Photo via Casey Sapio, USA TODAY Sports
Coach Frank Wilson was ten minutes late to the school’s press conference announcing the Roadrunners 2017 class. The tardiness was understandable; according to the second-year UTSA head coach, he purchased a blowup mattress from Walmart, inflated it in his office, woke up before dawn and took a warm shower, and started the day around 5 AM phoning prospects and their families.
It’s a tradition he’s carried with him throughout his entire coaching career.
“It’s been a tradition for me,” coach Wilson said. “Now, it originally started years ago having a young man in Mississippi and having to be on the east coast and the paperwork would come in early. They could come in as early as 7 a.m. As a staff, you met an hour before at 6 a.m., make sure email, fax and phones are working – knock out all the kinks so there are no elements of surprise. When it comes from the east coast, now you’re an hour earlier and so, because of it, years ago, we started doing it. I didn’t want to drive into work at 3 o clock and I’ve done it every year since then. I enjoy it.”
The tenacity and hard-work to his position paid off: UTSA announced 23 players joining the Roadrunners for the upcoming 2017 season, with two additional student expected to fill the remaining available slots this spring.
Of the fielded class, 11 athletes are all-state honorees; 13 achieved all-area, all-region, all-county or all-metro recognition; the entire 23 man class were named all-district or all-conference. The national ranking (No. 73) and amount of 3-star commits (14) are the highest in program history.
“We’re very fortunate to have the best recruiting class in UTSA history and one of the best, in our opinion, in our conference’s recent history. We feel very confident that with this team and this group of young men coming in that we’re on the right path to achieve our goal to win a conference championship.”
The Roadrunners were able to secure 16 players from the state of Texas with Power Five scholarship offers, utilizing coach Wilson’s recruiting persuasions as a method of convincing prospects that the edifice being built at UTSA is worth constructing; the coaching staff also made it paramount to develop meaningful relationships with student athletes and their families . Most of the twelve players on offense and eleven on defense posses equal chances to start, with two quarterbacks shadowing Dalton Sturm for their chance to lead the offense the following season.
“We’ll go through spring ball and see how these guys do,” coach Wilson said. “We call it a “wild card”, meaning we take the best available whomever he may be at whatever position group.”
For coach Wilson and staff, the recruitment odyssey began last January, with an emphasis on finding local talent. The second-year Roadrunners frontman acknowledged the support and participation of high school football coaches in the Lone Star State, stressing their importance in creating this year’s class.
“I just want to extend a tremendous thank you to the administrators, coaching staffs and parents of all these young men throughout this process for welcoming us with open arms,” coach Wilson said. “On Tuesday, we picked up the phone and we called the high school coach of every young man that committed to us, and we thanked them for allowing us to come into their schools and meet with them. We told them that we would deliver on a promise that their young men would be everything that they set out to be — to graduate and have a degree; to be developed; to maximize playing potential. We always talk about the full measure of success — the degree and the championship go hand in hand, and one without the other is not good enough.”
The Roadrunners begin their seventh season against Houston on Saturday, Sept. 2 at the Alamodome. San Antonio is expecting two more commits to sign letters of intent in the next couple weeks. An open tryout will be held prior to training camp.
Watch TexasHSFootball’s exclusive live stream of the conference here:
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