Independence Bowlclass: Calhoun’s first recruits now core of Falcons

In those three weeks, Cal-houn and his staff somehow put together one of the greatest recruiting classes in Air Force football history.

Lots of DVD studyWhen Calhoun was hired

at Air Force he had a list of recruiting targets, thanks to the holdovers from Fisher DeBerry’s staff. Calhoun had to make sure they were the players he wanted. He dug into a box of DVDs at the office and watched film around the clock. The most memorable one was scratched and kept skip-ping. It was of a fullback from Park City, Utah, named Jared Tew. The first six minutes he watched were useless because the field was just mud. Calhoun had no idea if Tew could play.

“Then one of his runs, he busted it along the bench,” Calhoun said. “And I thought ‘This kid might be able to run a little bit.’”

Tew went on the list.Coaches continued to look

at film. Defensive assistant Brian Knorr, who is with Wake Forest now, saw a tall receiver from Indiana named Kevin Fogler. Late in recruiting they saw a defen-sive lineman from San Jose, Calif., named Ryan Gard-ner. And Calhoun liked the quarterback from Atlanta who secondary coach Char-lton Warren had recruited for more than a year, Tim Jefferson.

The wish list was com-ing together. But what was Calhoun going to tell these players?

Honest interactionCalhoun said he had little

to sell the players, football wise. He knew the academy itself was great having been a cadet and player himself. But Air Force hadn’t had a winning season in three years. The pitch from the coaches became simple: take a leap of faith with us.

“Be on the ground floor,” Warren said. “Don’t look three years down the road and say ‘I could have been part of that.’ Be a part of the group that gets it flipped. Because it’s going to flip.”

Calhoun held onto that bravado when he sat down in Weatheroy’s living room. He talked about the acad-emy. Right away he told Weatheroy, his mother and father that academy life is not easy. That’s Calhoun’s approach — in the first five minutes he explains the de-mands of Air Force, wanting to weed out the recruits he knows can’t handle it.

Calhoun put the family at ease. When Weatheroy’s mother brought out a scrap-book of her son’s newspaper clippings, to the embarrass-ment of the father and son, Calhoun dutifully looked through it. When he opened it to a story about Weathe-roy scoring three touch-downs against his old high school, he joked that he couldn’t recruit Weatheroy anymore.

Calhoun came across as confident and honest.

Weatheroy was surprised to hear almost four years later it was Calhoun’s first home visit. Paul Weatheroy Sr. said Calhoun also talked about a quarterback from Atlanta named Jefferson who had committed. Cal-houn wanted Weatheroy to be a part of his first class.

“He struck me as a good coach, a good person and somebody I wanted to play for,” said Weatheroy, whose career has been derailed by three knee surgeries. “He made the academy appeal to me.”

When Calhoun left, a funny thing happened. The coach was the one energized by the visit.

“I walked out of the house thinking ‘This is the greatest. You’re interacting with kids that come from great families, and they’re great kids,’” Calhoun said. “I remember being so fired up. I thought, ‘We’re going to be able to recruit at the academy.’”

Nothing comes easilyThe initial excitement

was great, but the next few weeks were draining. Calhoun said about 12 visits were a total waste, because the recruits simply weren’t going to be fits at a service academy.

“That would have been legwork you had done in September,” Calhoun said.

The coaches flew com-mercial that first year (since then, they use private jets of two alumni), with mostly red-eye flights. Calhoun’s flight from Portland to Houston had a layover in Phoenix. He was delayed there. He got to Houston at 6:30 a.m. and had a home visit at 9 a.m.

“I remember showering and shaving and hoping that would wake me up,” Calhoun said.

Among the players Cal-houn met in the Houston area were safety Phil Ofili and receiver Kyle Halder-man. The next day, he met Jefferson and quarterback Ben Cochran in Georgia. At

Jefferson’s school, Wood-ward Academy, he thought he made a mistake.

