PALO ALTO — It's a gorgeous, cloudless morning, and 230 college football coaches have converged on Stanford's practice field to observe close to 500 high school players dressed in shorts and gray shirts with numbers painted on their legs and plastered on their backs.
Pete Carroll of USC is shaking hands with Hall of Fame coach Bill Walsh and future Hall of Fame receiver Jerry Rice. Coach Charlie Weis of Notre Dame is huddled with five of his assistants. Coaches Jeff Tedford of California, Mike Riley of Oregon State, Walt Harris of Stanford and Karl Dorrell of UCLA are wandering nearby.
"Anybody you want to see, they're here," Tedford said of the mini-coaches convention the day before Mother's Day.
The Nike-sponsored training camp is football's version of a buffet. Coaches are given the rare opportunity to scout hundreds of prospects in a single setting.
It's a spectacle watching highly paid and highly visible coaches devote so much scrutiny to teenagers who aren't even wearing shoulder pads.
"If you think of the process of recruiting, you don't get to visualize enough," Riley said. "This is a little bit of a zoo because of the numbers, but there's a lot of benefits. You get to watch them move, watch them run, see if they're really 6-3, 215 pounds."
There are lots of high school coaches who think the combines and training camps are a waste of effort. That's what I thought until Saturday.
The chance to be seen by so many influential college coaches and to compete against the best is too valuable to bypass.
The players are tested in the early sessions while coaches stand in a roped-off area mostly talking with each other. Others are paying attention to players running 40-yard sprints, throwing and jumping. Pat Ruel, USC's offensive line coach, has brought along binoculars so he can get an up-close view of the linemen.
Later, players take part in position drills, and the coaches are allowed to freely roam the field. The coaches want the players to know they are there. Each one is wearing either a hat or shirt with an insignia identifying their school, and the players notice.
Kenny Rowe, a highly recruited defensive end from Long Beach Poly, is moving from drill to drill, but he's asked if he sees any particular schools represented. He starts rattling off, "USC, UCLA, Mississippi, Oregon, Washington ... "
Some schools have brought as many as six coaches to the event so that each can evaluate players at respective positions.
