Notre Dame’s top recruiter can talk the talk
Published: May 17, 2011 3:00 a.m.
That man up there onstage, he talks like tomorrow’s a rumor. He talks like Congress just made talking illegal. He talks like his mouth is a burning building, and every word inside is falling over every word trying to get out.
“Practice 11 on 11,” Chuck Martin says now, the words marching smartly off his lips, left-right-left.
And suddenly you can see why the man has the job he has, this 42-year-old out of Park Forest, Ill. You wouldn’t enter My Friend Flicka in the Indianapolis 500. Why would you send a guy who hates to talk into the kitchens and living rooms of America’s most eligible high school football players?
Instead, if you’re Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly, you send Chuck Martin, because first of all Kelly and Martin go way back. They coached together at Grand Valley State not quite a decade ago, where Kelly won a Division II national title. Then Kelly left and Martin took over and Grand Valley never dropped a beat, winning two national titles and 40 straight games on Martin’s watch, going 74-7 in his six seasons.
Now he and Kelly are together again in South Bend, where Martin coaches the defensive backs and serves as Kelly’s recruiting coordinator. This means his family rarely sees him, and when they do, he’s usually got a phone grafted to the side of his head. It also means, since this is Notre Dame, he might have the least envied job in America.
Kelly to Martin: “I want you to be my recruiting coordinator.”
Kelly to Martin (rough translation): “I smell gas. Go inside and strike a match and tell me what you see.”
The point, of course, is you recruit or die in big-boy college football, and at Notre Dame the death tends to be grimmer than in most places. And yet, Martin thrives on it, because it suits both his personality and his ability to maintain perspective.
“The thing for us that people don’t realize is … really, at our level, (recruiting) is 365 days a year,” he said last week at Wayne High School, where he spoke at a coaching clinic for Jason Baker’s football camp. “It’s just an ongoing process. You’ve got to like people, and I enjoy it because I really like people. That’s kind of prerequisite No. 1.”
Prerequisite No. 2 is understanding the pitiless mathematics of it all, which is where maintaining perspective comes in.
“You can’t get too high or too low because there’s a lot more failures than successes,” Martin says. “We’re all signing 20, 25 kids (a year), and we’re all recruiting hundreds. And at the starting point it might even be thousands. So when you sit down and do the percentages, you’ve got to be somebody that can deal with failure, know what I mean?
“For every kid that says yes, there’s five that say no, and you’ve just got to move on.
There’s not a lot of professions where if you get one or two out of five you’re successful, but recruiting is. It’s just a different animal.”
And so the 23 players Notre Dame got this year, including four five-star defensive ends, was deemed an excellent haul. Martin talks about that, too, about how everyone still mentions fabled Notre Dame ends Willie Fry and Ross Browner, and how that proves defensive end has been a difficult position to recruit, but also an important one.
“We’re hoping our highly touted kids in this class become half as good as Browner and Fry someday. We’ll be real excited if that happens,” says Martin, before going on to talk about schemes and asking different kids to do different things and how defense is always a priority for Kelly because Kelly’s never not scored points.
“I’m not saying he’s not worried about offense …” he says.
It’s about the only thing he won’t say.