“It’s the only time I’ve mentioned something to a kid and thought, ‘I never should have done that,’” Calhoun said. “I told him, ‘You might be a four-year starter.’ I remember leaving there thinking, ‘You might have just overwhelmed the guy.’”

He went to Cleveland to visit quarterback Anthony Wright, who would become a second-team all-confer-ence cornerback for the Fal-cons, and linebacker Patrick Hennessey. He stopped near Columbus to see defensive lineman Chase Burge, who went to Navy (“I remember I was so mad when we lost him,” Calhoun said) on the way to watch Cincinnati’s Jon Davis at a basketball practice. Davis is now Air Force’s starting free safety.

“I remember the end of the first week, ... thinking ‘Holy cow, what are we do-ing, what have we gotten ourselves into?’” Calhoun said.

And he hadn’t dealt with the negative recruiting that almost cost him his star quarterback.

Battling negative recruitingCalhoun didn’t quite land

Weatheroy during the visit in Oregon. Paul Weatheroy Sr. liked Calhoun, but Army, Navy and three Ivy League schools wanted his son, too. On a recruiting trip to another service academy, Weatheroy Sr. said that school spoke negatively

about Air Force. He said the coaches claimed the Falcons were going to use Weatheroy as a fullback, that Calhoun had lied about him being their top tailback recruit, that Calhoun was going to run a pro-style offense. Warren said he heard other schools showed recruits film of the NFL’s Broncos and Texans, to convince them that would be Calhoun’s offense at Air Force.

Weatheroy Sr. was both-ered, so when he got home he called Calhoun, even though it was late at night. What Calhoun didn’t say to Weatheroy Sr. struck him. Calhoun never trashed the other school. He just set the record straight. More than anything Calhoun said in the home visit, the short phone call convinced Weatheroy that he wanted his son to play for this man.

“He stayed calm and cool,” Weatheroy Sr. said. “I thought, ‘I like this guy.’”

More negative recruiting was happening on the other side of the country with Jefferson. Jefferson had told Air Force he was coming, but he wasn’t so sure now that he was hearing Cal-houn wouldn’t run the op-tion. Jefferson said his com-mitment wavered for about two weeks. During that time Jefferson said he told Navy he would go there. Jeffer-son’s father and high school coach wanted him to go to Annapolis, because there was no uncertainty about that staff.

Jefferson called Warren

and said he didn’t know what he was going to do. Warren told Jefferson he would hang up and call back from Calhoun’s office. They spoke on a conference call and set the record straight. Jefferson reaffirmed he was coming to Air Force. That was a crucial commitment for the Falcons. They had just one season left with starting quarterback Shaun Carney, and nobody in the pipeline.

Jefferson wanted to be a pilot since he was 4 or 5 years old. During that call, Warren urged him to think about the big picture.

“He helped convince me the whole thing isn’t about football, it’s about what I want,” Jefferson said. “And I wanted to fly.”

Had Jefferson wanted to be on a submarine since he was a little boy, maybe he’d be playing for Navy. Instead, Jefferson is three wins from becoming Air Force’s all-time leader in victories for a quarterback. A little luck never hurts.

Hard work paid offThe final two weeks of

recruiting were hectic, between constant phone calls, transcript requests and traveling. Calhoun and Knorr still laugh about driving to Denver’s airport in a blinding snowstorm to make a flight to Kansas City, only to be delayed 4½ hours. And they didn’t even land the receiver they went to see.

The campus visits over those weekends were critical. Calhoun sat down with parents and recruits individually in the Falcon Stadium press box and told them about the benefits of coming to Air Force, and the football program he was trying to build.

“Jared pretty much com-mitted on the spot,” said Steve Tew, Jared’s father.

Others, like Wright, were tougher to convince.

“When I met them, his father, I could just tell, was: ‘No way is Anthony coming

here,’” Calhoun said “He didn’t say it, but I could tell. Then on Saturday night I met with them at the sta-dium and his dad said, ‘This is best for my son. For his future and for his life.’”

The commitments started coming in. Knorr can vi-sualize the white dry erase board in the football offices where the recruits were listed.

