AMHERST — It’s hard to believe Walt Bell hasn’t coached a game yet at UMass.
That will come Friday when the Minutemen open their season under the lights at Rutgers. And when he does finally step onto the field at SHI Stadium to live out his dream of being a head coach, he’ll already have a majority of his 2020 class verbally pledged to UMass.
In the last six months, 17 players have committed to playing for Bell at UMass. The NCAA mandates just 25 new scholarship players per year, so Bell has secured almost 70 percent of his first full recruiting class before he’s even coached a game.
“By no means is the job done, by no means is anybody around here patting themselves on the back,” Bell said before training camp started at the beginning of the month. “We did a nice job evaluating talent early. There was a time there in December when we first got this job there was a big three- or four-day rush of a lot of kids who got offered. We did a good job at sticking to the plan of staying as close as we can to here so we can just overwhelm and break those guys a little bit and show a lot of love.”
Bell has put most of his focus on areas that are within a six-hour drive of Amherst – notably Massachusetts, New Jersey and the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Those three areas constitute 13 of the 17 verbal commitments thus far, and it’s a strategy that has worked for UMass in the past.
As safeties coach Jason Tudryn, a Northampton native who played at UMass in the mid-1990s, pointed out, many of the great UMass teams of the past featured rosters littered with players from those three areas. He said focusing on the areas within driving distance of Amherst is the right move in order to finally get the program moving in the FBS era.
“When we were here and this place has been really good, six hours has really been where those guys came from,” Tudryn said last week before listing off UMass greats who lived within a six-hour drive of Amherst. “Those guys were great football players and you didn’t have to go far to get them.”
Defensive coordinator Aazaar Abdul-Rahim has a litany of recruiting ties in the Washington D.C. area from his 10 years as a high school coach in the region and his three seasons working at Maryland. He is a main reason why the Minutemen have been so successful at finding talent in the region, spearheading the recruiting efforts in the talent-rich landscape. So far seven recruits come from the DMV – short for District, Maryland and Virginia – and many of them come from the more successful programs in the area.
However, Abdul-Rahim is quick to shift the credit to his colleagues, most of whom played an equally important role in connecting with the recruits. He said Bell’s persistence in texting and talking with the players during open communication periods has been helpful in cementing the idea that the coaching staff cares about them as people. Abdul-Rahim also added that having a staff that is well-liked on the recruiting trail by coaches, athletes and parents is just as important as well in recruiting, and said Bell has assembled a roster of coaches who can connect with these demographics during campus visits.
“The thing about recruiting is if you can put a staff together that everyone you send a kid to, they can gravitate to then you’ve got a special staff,” Abdul-Rahim said earlier this month. “The key to recruiting is gang effort. If I can get a tight end up here and throw him in Coach (Jon) Bills’ room and he loves Coach Bills and loves myself and loves UMass, that’s how you get it. It’s a team effort at the end of the day.”
What the public is witnessing now on the recruiting trail from Bell is exactly what UMass athletics director Ryan Bamford experienced when he interviewed Bell for the head coaching job. In an interview earlier this month, Bamford said the plan Bell presented to him about how to build UMass into a winning program resonated with him strongly and that Bell’s pitch is hitting home with recruits in the same fashion.
He said Bell’s willingness to be honest with recruits is also very attractive to prospective student-athletes, which adds to the already attractive offense and defense Bell will roll out on Friday. Over the next 14 weeks, UMass will finally gather some data on Bell as a head coach and how his plans actually look on the field. But Bamford said Bell’s authenticity and vision for the future will still be major factors no matter the Minutemen’s record this season.
“They’re buying into what Walt is selling on where he wants to take this program,” Bamford said. “Now in the next three months, we’re going to go live it, we’re going to live with some results. We’re going to live with the process now and seeing some outcomes, and ultimately for us, it’s going to come down to he and his staff continuing to be authentic to who they are. That’s what we’ve subscribed to and that’s what a lot of the men in our program and our coming to our program are looking to subscribe to in the future.”
In the meantime, Bell will also have to fight off larger schools who have already tried to poach recruits away from UMass. It’s a sign of the type of athlete Bell and his staff have targeted, but Bell said the important piece of keeping these commitments to the first signing period in December is being able to continue to make the same pitch and preaching this year’s results won’t alter Bell’s plans for the future.
“We just keep fighting the fight and make them understand that the reason they chose this place in the first place, nothing’s changed,” Bell said. “They can come here and help make a difference in the program.”
Josh Walfish can be reached at jwalfish@gazettenet.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoshWalfishDHG. Get UMass coverage delivered in your Facebook news feed at www.facebook.com/GazetteUMassCoverage.