When tiny North Park University on Chicago’s North Side starts football practice in a couple of months, the Vikings expect to have nearly a dozen players representing three islands of Hawaii.
“I know, we’re a small school in Chicago, who’d have thought it, right?” said the head coach, Michael Conway.
Up until a few years ago, not even the Vikings.
With Hawaii, once seen as a layover for recruiting forays into American Samoa, Division III North Park (enrollment: 3,051) has found fertile recruiting ground on these shores.
In that it is among the lineup of schools on several levels — Division I, II, II, NAIA and junior colleges — for whom Hawaii football camps have increasingly become must-stop shopping venues.
For local players without the means to attend the camps of schools on the continent, they also have been a blessing.
This year, because of a change in the NCAA’s evolving rules regulating camps, the two anchors — Rich Miano’s Gridiron Performance Academy College Showcase and the University of Hawaii’s Elite Camp — could be focused on different markets.
GPA, which is scheduled for Saint Louis School on June 7-8, will be without Division I coaches unless its request for an NCAA exemption is approved. Last year, in its fourth year of operation with Division I coaches, GPA attracted 83 coaches from 29 schools overall and, it said, 571 campers with 200 scholarship or aid (some players receiving multiple) offers.
UH, in head coach Nick Rolovich’s inaugural summer, teamed up with Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh for a camp at Saint Louis and was host to a camp on the Manoa campus that featured several teams, including Mountain West rivals.
This year UH will exclude its prime recruiting rivals and hold its Elite Camp with USC, Washington and, possibly, Oregon on June 9-10 on the Manoa campus.
Thanks in part to Harbaugh’s eight-day, seven-state satellite camp “Summer Swarm” tour the NCAA adopted legislation restricting Division I head coaches this year to appearances hosted by fellow D-I schools and operated at the schools or on their home game sites.
While the brand-name schools such as Oregon and USC compete for the three- and four-star prospects, the smaller schools, such as North Park, which recruited seven players in 2017, and Adams (Colo.) State, which picked up five, and others stock their rosters at the bulk rate.
“The big schools can’t take everybody,” Conway said. “And there are a lot of good players in Hawaii.”
For schools without access to private jets and with limited travel and recruiting funds, the GPA camps have been a godsend. “The GPA camps in Hawaii give us an opportunity we never would have had before to see so many players from all the islands,” Conway said. “There’s no way we could have visited all those places.”
The GPA camp, through sponsorships and donations, helps subsidize the appearance of some D-II, D-III and JC coaches.
And while many schools do not offer athletic scholarships, they do come up with academic scholarships, financial aid, paid internships and other means to help players underwrite tuition and expenses.
“It exposed us (to potential recruits) and allowed us to be able to be seen, but more importantly it has allowed us to be able to have vision on some of the kids that we would have never gotten to see (in person) before the camp,” Conway said. “That is very valuable for a school at our level.”
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
