Supportive 'Team' Keeps Jenkins in the Moment

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As Jelani scrolled up and down the screen of the Gateway laptop in his mother's bedroom, Stephanie and Ernest Hall sat on the mattress behind him and peered over his shoulder. On this mid-July day, Jelani showed his mother and stepfather, for the first time, the extended reach of modern-day recruiting.

From the inbox of Jelani's Facebook account, he opened a half dozen of the 50 or so messages he had received in the past eight months from people he had never met, people who attended the same schools that were pining for his services on the gridiron. It was a slow progression, Jelani said. A friend request here and there, a message every now and then.

But after Rivals.com listed Jelani as the No. 9 recruit in the country this past March, the highly coveted linebacker discovered he had more friends than he knew what to do with.

"It was weird because you don't start getting that [attention] until you get in the rankings, so I knew not to show them even any attention because I knew they didn't want to be my friend; they just wanted me to go to their school," Jelani said. "I know it shouldn't be like that where they can use something for some other reason that's not the real reason why. I mean, it doesn't bother me. I feel blessed to have [the attention], but I don't use it to tell any random people from their school where I'm going to go."

Jelani said he used to accept every friend request that came his way. Now, he checks to see the friends he has in common with each person who makes a request. If it's just a bunch of highly touted recruits, then he clicks "decline." In all, Jelani estimated he has received 70 random friend requests since December 2007.

"I'm really just learning today, to be honest, that Jelani is getting so much activity on this Facebook," Ernest said. "It's something I never even thought about, you know? So we really haven't had an opportunity to help him manage that. He's been managing that part by himself."

This, the team said, was not part of the plan. When the recruitment mail started pouring in during the fall of Jelani's junior year, the team devised a way to prevent the process from dominating Jelani's daily life. What was important to read? What could be tossed aside? At first, those decisions were left to Stephanie, but she was working on a doctorate in organizational leadership at the time, so she released the responsibility to Maurice.

In the following months, Maurice crafted a three-page matrix that reduced the recruiting chaos surrounding his son into a simple diagram. The columns list each school in nearly every division I-A conference. Programs that offer Jelani a scholarship are highlighted in yellow, which include nine Atlantic Coast Conference schools, six schools each from the Big Ten, Big East and Southeastern conferences, as well as four from the Pacific-10 and a pair from the Big 12. Notre Dame, an independent, also is highlighted.

The rows separate categories, such as diversity, U.S. News & World Report academic rankings, number of NFL draft picks in the past five years and graduation rates. "It gives us a snapshot of the things that are important to us," Maurice said of the matrix.

On average, Maurice estimated he spends a couple of hours each day managing Jelani's recruitment. But organizing the offers was only one part of the plan. There also was the matter of all those phone calls that needed to be addressed. During the spring, it was not uncommon for Stephanie to come home each day to find four new messages left on the answering machine from coaches and recruiting analysts looking for a brief chat with Jelani.

When it got to the point that Jelani's cellphone voicemail box filled up on a regular basis because of many of those same people, the team stepped in again. Now, all suitors are told to call Maurice.