“One by one we were marking them off as ‘Yes,’” Knorr said. “I don’t think we thought we’d get all these kids.”

Knorr said he thinks the Falcons landed 60-70 per-cent of their targets, high for a service academy. Sign-ing day was on Wednesday, Feb. 7. Calhoun admits he started to worry that after-noon, wondering if they had overvalued the recruits they landed. He went back and looked at video on every one.

“My thought was, ‘I think there’s some good players in this group,’” Calhoun said.

That class is a mix of direct-in seniors, who will be playing their final game in Monday’s Independence Bowl, and juniors who went to the prep school. Behind them, Air Force has won at least eight games in four straight years for the first time since 1982-85, and made four straight bowl games for the third time in school history.

“I realized he’d start from ground zero,” Jefferson said, thinking back to his commitment. “I guess it was just all faith. We believed in him.”

After reminiscing about late-night commercial flights, convincing parents he wasn’t going to run the Houston Texans’ offense and around-the-clock DVD study to find players, Calhoun started rattling off names in that class, getting lost in his thoughts.

Calhoun chuckled, snap-ping himself back to the present.

“Those are some good players,” Calhoun said.

from page 1—

Air Force quarter-back Tim Jefferson worked out Friday for Monday’s Indepen-dence Bowl against Georgia Tech. Jefferson was part of coach Troy Calhoun’s first recruiting class at the academy.

JIM hudelson, The shreveporT TIMes

ramsey: Georgia Tech did not live up to lofty expectationsCharlton Warren flinched when he thought of the challenge of facing Johnson and his primitive, mighty rushing attack.

“I think the guy is a fierce competitor,” Warren said. “He has a mindset of what he wants to do and he does it. He tells you, ‘Until you stop what I do, I’m going to keep on doing it.’”

Warren’s words are true, which means Air Force defenders should brace for a simple, massive challenge. They have to conquer a coach the Falcons have long failed to defeat, and they have to figure out a way to win with a defense ranked 100th in the nation against the run.

It will not be easy. Tech

leads the nation with 327 yards rushing per game, and the Jackets run a rep-lica of the offense that car-ried Navy to those victories over Air Force.

“You better get ready,” Warren said of Johnson. “You better be prepared because he’s going to thump you in the nose if you don’t. He is going to do what he does and you better get ready.”

This has been a harsh season for Johnson, at least by his standards. Coming into 2010, Johnson had won

63-of-89 games in seven seasons at Navy and Tech, and the Yellow Jackets had roared to 20 wins in 27 games.

Johnson and the Jackets seemed to be rolling Oct. 16. Tech had earned a 5-2 record and seemed ready to sternly defend its ACC title.

Then it all crumbled. The Yellow Jackets lost four of their last five as their defense disintegrated, sur-rendering at least 27 points in each defeat.

The Jackets had lofty plans for this season. A

journey to Shreveport was not included in those plans.

When Tech announced its trip to the Independence Bowl, Atlanta columnist Mark Bradley greeted the news with these kind words:

“Let’s face it: You have to be pretty awful not to be bowl-eligible.” He also called Tech the worst 6-6 team in the United States.

So these are gray days for a coach who has enjoyed little but blue skies for nearly a decade.

You can be sure the man who resurrected Navy’s football program is feeling grumpy about his team’s sudden descent.

But that just means he’s even more dangerous, espe-cially to his old nemesis, the Air Force Falcons.

from page 1—

Former navy coach paul Johnson, now at Georgia Tech, has won five straight games against Air Force.

The AssoCIATed press FIle

“I think the guy is a fierce competitor. He has a mindset of what he wants to do and he does it. He tells you, ‘Until you stop what I do, I’m going to keep on doing it.’”cHarlton warren —air Force secondary coach

Troy Calhoun misread the father of Anthony Wright, Jr. Fortunately for him, he was wrong.

BrYAn oller, The GAZeTTe FIle

SPORTS 4 ❘ the gazette ❘ Sunday, december 26, 2010