After more than 14 months of being locked behind a virtual wall, University of Cincinnati football coach Luke Fickell is ready to burst through the door and get back on the recruiting trail.
The NCAA's historically long, pandemic-inflicted recruiting dead period will come to an end Tuesday at midnight. At that moment, Fickell will joyously blow his whistle, signaling the start of "Midnight Madness."
"We are actually doing a little midnight camp," said Fickell, who is entering his fifth season at Cincinnati. "We'll kick it off and get it rolling, and then it's pretty much a sprint all of June."
The on-campus camp will feature several local and some out-of-state high school players. It will be the first in-person camp Fickell, the two-time American Athletic Conference Coach of the Year, has hosted since summer 2019.
"Finally," Fickell said.
The NCAA imposed the dead period in March 2020 after COVID-19 shut down all sports. The period was extended eight times over the past year as the global coronavirus pandemic surged. But as more and more vaccinations take place, the world is slowly returning to its pre-pandemic state, when coaches and recruits were able to engage face to face and Fickell was able to do some on-campus evaluating.
"It is a little harder to find the right ones (potential recruits) when you're doing everything virtually," Fickell said. "I know you can do a lot through Zooms and stuff like that, but truly, truly diving in, meeting with coaches, other people, getting to know families and things like that, it's really difficult when you can't be there in person."
Fickell can't dive in all the way just yet. NCAA rules disallow him to do any off-campus recruiting, but he can host on-campus camps and attend satellite camps, or camps hosted by other institutions away from UC's campus where he can serve as a guest.
But Tuesday will mark for Fickell a welcome change from FaceTime and Zoom calls and the creative graphics packages and virtual events and campus tours created by former UC Director of Recruiting Chad Bowden and the Bearcats' recruiting department.
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After Bowden left UC in January to join former defensive coordinator Marcus Freeman at Notre Dame, Fickell promoted Pat Lambert from director of on-campus recruiting to Bowden's former role as director of the program's entire recruiting operation.
Lambert's creativity helped Fickell keep the recruiting ship afloat over the past year. Lambert, who played for the Bearcats from 2008-12, helped develop unique ideas that allowed Fickell and his staff to continue to build relationships and secure another highly rated recruiting class.
"I just think it had to be extremely tough for like an Isiah Cox from Alcoa, Tennessee, who had to make a decision for his next four years when he's actually never seen the place where he's going to be living, the apartment complex, the actual facility, his locker room," Lambert said. "Those are some of the toughest things that we had to combat through the recruiting process for these 2021 recruits."
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Lambert's efforts helped the 47-year-old Fickell and his staff embrace some new recruiting tools amid COVID-19 challenges and prepare them for an ever-changing recruiting landscape.
"I give them a ton of credit," Fickell said. "I mean, to be creative, to find new ways to reach guys, to keep them involved, to keep them within the program, the games and the things that we went through. I could not come up with those things. I don't think that way. Sometimes when they would come up with things, I would go, 'OK, I'll do what you say.'
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"Nobody really enjoys doing all those Zoom calls and things like that. It's a tough way to build a relationship. But you have to give a ton of credit to the coaches, as well. We're not old guys, but we're set in the ways that we like to do things. When you have to find new ways to do things, I think it's going to make us all better, better recruiters, better at adapting as times continue to adjust. So I look at it in the big picture. It was innovative by our guys. It pushed us out of our comfort zone, which is what you need to do to grow."
