After signing day, rude awakening awaits players once they hit campus

Said Good Counsel's Young: "They're there to sell you a perfect car, they're going to make it seem like it's a Rolls Royce when it really could be a Honda. . . . I'm trying to look through all that. It's very flattering to hear everything you want to hear, but in reality it's their job to say what they have to say and get you to go to their school."

College coaches are skilled professionals when it comes to recruiting; receiving additional training in their pitches is becoming more and more popular, while the players they are recruiting are still teenagers.

"When they recruit, they're easy-going and friendly, but when they coach them up and have them in weight training and study hall, it's a shock to" players, Dunbar Coach Craig Jefferies said. "When they're recruiting, they find out as much about you as they can but they don't give out a lot about them. It's all about love and the finer things in life, the peaches and cream and how much fun they're going to have. They talk about football and schemes, but it's different the first time you hear a coach being demanding and holding something on you."

For many players, reconciling what they are told during the recruiting process with how things are on campus can be a challenge -- especially for those who have excelled throughout their athletic careers but now find themselves in a much different environment.

"When you get recruited, you're being told you're the best thing since sliced bread and once you sign, now you're a player and you start at the bottom rung," said McNamara Coach Bryce Bevill, a former DeMatha standout who played at Syracuse. "That's the recruiting game. But the thing is, when young men do sign, they know what they're getting themselves into."

A handful of players have gotten an early start adapting to their new environment, choosing to graduate early and enroll in college for the spring semester. Like Goree -- who needed a semester of prep school to meet the NCAA's minimum academic eligibility standards -- they have been on campus only a short time but realized life is much different than it was in high school.

Said Ricardo Young: "If someone is picking a school based on how the city is or how fun it is around there, they would be clueless because you don't have a lot of time other than your one day off on the weekends."