Virtual Tours and Expanded Roles For Video Staff Helps IU Football Recruiting

Tom Allen credits his video staff for providing a great virtual experience Image: Sarah Miller, Hoosier Huddle

Written by Sammy Jacobs (@Hoosier_Huddle)

College football recruiting has had to adapt over the past two months due to the travel and campus restrictions caused by the COViD-19 pandemic. The adaptation that Tom Allen and his staff have made is virtual and relies a lot on the video staff at Indiana.

Video and social media has also been important in modern day recruiting. Teams will put out highlights, hype videos for games or have inside looks to the program that show what it may like to be an athlete at Indiana University.

“It's probably been intensified in some ways because that's the means of communication for recruits and what we can send to them and the ability to create videos for recruiting” Indiana head coach Tom Allen said of his video staff at IU.

Much like the rest of the world, Indiana offers virtual tours of their campus and has options to virtually experience what is like to sit in the student section at a basketball game, the day in the life of an IU student as well as take tours of campus buildings.

“The virtual tours become a very big component here. The rules have kind of had to be adapted to the situation and modified accordingly the last few weeks to kind of sell them on the way we can do things. So, utilizing those guys in a big way to somehow simulate what the campus feels like from far away. What it feels like to be in Bloomington as a city and just trying to show them the simple things of our facilities” Allen explained in a teleconference.

Allen credits “having great people in those spots has been huge and our workers have done a great job and coordinate things we do for our recruits, whether it's the things we create for them from a graphic perspective or literally the on-campus simulations that we're trying to create.”

The Cuban Center has give the Hoosiers the team, led by Director of Creative Content for football David and the resources to continue to recruit at a high level despite the restrictions of bringing prospects onto campus.

“This is obviously the time of year when we'd have a lot of unofficial visits, even official visits at times as we get into the months where we're allowed to have those and those are not taking place” Allen said. “You got to see them. Normally you see them face-to-face. Now, we're having a Zoom meeting. It's like this right here. Those tours that are face-to-face, they're now becoming virtual. They're rolling and doing that is very important.”

The NCAA originally announced on March 13th that they would put a recruiting “dead period” into effect that would expire on April 15th. That period has been extended through May 31st and there has been no update on whether or not that “dead period” will be lifted or extended at the end of May. All college football programs are in the same boat. Nobody is allowing recruits on campus, so it is up to the men and women behind the scenes to provide the tools to show off their individual programs and campuses and provide a virtual experience that will make prospects feel at home and give them as close to a “real-life” experience as possible.