CONWAY -- Given about a month’s time to pull together his first recruiting class as Coastal Carolina’s head football coach, Joe Moglia said that while the Chanticleers aren’t expecting a large incoming group this year, he’s encouraged by the new batch of players he and his staff are bringing to campus.
But, of course, nothing – including any sense of satisfaction or relief – becomes official until the National Letters of Intent start arriving Wednesday.
“I’m not going to feel confident that everything’s going to work out until we get to tomorrow’s class and guys have actually signed,” Moglia said Tuesday morning on the eve of National Signing Day. “We’re not going to have as many guys as ideally we would like, but I feel good about the quality of the players that we’ve got.”
New recruiting coordinator Mike Gallagher said Coastal is expecting to sign around 12 players after a whirlwind month in which the Chants evaluated more than 500 prospective recruits all while Moglia was still in the midst of assembling his coaching staff.
“We feel very, very good about the class,” Gallagher said. “What we were able to accomplish as a staff in 27 days we feel is pretty remarkable.”
That process started in earnest after Moglia officially arrived on campus Jan. 3 and he and his under-construction coaching staff began identifying needs on the current roster and reaching out to the players who were being recruited by former CCU coach David Bennett and his staff.
Gallagher said about four of those players maintained their commitments or decided to choose Coastal despite the coaching change, and Moglia also acknowledged that a number of others backed away after the transition. But that’s to be expected, he said.
“For whatever reason, some of the guys just said they felt uncomfortable. They didn’t know us,” Moglia said. “Some guys actually said they were worried about how they were going to be treated. So you do all you can to be able to combat that, but at the end of the day [if] for whatever reason a guy doesn’t feel like he’s comfortable here, then he’s not supposed to come here. That’s the reason why I feel good about the guys that are coming.”
To compile that group, the new CCU assistants went to work calling on old contacts from their respective familiar areas while fielding calls about other potential targets.
“We got calls from all the way north to all the way south in Florida and west, so we were taking all those calls [and] we were taking them seriously,” Gallagher said. “We sat in this room for probably about 16-17 hours a day just watching and grading film.”
And it didn’t end there.
Gallagher and fellow staff members Brandon Noble, Brock Olivo and George Glenn were living together across from campus at University Place in the meantime, leaving little separation from the work they left behind inside Adkins Field House.
“We never stopped. As soon as we left here, we’re all living together over there. The phone calls started in the morning,” Gallagher said. “There was like 16 cell phones between four guys, and they’re all ringing.”
The result is a recruiting class, he said, that may surprise some people in terms of its geographic reach. While Coastal’s current roster is predominantly made up of players from South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia and a few from Florida and Virginia, the Chants have verbal commitments from quarterback Dalton Demos from St. Louis, as well as at least a couple players from Pennsylvania.
Gallagher noted that the program will continue to focus on securing local talent with plans to reach out to every high school football coach in South Carolina as the attention immediately turns to the next recruiting cycle, but he said ultimately the Chants will aggressively recruit “the whole Eastern seaboard” to procure the best talent.
“Our thing is we recruit football players,” Gallagher said. “If we can get them all from South Carolina, we’ll get them all from South Carolina. But ultimately at the end of the day we recruit football players, so our job is to go out and find them. In trying to put together a national championship team … we’re going to stretch our legs and find football players.”
And while this won’t be a large recruiting class, Moglia feels Coastal has added some pieces toward that puzzle.
“I really didn’t want to bring in a kid just because we had a slot,” he said. “I wanted to bring in a kid that was going to help us one day be the foundation of winning a national championship or competing for a national championship.”
Notes
Gallagher said the team also has about 85 prospective walk-ons signed up for tryouts this week. … Moglia, meanwhile, indicated he might have his defensive coordinator named by the end of this week.
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