D3football.com Podcast 407 Extra: David Blake, Bethany (W.Va.) [30:11-35:11]

we start getting fully staffed in February to just, you know, throttle them down and, you know, and the way we do our visits, when we got the, the, the, the, the secret sauce right now is, it is a simple game of knockout. Okay. And so my daughter in basketball that we're talking about, yep, yep, exactly. So my daughter, you know, she plays basketball, she's a fourth grader. She's 10 and I had recruits coming through the one day. And she said, dead. I want to play knockout. And I said, scarlet. We can't. We have recruits. And she's like, come on, dad. She's like, I said, scarlet. We don't have enough people. And she's like, the recruits can plan. I'm like, you know what? And so as we're doing our athletes, she's toward my daughter and, you know, a couple of the GAs are you had the basketballs lined up in the gym. And we, we got a game of knockout in and we would actually turn out to be a really good litmus test to see who is athletic. Sure. How they competed. And how simply they could follow up rule, like the rules of the game and in simple instruction. And you're throwing something at them that they're not going to have experience on any other recruiting trip. It's not something they would ever have thought was going to happen, you know, here to them as a potential college football player. Right. Right. And so that's really every visit, you know, we, you know, we get a game of knockout in with the boys. You know, if I see, you know, our, our, some of our other sports teams coaches walking through their office, you know, hollered them and they'll hop in and it too. So it's been fun, you know, some of the, the moms and dads, you know, the siblings, they all get in on it. And so when you see everybody, you know, thrown up shots on a basketball court, it gets kind of hysterical. I am just trying to wrap my brain around what kind of shape, what kind of skillsets you have to have just to be on your staff, let alone to, to, to suit up on Saturdays. Yeah. So should we got team captain from University of Memphis, it played free safety at Memphis. We got a Georgia Tech linebacker. That was a team captain that's on our staff coach and linebackers. We got another Clemson, Georgia Tech transfer that, you know, it's in coaching our running backs. We got a division one offensive line guy, you know, it, and so everybody's kind of on the military side of it, our strength coach, he's, you know, combat deployment 17 months of combat deployments was a long snap at Oklahoma State, you know, our D3 representative Matt Bordfield, you know, that guy and, insanely fine tune to his diet. That's our director of experiential neuroscience, you know, and so across the board, yeah, everybody's pretty dang athletics. We always tease our players. Hey, if we play a game right now, I think we might smoke y'all kind of thing. So the pretty young guys too, I mean, obviously, you guys, you guys coming back off deployment, obviously, you know, they've got a couple of years of experience under their belt, but we talked to some young staffs recently. Right. So, you know, I'm 40. I'm the second oldest on staff. And so Brady Knicks, I believe, is our oldest. Yeah, he's two years older than me. He's an army veteran. Another vet that's our assistant strength coach, assistant DB's coach. He's got 40 months himself of combat deployments. Our wide receivers coach, we would always joke around say you ever seen top gun, well, he's goose, and he was an NFL one, the PA beside the patrol Constance aircraft. And so we, yeah, so everybody's pretty much as either major division one, division three, explain. Everybody's got either got playing experience or everybody's got playing experience. And the ones that don't have the additional playing experience, they also got military experience. So yeah, it's a pretty sweet blend of D3, D1 and military. When you're looking for guys to bring in for the fall, I mean, aside from all the things we just talked about, like geographically, or you guys extending the footprint outside of, you know, the traditional 150, 200 miles radius of the school. You guys obviously have certainly people who have come from all over the place in order to be part of your staff. And I'm wondering if they bring any, you know, unique recruiting areas or pockets of guys that you've discovered for this upcoming season? Yeah. So, you know, first foremost, we want to obviously dominate our local, you know, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, ties right there, and we've done a really good job at that. And that was all kind of, you know, our recruiting coordinators also are offensive coordinator, Chris Kiddash. And, you know, when I open this up and I always talk about this to the recruits and they come through the doors too. When you are, when you become a head football coach, I've learned, you become the coolest Kidd in town. It's like being a small town kid with a boat. Everybody wants to be your friend in the summertime, you know, people are looking for jobs in. And so when I did the OC interviews, I interviewed people from all levels, all the way from power four through high school and everything in between D3 guys, D2, FCS, you name it. And Chris Kiddash ended up hiring. He stuck out the best because why? When he was a high school teacher too, he knew the Ohio Valley, which is that local area,