The end zone at Greentree Practice Field, where many late-night battles have taken place. (Matt Porter/The Palm Beach Post)
Once he started playing football at age 10, Florida State was the hot team. By the time Beason grew into a star player at Chaminade-Madonna High in Hollywood, he thought he might join the Seminoles. Or Georgia, which had a young coach, Mark Richt, who made a strong impression on him.
Until he took an official visit to UM in January 2003. That’s where he saw them.
D.J. Williams. Edgerrin James. Andre Johnson. Reggie Wayne. Santana Moss, and many others. Rising stars on Miami’s roster, training with former Hurricanes in the NFL.
Beason already loved the campus and the academics, and then he saw these players working out in UM’s weight room. The pros could have been anywhere, and they wanted to be there. And many of them came from the towns he knew in South Florida. It was sinking in when Wayne, in his second year with the Indianapolis Colts, took him aside and asked him a simple question.
“Do you want to be good,” Wayne asked, “or do you want to be great?”
Beason knew the answer.
“That was the type of community that was different than any other school I took a visit to,” recalled Beason, a three-time Pro Bowler who now works as a CBS Sports analyst. “I felt an immediate need to be there. I went right upstairs and told coach [Larry] Coker look, don’t announce it, but I’m coming, I’m sure about it, right now at this very moment.”
Since building a champion in the 1980s, Miami has sold itself to recruits as a football brotherhood nonpareil. It’s tough for them to argue when they see Pro Bowlers who went to ‘The U’ returning to campus to work out, attend events like Wednesday’s Pro Day and rub elbows with the up-and-comers. While other schools may be larger, have bigger athletics budgets and better facilities, UM has long had an alumni network they can’t offer.
“The coaches taught you the system,” said former UM linebacker and assistant coach Micheal Barrow, a Homestead native. “The players taught you everything else.”
Alums say Richt, since returning to his alma mater as head coach in Dec. 2015, has fostered much better relationships than his recent predecessors. He has asked them to return for meet-and-greets, dinners, parties and recruiting events. But players have returned, in good times and bad.
“Guys would miss OTAs [optional spring workouts] in the NFL just to train at Miami,” said Barrow, now a linebackers coach with the Seattle Seahawks. “I remember one day I’m covering Kellen Winslow. We’re doing man-to-man coverage. For two hours, we’re just battling. I’m in the pros, he’s in college. Just battling. Then the next day with Clinton Portis and Willis McGahee. I’m showing them what I know, and they’re the next big stars in the league, so they’re keeping me right. It was priceless. ”
That’s not lost on today’s recruits. It’s one of the reasons for Miami’s recruiting success last year — its class was ranked as high as 11th nationally by Rivals — and is a major reason the Hurricanes have the top-ranked recruiting class at present, according to a consensus of Rivals, Scout and 247Sports.
Running back Lorenzo Lingard, the No. 2 back in the country, is one of four top-100 players in UM’s class of 15 commits. Nine of the players are rated 300th or better among all players. Though signing day is 10 months away, the Hurricanes have assured themselves of at worst, a second very good class in a row.
That’s “what made this place great,” second-year safeties coach Ephraim Banda said.
“Coach Richt is building a place for all the kids to be together, so when they step on Greentree, just like they did in the years before, they’re competing against the best players. They’re having fun. They’ve already been doing this in 7-on-7s and the parks, and now they have an opportunity to do that in the college scene. What that had done in the past is make very dominant Miami Hurricanes teams. So we’re trying find the same path. And the kids are seeing the same things happening.”
After last year’s 9-4 finish, including a five-game win streak to end the season, and a No. 20 ranking, the Hurricanes are expected to be one of the top contenders in the ACC. That should keep most — or all — of the recruiting class in the fold. Richt, who couldn’t get Beason way back when, knows how tough it can be to recruit South Florida when Miami has it rolling.
“We want to make it at least tough for everybody,” he said. “Because we know everybody is still going to want the same guys we want. … If someone is going to steal one out of there, it’s got to be where they can’t start just plucking them out without a battle. And that’s the big thing for us. We want to battle for every one of these guys who want to be here. To this point, we have a lot of positive vibrations on that.”
And when they get to campus, players will tell them something like what UM linebacker Bernard “Tiger” Clark used to tell visiting recruits: “You have two choices. You can come to the University of Miami, or you can go somewhere else and get beat by the University of Miami.”
Those words are starting to ring true again.
Filed under: 2016 football recruiting, 2017 football recruiting, 2017 season, 2018 football recruiting, 2019 football recruiting, 2020 football recruiting, Football, Matt Porter, Recruiting Tagged: caneswatch, Miami Hurricanes, sports, sportsfront
