Lawrence coach Robbie Barker sounds like he's making the best of observing rules of social distancing and staying home.
"I have a six-year-old and a three-year-old, so we've been kind of doing projects around the house," Barker said over the phone from the school's campus in Groton, Mass. "We built a rink in the basement, we built a little ball park out in the back, so we've been playing some wiffleball, and then yesterday we just built a zip line."
Normally, Barker and members of his coaching staff would be scouting games, just like most prep school coaches at this time of the year. But, as with everything across the region, country and world, coronavirus has dumped normal onto its head. For Lawrence Academy, among the changes was cancelling its annual Winterim school trips to France, Italy, Ireland, Nepal and Hawaii.
Recruiting, obviously, has presented the biggest challenge for prep school hockey teams. Without midget tournaments being played, without the championship games for high schools, without certainty in terms of when we'll see significant hockey again, coaches are turning to video, word of mouth and old-fashioned phone calls to get the lowdown on players.
So, lots of viewing of YouTube, Hudl, LiveBarn, etc., going on these days, in addition to the usual highlight videos produced by families and advisers.
"There’s no games to watch, so that definitely changes things quite a bit," said Kimball Union coach Tim Whitehead, whose Wildcats won three of the last four Elite 8 titles. "March and April are always key times to get out there and recruit. We don’t actually have a recruiting budget, we’ve always done a lot of video anyway, which is different from college, where you’ve got three guys on the road recruiting throughout the year. We’re limited as it is, but now ... we can’t go out because there’s no one to see. So, we’re definitely relying on video to try to get as much insight as we can into certain recruits."
"I think that's the greatest part of technology nowadays, is that you can do it all virtually," Barker said. "It's not too difficult, but at the same time it doesn't do the face-to-face meeting justice."
Dexter Southfield coach and senior associate director of admissions Dan Donato has had his world doubly disrupted: As the school's baseball coach, he normally would have been fresh off a spring training trip to Florida to help his team kick off its season. And this potential loss of a season is particularly personal for Donato: His son, a senior, is losing his last year of baseball.
Admissions and recruiting work over the phone has become Donato's new normal, but the virus has introduced a new concern when it comes to talking to parents.
"We might have a family a little bit apprehensive about boarding school, to be honest with you," he said. "It's just a little more to think about, having your kid under your own roof right now. I've heard a couple of families that we're recruiting say, Geez, this has put it all in perspective, they’d like their kid around."
The biggest challenge for the players, according to Donato, will be team conditioning sessions when the all-clear eventually happens.
"Working out will probably affect the kids a little bit," said Donato, whose team went 25-5. "Not being able to go out to the gyms or being in a group of more than 10, I think that's definitely going to have an effect."
With acceptance letters being sent out by prep schools on March 10, players in normal times would have until April 10 to make up their minds and commit to a school. That still might happen, but the secondary wooing of undecided players that usually takes place in the gap is now not happening with follow-up visits to campuses; schools have to rely on previous visits and virtual tours as new recruiting tools.
"So, it's been just sort of contact-based, reaching out and saying this is who we have coming in, this is where we see you fitting," said Barker, whose Spartans were the No. 1 seed in the Elite 8 after a 22-3-2 season. "I think (we're missing) just where there's that one extra meeting and show of love that's going to put you over the edge, and right now all the schools are losing that. So, we're just trying to stay on top of sending out a brief text message every couple of days that reminds them that we're here."
Barker and his prep school peers have seen and met most of the players (and their families) that will form the core of next season's team, but to a lesser degree it's more trying to add supplemental players and/or replace players who have unexpectedly left.
Primarily, the rest of the year is usually about the following season, in this case 2021-22, specifically seeing players play but also talking to them at games and building in-person relationships.
"The majority of the summer is looking at those '06s and '07s for the following year," he said. "Not being able to start our list or to be out there and starting to compile numbers and names for the upcoming season, it's going to be difficult.
"And depending on how long it goes, I mean you always want to go to those tournaments. It's like every weekend, you can find the tournament throughout the course of the summer and you come back with five or six guys that you think could be an impact player in your program."
When it comes to recruiting, if games don't resume until the fall season, it could be a concern.
"I would start worrying probably mid-July, August," Barker said. "Those are crucial times for us. ... But, yeah, it's going to be sort of a crunch time if we're not allowed to get out there until September or October."
Paul Grant is an editor and a writer for HockeyJournal.com and Seamans Media. He previously oversaw hockey content at ESPN.com and Sporting News. You can connect with him at pgrant@hockeyjournal.com.
