Nov. 12--SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- In the bruising battlefield of college football recruiting, one of Notre Dame's key generals is a soft-spoken 23-year-old Ohio State graduate who grew up cheering for the Buckeyes and had always wanted to become a doctor.
But now she's on the front lines of recruiting, working with Notre Dame assistant coaches to connect with prospects in today's social media-driven world. Megan Whitt, one of four women on the Irish's official staff, serves as the coordinator for recruiting operations and is also one of coach Brian Kelly's most recent additions to the program.
"People joke that my mom taught me my football positions before my colors," Whitt said. "She was not going to let me be that person that didn't know offense from defense."
Kelly hired Whitt away from Ohio State in March to help improve Notre Dame's ability to reach recruits through social media applications such as Vine, Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter -- applications some of his assistant coaches have almost no experience using.
Every school has a social media presence and communicates with recruits through those avenues, but how schools utilize social media can vary.
Kelly and Notre Dame think they have spotted a chance to gain an advantage in recruiting by restructuring how they relate to recruits. Notre Dame wants to become the envy of the college football world.
Enter Whitt, who helps run an office dedicated to this cause.
"I feel like in our office our job is to keep our coaches in the game," Whitt said. "They're going to go to schools, they're going to call them and they're the ones making the home visits. Our job is when they get there to have provided the recruits with information through mailings, social media, posters -- whatever we can. ... to give them that edge."
There was an SEC school Kelly and his staff noticed which was doing just that, Kelly said, and it prompted him to look into hiring Whitt. Kelly didn't name the school, but he said its recruiting classes were outpacing Notre Dame's.
"You just couldn't figure out how were they doing this," Kelly said. "But their social media plan and graphic arts plan was so good that they were reaching these kids and developing relationships with them that you couldn't normally develop anymore because of the NCAA rules through this kind of conversation. I said if we could just hit that by 50 percent, we have a story to tell."
But the story has become modernized. On each social media platform, Notre Dame posts quick videos -- less than 30 seconds in length -- that offer a glimpse inside the program. Maybe it will be of players goofing around before a flight, getting pumped up before a game or a snippet of Kelly's postgame speech after a victory.
Whitt, with graphic designers Luke Pitcher and Buddy Overstreet, work to create flashy graphics that preview and recap the weekend's games and also provide information about the program. Those graphics are mailed to recruits and posted to Notre Dame's Instagram and Twitter accounts. For instance, the graphics for the North Carolina game featured pink designs to promote breast cancer awareness while another game featured a theme based on the movie "Sin City."
"The No. 1 thing is we just want them to look cool, for 16- to 18-year-old kids to like them, which is sometimes more challenging than others," Pitcher said. "It's not really as much of a science as it is trial and error."
Pitcher and Whitt also use the recruits' Twitter and Instagram accounts to gather their interests to custom-make graphics and mailers. They can track if their efforts are working based on the amount of Instagram likes or retweets they get for certain graphics. It may also mean Whitt and her staff have to work after hours if a recruit primarily uses his social media applications late at night.
"When you start cookie-cutter recruiting, when you start recruiting and have a big plan, it's not going to work because you're only taking 25 kids," Whitt said. "If you recruit a big mass the same way, it's not going to work because they want to feel special. So we try to take each kid as much as we can on an individual basis."
It's all part of Notre Dame's attempt to make recruits feel what Whitt calls "a love." In this sense, "love" isn't an abstract, it's a concept -- a conceptualization of the attention Notre Dame is trying to pour onto its recruits. Whitt reaches out to recruits and their parents and starts to form relationships with them.
"It can be very awkward," Whitt said. "When I first came here, I bonded with the mom of a quarterback who is no longer here because my relationship with those parents are not football-related, they're asking me, 'Hey, did your brother win his football game?' "
In her short time at Notre Dame, Whitt has won over the assistants and Kelly.
"(My assistants) will come to me and say, 'Hey, Megan's awesome.' And they don't say it's because, 'Well, jeez, she's so pleasant to be around.' It's not that," Kelly said. "The kids they're recruiting are getting information about Notre Dame in a manner that our coaches would have a hard time getting to them through forms of communication they're not up on."
Kelly added with a laugh: "No disrespect to (offensive line coach) Harry Hiestand, but Harry has a hard time just finding his keys at times."
Being a woman in a male-dominated industry hasn't fazed Whitt. Her former boss, Buckeyes coach Urban Meyer, helped instill a confidence to thrive in the face of skepticism.
"I work with men probably 95 percent of my time," Whitt said, "and (Meyer) said the only way you are going to succeed in this industry is if you know that going into it and the only way you're going to prove them wrong is if you just show them what you can do."
chine@tribpub.com
Twitter @ChristopherHine
