As you can imagine, the fall gets pretty busy for Tennessee football head coach Josh Heupel. While balancing not just his team’s in-season duties, he also has to continue the non-stop recruiting efforts with game day visits and other responsibilities.
Despite this, Heupel has seemingly found the time to help out the other teams on campus. With football games creating the perfect event for basketball recruiting, as well, both the Vols and Lady Vols hoops teams typically have official visits aligning with the matchups. During this time, Heupel is apparently greeting some of those teams’ recruits, too.
It’s not just a quick ‘what’s up’ and keep it moving, either. He knows their names and other info before the greeting even happens.
“We are excited. I mean, football season is a phenomenal time around here, and you can already feel the buzz on campus,” Caldwell said. “You can tell that it’s coming. It’s great for us. With recruits, Coach (Josh Heupel) does a great job. He’ll talk to our recruits for us, which is so nice and kind. And he knows their names, he knows where they’re from. He does such a great job. And I think that’s something that every coach here does a really good job of, is we support each other. And so we’re excited to get to watch them play.”
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While a top-rated women’s basketball recruit certainly isn’t picking their school based on what the football program looks like, seeing a connectivity on campus doesn’t hurt. A year ago, Caldwell and company landed the No. 2 class in the country, according to ESPNW, including pickups of a trio of McDonald’s All-Americans and a pair of top 100-rated four-stars.
Despite all the success on the trail, Caldwell does have a list of things she wants to improve on in this category next year. She noted that when hosting recruits, there is a ridiculous time spent eating. She also wants her players to talk to recruits more.
“We learned a couple things about our visits of maybe where we want to do things,” Caldwell said. “You spend a lot of time on your visits eating. So let’s speed that process up. You think I’m kidding, but when you have visits every weekend and you’re doing three sit-down meals a day for three days, it adds up. So speeding those processes up. Our players are our best recruiters, so getting our recruits in front of our players as much as possible.”
At the end of the day, Caldwell is just looking to add players that she likes. She’s not looking at recruiting rankings or listening to any outside noise. She just wants to field a roster that gives her the best chance to win.
“I recruit the same. I just recruit the players I want to recruit,” Caldwell said. “I don’t pay a lot of attention either way to anyone’s reaction, positive or negative.”
