By Zaire Hardin / Staff Writer

Football recruiting is the process by which nearly all student-athletes are identified by college football recruiters and eventually accepted to a team.

Some student-athletes are recruited when their junior year of high school comes around or late towards the end of their senior year. They start looking at colleges so they can find the right school for them and their sport to play at the college or university.

Defensive Line/Recruiting Coach Elisha Shaw said the recruiting class this year is part of a plan for the future of the Missouri Valley College football program.

“We are trying to have some guys in here that are going to fill in the gaps,” he said. “Last season we didn’t do so well and we got to get stronger in some positions. So we went out to recruit some maturity, on the secondary defensive side and more receivers for the offense to be impactful on both sides of the ball.”

Some people think that there are a lot of people coming in for recruitment who are not going to impact the football program, but the coaches have a plan in hand for the upcoming season.

“This year we caught some big nets in the NAIA,” Shaw said. “So right now my recruiting is around 30-45 guys, maybe more, and about eight good commits at the moment.”

While the numbers are increasing for recruiting for the Missouri Valley Football team this year, Shaw also talks about the comparison between this year and the past few years of the recruiting numbers and the change that may happen in the future.

“The past few years I think we went in a different kind of direction,” he said. “This year we brought in three-star quarterbacks, a three-star linebacker. We are getting high-caliber kids that a normal school wouldn’t get at an NAIA level just to create a competitive atmosphere for our guys we got here on campus already. Like I said, we are trying to get more mature fillers on both sides of the ball so we can have more impact.”