Butch Jones And Tennessee Volunteers Building Recruiting Relationships

Apr 20, 2013; Knoxville, TN, USA; The Tennessee Volunteers football team holds up their helmets while the band plays Rocky Top after the spring Orange and White game at Neyland Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Randy Sartin-USA TODAY Sports

Talent evaluation is a race, and in six short months, Butch Jones is proving that he can land on a prized recruiter faster than his competition. Recruits are taking notice.

“What a player wants to see is them showing him love and he always made it seem like he really wanted me to be with his program no matter what school he was at,” Wharton said. “When he came to Tennessee I knew I was going to go there.”

Henderson was similarly comfortable with the staff, but had to weigh distance as a factor before settling on the University of Tennessee.

“I wouldn’t say it was quick or that I jumped straight on to Tennessee (when they were hired),” Henderson said.  “I had a lot of interest in Louisville and I was still building a relationship with some of the coaches like Coach Elder. It really wasn’t until the visit that I knew it was a home away from home.”

Ultimately, it was the bond with Jones that led both Henderson and Wharton to Tennessee.

Recruiting in college athletics is this multi-tiered archetype of relationship-building. Coaches have to create those bonds with parents, athletes, mentors, friends, family and other coaches and they have to be strong enough to yield trust.

It can be almost impossible, especially in an age where skepticism surrounds college sports and with good reason. People have questionable motives and athletes—specifically young football players who stand to make the most money for their prospective universities—are being taken advantage of.

The constant is that everybody wants to win. The trick is to strike up a balance that allows you to get there while serving the best interests of everyone involved. Have cake, eat cake, get that cake a degree, get it drafted, and then send that cake off to a prosperous life.

Butch Jones is no different than any other coach in the country in the sense that he both wants and has to win. However, at every stop along the way he’s managed to strike up a balance that’s earned him trust.

During Jones’ time at Cincinnati, he developed a relationship with perennial national football powerhouse Warren Central in Indianapolis and then head coach John Hart. The two developed a trust and Jones wound up signing five players from Warren Central (four in his final recruiting class in 2012) while he was at Cincinnati.

Hart now coaches at Huntley High School outside of Chicago, but even with himself and Jones moving further away from each other throughout the natural course of their careers, he still won’t hesitate to recommend Butch Jones to any of his future D-I athletes.

“I’ve known Coach Jones since he was at Central Michigan, and I think the key about him and the guys that he has around him, is that they’re men of character,” Hart said. “When he says he’s going to do something, he follows through with it.

“I always felt like my job as a head football coach was to make sure I protected my players when they go into the recruiting process, and Coach Jones did an outstanding job … there’s not anybody that I could recommend (to a prospect) more strongly than himself and the coaches he surrounds himself with.”

Of course, in a relationship business, those prior bonds often bear fruit, just as they did in the instances of Joe Henderson and Vic Wharton. However, the most important bonds to Butch Jones and the University of Tennessee are the ones that he’s forging within the borders of the state of Tennessee.