The (staffer) just starts whaling on (my teammate). He’s like, ‘F — you. You’re such a scumbag,”’ Reagan recalled. “And we’re all 17. This is a grown-ass man screaming.”
It worked out well for Reagan at Vanderbilt. He started 40 consecutive games and played in two bowls, the Independence Bowl in 2016 and the Texas Bowl as a fifth-year senior in 2018. He’s glad to see recruits in 2022 gaining more leverage with coaches as college football continues to evolve. In hindsight, he thinks he should have been more selfish during his process.
“It opened up a whole new perspective for me going into adulthood,” he said. “Just a quick, strong, firm lesson on the way the world works.”
As the early signing period approaches, most of the nation’s top recruits have already made their decisions. Of the top 100 players in the 247Sports Composite, 85 are already committed to a school.
And for those who aren’t committed, it stands to reason that they’ve at least trimmed their lists and started making some of these calls.
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“Oh yeah. It’s very important,” said five-star offensive tackle Samson Okunlola, who plays at Thayer (Mass.) Academy. “That’s something you don’t want to say in a text.”
As he cut his list from 47 schools to nine over the summer, Okunlola called anyone he had developed a relationship with at each program to let them know where his recruitment was trending.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m not coming to your school,’” he said.
Okunlola declined to get into specifics about which calls were the most memorable but realizes it will only get more difficult from here.
“It’ll be at the point where I just had so many good connections with those schools, where I’ve talked to this coach probably like twice a week every week or something like that,” he said. “So it’s probably just the connection.”
For their part, college coaches seem to appreciate the transparency.
Vanderbilt running backs coach Norv McKenzie, a former recruit himself, admitted it can be “terrifying” to turn down a coach and acknowledged that not every staff handles rejection well. He was nervous about his own phone calls when he made the decision to attend Vanderbilt in the early 2000s. But now that he’s on the other side of the recruiting process, he has a deep appreciation for the prospects who call him.
“I think it means a lot more when you become a man and you just say, ‘Hey Coach, I appreciate the opportunity, I feel like this other opportunity is best for me and my family,’” McKenzie said. “I always can respect that. It’s hard when you invest so much time in a young person and that family and then you have to find out on social media.”
Plus, there’s always the transfer portal.
Coaches have more incentive now than ever to react positively when prospects give them the courtesy of a phone call. They never know when they might meet again.
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“When it comes down to it, you kind of just have to do what’s best for you, and at that next level, it’s a business,” said Hall, the Michigan State commit. “So you’ve got to kind of take that approach now. You might hurt some feelings along the way. But it’s all about doing what’s best for you and the opportunities that you can make.”
(Top illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; photos: David Becker, Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
