SALT LAKE CITY — One morning in mid-March as America was still in the early stages of what has become the collective new normal, Pleasant Grove junior Isaac Vaha had just woken up when he looked at his cellphone.
Vaha is still relatively new to the circus that is college football recruiting, having received his first Division I scholarship offer from the University of Utah just last October, but the 6-foot-7 tight end/defensive end is experienced enough with roughly 20 offers now to know that the more than 200 text messages he received from coaches around the country was unique.
Welcome to recruiting during the coronavirus pandemic. Like so many things, it has been completely altered over the past few months, but in some respects, coaches are being more relentless than ever since they have more time to devote to it.

“To be honest, the texts that coaches send me, it’s been off the wall since quarantine,” Vaha said, although he noted it has slowed considerably since that morning.
“To be honest, the texts that coaches send me, it’s been off the wall since quarantine.” — Pleasant Grove’s Isaac Vaha
In addition to texting and other traditional methods contacting players, such as phone calls and FaceTime, coaches have had to devise new ways of reaching prospects since the NCAA banned in-person recruiting on March 13, a ban that will continue until at least May 31 and could extend to June 30 depending upon a vote that will take place May 13.
Like much of the world, coaches are using Zoom heavily, where they show prospects presentations of their campuses and facilities. Vaha, who just started playing football last fall after long being a basketball player, said he is now spending up to two hours per day communicating with coaches and has seen “virtual” campus tours from Utah and its Pac-12 Conference foes Oregon and Stanford.
He said the Utes and Cardinal’s presentations were mainly photos and videos, while the Ducks had a website where he could click into different rooms in the team’s practice facility and a camera would give a tour of the room.
“The Oregon one was crazy,” Vaha said.
A good friend of Vaha’s, Kearns safety/wide receiver Jeffrey Bassa, said the virtual visits in a sense amount to an unofficial visit (in normal circumstances, prospects can take up to five “official visits” to see campuses, which are paid for by schools, but can take as many “unofficial visits” as they want, although they have to pay for them).
Bassa, who had already been on actual unofficial visits to Utah, Oklahoma State, Stanford and Cal before things got shut down and has received offers from Oregon, Baylor, Louisville and Kansas since mid-March, said there is one big missing component not being able to actually see campuses, however.
“It’s better to go out there and get that firsthand experience and view of things so when you go back for the official visit you already know what you’re expecting and all that,” he said.
“You can learn a lot about a college town on the drive from the airport in a lot of ways, and I think that’s something that can’t be replicated. Do I really fit in this college town, city or community? That’s the one thing virtual tours can’t replicate.” — Brandon Huffman, national recruiting editor for 247 Sports
Brandon Huffman, the national recruiting editor for 247 Sports, said that notion of firsthand experience is the biggest challenge for both prospects and coaches during the pandemic.
“You can learn a lot about a college town on the drive from the airport in a lot of ways, and I think that’s something that can’t be replicated,” he said. “Do I really fit in this college town, city or community? That’s the one thing virtual tours can’t replicate.”
As for coaches, he said, “They’re having to rely on the eyeballs of others and really having to trust their instincts just watching film rather than getting another context in which to evaluate kids before they offer.”
Nevertheless, coaches are still offering scholarships, and numerous recruiting analysts have observed that prospects are committing in droves.
Take Grantsville offensive lineman Branson Yager for example. He didn’t receive his first offer until BYU came calling on March 3, but then he started “blowing up,” to use recruiting parlance. By the end of March, he had offers from Iowa State, Nebraska, Virginia, Vanderbilt and Cal, even as in-person visits had been banned and all coaches had to go off was his film.
Throughout April, Yager kept in communication with coaches, but then on April 27, he announced his commitment to Nebraska.
“A lot of it was just I knew where I wanted to go,” he said. “Everything that I’ve seen about Nebraska is what I want. I knew where I wanted to go, and so I didn’t want to wait and then lose my opportunity.”
While Yager said he truly likes what Nebraska has to offer, Huffman said with all the uncertainty swirling, some coaches are pressuring prospects to commit (Yager acknowledged that was his experience with some schools), and some prospects are going for it, figuring they’ll grab their spot while they can, even though commitments are non-binding for both sides until a prospect signs a national letter of intent with a school next winter.
“I think what that means is we’re going to be set up for a very crazy ending to the recruiting cycle because I think there’s going to be a large amount of decommitments, and it’s going to come both ways,” Huffman said. “It’s going to be kids that jumped on the offer just to make sure they have a spot, but it’s also going to be coaches having to reevaluate after they see a kid in person.”
Whether that can happen anytime soon, of course, is anyone’s guess. Summers are an incredibly valuable time for both prospects and coaches to be at camps around the country getting to know each other, and many of them have been canceled.
Without them, Huffman said a huge opportunity for both sides to evaluate each other will be lost, although he said there’s a chance some could be hastily organized for June if the NCAA allows it with the May 13 vote.
For now, both Vaha and Bassa are biding their time in the recruiting process, hoping things will eventually get to the point where they can visit campuses in person to help them make the decision of where they will play college ball.
“I’m really not in a rush,” Bassa said. “I’m just trying to enjoy the process right now since you only get one chance to really do this your whole life.”