Cal Football: Pandemic Prompts Recruiting Changes That Could Stick

Cal has developed an interactive, virtual tour of facilities and campus for recruits

Photo courtesy of Cal Athletics

If necessity is the mother of invention, Benji Palu had to reinvent his purpose on the Cal football staff.

Palu is Bears’ football’s director of on-campus recruiting, and that’s a role that has at least temporarily been shelved in the age of COVID-19. High school prospects are not allowed to make campus visits during the pandemic.

So where did that leave Palu?

“Benji’s really become the director of virtual recruiting,” said Marshall Cherrington, who serves as the Bears’ director of recruiting strategy.

In fact, as schools across the country adjust to the new recruiting landscape, Cal coach Justin Wilcox says he relies heavily the creative juices of staff members.

The challenge was how to best connect with high school prospects, many of whom live states away and have never stepped foot on the Berkeley campus.

‘We’ve got some sharp, sharp people when it comes to loading all that stuff and putting it together. I am not one of them,” Wilcox said. “I have ideas that I don’t know how to make happen, but other people do.”

Cherrington and Nick Mitchell, a video specialist and the staff’s creative director, began assembling a video that gave recruiting prospects and their parents a look of Cal’s facilities and campus.

Cherrington ran it by Palu, who had an epiphany. “Automatically, I was like, we could walk them through a tour virtually,” he said.

*** Cherrington and Palu explain in the video below how they adjusted recruiting to the limitations of the COVID-19 pandemic: 

The result of their brainstorming is an interactive virtual tour, where coaches or staff members use Zoom to guide prospects and their parents step-by-step through the football facilities and onto the campus.

Players get to “walk” through Memorial Stadium, Wilcox’s office, team meeting rooms, the football weight facility, even a space dedicated to sleep and rest with eight “hibernation” chambers.

A favorite with recruits is a stop in the team locker room, where they can check out displays of the Bears’ different game-day uniforms.

The tour makes visits to the Haas School of Business, player dorm suites at Clark Kerr, the Cal library and Sproul Plaza in the heart of the campus.

Along the way, recruits and their parents can click on highlighted items to get more information, while also directing questions to coaches on the Zoom call.

“We take them through as if they were legitimately on campus,” Palu explained. “We’ll say everything we would say in person. It’s kind of cool because you get to interact. The see kids’ facial expressions to certain things.

“Parents are very engaged as well. It’s been a huge hit doing these virtual tours.”

Cherrington says the key has been to create the same kind of personal connection a prospect might develop if he were making an in-person campus visit.

“We really tried to still get our faces in front of the recruits as much as possible. That’s such a big part . . . our culture, our team, what coach Wilcox is all about,” he said. “That feeling, the energy when recruits come to campus, it’s hard to replicate that. I think we’ve done a pretty good job with it.”

Wilcox calls the virtual tour “super cool,” and the Bears are enjoying their best recruiting year since his arrival before the 2017 season. Cal has 18 commitments so far and their 2021 class is ranked fourth-best in the Pac-12 by 247Sports, fifth by Rivals. Nationally, the Bears are No. 24 according to 247Sports and No. 33 per Rivals.

“Recruiting’s gone well for us,” said Wilcox, who also acknowledges that a lot of Cal’s recruiting targets already had made campus visits before the COVID-19 shutdown in mid-March.

Wilcox and his staff look forward to the day they’ll again be allowed to make home visits to pitch their program, and to invite high school prospects onto campus.

“Nothing beats face-to-face, shake somebody’s hand and sit down with them,” Wilcox said.

At the same time, he is convinced some of the changes they were forced to make will remain part of their recruiting strategy going forward.

“I think that’s one of the things as we come out of this, who knows, there’s just a lot of ways we can probably be a lot more efficient,” Wilcox said. 'I think it’s something that at a conference level or national level should and will be discussed.”

“There’s no doubt,” Cherrington agreed. “It’s been a very tough time, obviously. But we’ve developed our virtual game very well. I think it’s going to allow us to extend our recruiting footprint even farther east.

“Where we might not have gotten an official visit from a kid, now we get it because he’s seen that preview and that virtual tour and wants to learn more about it.”

Sept. 1 marked the first time coaches could personally reach out to the current high school juniors who will become the recruiting class of ’22. But with the fall high school season shut down in California, Wilcox said recruiting the next cycle will present its own challenges.

“You rely a lot on their junior seasons. That’s the key indicator. And then you get a chance to go watch those guys work out in the spring,” he said. “A lot of those guys won’t be playing in the fall. I think that one’s probably more challenging than the ‘21s in a lot of ways.”

Cherrington believes there will again be virtual solutions.

“It’s really going to be good for them, especially with our priority guys, making sure they have all the information they need,” he said. “They can see campus, they can see everything virtually.

“So when that time comes and everything opens up again they’ll be able to come up and have some sense of familiarity with the program and Berkeley and our entire campus.”

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Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo

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