For Recruits, a Text Message Free-for-All

If a college recruiter wants information about a DeMatha football player, Stags Coach Bill McGregor is only too happy to oblige. Highlight tapes? Got those, too. A transcript? Right here. Do you want to meet the kid and talk? Come on over to the school.

McGregor, however, refuses to give out a player's cellphone number under any circumstance. Cellphones are the targets of recruiters' text messages, which can come at any time with any frequency.

Text messages have turned recruiting into a 24-hour-a-day process and have allowed coaches to shower a prospect with unlimited persuasion -- away from the presence of a recruit's parent or high school coach -- right up until signing day.

The NCAA limits college coaches to one phone call per week to a recruit during his senior season. Text messages, instant messaging, e-mails, faxes or pages, however, are not considered phone calls, according to NCAA bylaws, and are not restricted.

"The major thing everyone wants now is the cellphone," said McGregor, who testified on the issue last month before the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. "They want your cellphone so they can send you text messages. . . . I think text messaging is ludicrous. What's the difference between a text message and a phone call?"

College coaches have pounced on the loophole and turned text messaging into a necessary part of recruiting. Players have come to expect the messages so much that if a recruiter is not sending them, he's not doing a good job.

"You've got to send out text messages now constantly," Connecticut Coach Randy Edsall said, "and if you're a head football coach, you don't have that kind of time to be typing away on those things all day.

"With the text message, you have to do it because everybody else does. It's getting out of control. I'd like to never send another text message in my life, but I don't have that choice."

Gaithersburg junior Dan Atwood, who is not yet allowed to receive phone calls from college coaches, said he already is receiving plenty of text messages, sometimes at the most inopportune moments.

"It's like, they know we're in school, 'Why are you text-messaging me now?' " said Atwood, noting that most text messages are small talk, a means of keeping a player's attention on a particular college. "You would think they'd actually want us to pay attention in class. I'd look down [at my cellphone as it buzzes] and be like, 'Oh, now what?' "

Atwood said seven coaches messaged him Sunday afternoon, asking him who he thought would win the Super Bowl.

"It's really a little thing," Atwood said of the text messages, "but it can have so much meaning, like this coach is taking the time to write me."

The NCAA has considered measures to limit text messaging. One proposal, banning it altogether, was overwhelmingly opposed last summer. Another proposal is to restrict sending messages to certain hours of the day, but Grant Teaff, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association, said that measure would be unenforceable.

"It has really gotten out of hand. . . . We've got a problem, and we need to fix it," Edsall said.

Staff writer Eli Saslow contributed to this report.