SELECTIVE SEVICE : Tyler Batson, a Top Recruit, Makes His Choice

When it started last spring, the process of being recruited as a top college football prospect seemed like a Picasso painting to Tyler Batson.

His own preconceptions gave him an abstract notion of what it was supposed to be. But beyond that, it was unclear. There was an unnatural combination of excitement and uncertainty.

It was exciting to receive letters and talk to coaches from universities that Batson, an outside linebacker from Torrey Pines High School, had watched on television since he was a kid. He kept hearing he was just the guy they needed on their football team.

But that was tempered by times of stress and anxiety . . . or exhaustion. He did not know how he would pick the right school, or even how to tell the others no.

When it got to be too much, Batson talked to Pete Egoscue, a private trainer who was helping him get stronger and faster through a variety of weight and diet techniques. In the tough times, Egoscue also helped with inner strength.

Batson figured Egoscue was the only person he knew who did not have an interest in where he went to school. Everyone else did, including friends and family. He even got called into the principal’s office for a lecture on the benefits of a Stanford education.

Egoscue remained neutral.

“He didn’t care where I went,” Batson said.

Egoscue admits he did care but was careful not to say. He understood what Batson was going through, and he knew how to help.

“Everyone around him is giving him rational reasons why he should go here or there,” said Egoscue, who has worked with several high school and college players and the Chargers’ Billy Ray Smith. “But the fact is, he’s going to base his decision on irrational reasons. Every athlete I’ve seen did exactly the same thing. I told him, ‘Just go with your instincts, pal.’ ”

Batson did.

As probably the most recruited player in San Diego County, Batson probably could have played at UCLA, USC, Washington, Nebraska, Michigan, Iowa or Ohio State.

But after weighing the pros and cons, reading countless letters and talking on the phone to interested coaches hundreds of times, Batson went with his instinct.

He chose Stanford.

“It’s the hardest thing to explain why I chose Stanford,” said Batson, who also considered Colorado and Washington until early January. “It was something about the atmosphere. It felt right.”

The gut feeling turned into a solid commitment when Batson signed a letter of intent to play at Stanford Wednesday, the first day high school football players could accept a scholarship.

It seemed a simple ending, but Batson will tell you it was not.

He does not have horror stories to tell--no cars offered, no trips to Bermuda, no promises of wine and women, no money under the table--but the nine months leading up to the decision were complex, to say the least.

MARCH 6: THE FIRST LETTER

It came from UCLA. Batson was ecstatic to know that he was actually going to be recruited by big-name schools.

He had an idea he would be after he received a letter from Street and Smith’s college football magazine about being selected a preseason honorable mention All-American. But the letter from UCLA solidified his hopes.

Said Batson: “It’s great to get those letters in the beginning. I was excited that so many schools were interested. A lot of the first letters are questionnaires. I filled out a lot of those.”

There were many questions. The first ones wanted football information: position, height, weight, time in the 40-yard dash.

After Batson answered that he was a linebacker, 6-feet 5-inches, 227 pounds, 4.8-second 40, most schools sent more letters.

Batson had a good junior season, but not spectacular. He averaged about seven tackles a game.

At first, he’d go to the mail box to get them each day. After a while, he sent his 13-year-old brother, Bryant.

The letters came in the summer and early fall. Utah, Iowa, Notre Dame, Michigan, Nebraska and tiny Colorado College in Colorado Springs--where his parents, Bob and Sandy, went--all expressed interest.

By the time Batson decided where to go, about 50 schools had sent letters at least once. They filled up two small plastic file cabinets.

The first letters were usually started with: “Dear prospective student,” or something equally anonymous. As time went on, the letters either got more personal or they stopped coming, because either Batson or the school--or both--had lost interest.

If Batson showed interest or the school was really interested in him, the letters got even more personal. USC had a girl named Kelly write notes weekly just to wish him luck in the upcoming game or say that USC was still interested in him.

“She calls all the time, too,” Batson said. “She just asks how my season is going. I usually feel uncomfortable talking to her.”

Bob and Sandy Batson got nearly as many letters addressed to them, especially around the middle of October.

“I think it (was) that time of the season when they want to say the right things to parents,” Bob Batson said. “Most of them are oriented around education and career opportunities. They are made to sound sincere, but you know that they are not. We even got one from the school trainer talking about the training facilities they have right out on the field. I think that one was for the mother’s benefit.

“They use lots of subtleties like that. These guys are pretty good at saying the right thing. But we don’t know who wants to give him a scholarship and who is just interested at this point. At this point, it is all conjecture.”

JUNE 13: USC’S ‘ACADEMIC DAY’

Batson’s first glimpse of USC was an unofficial visit. The prospective recruits and their parents paid for transportation and meals.

But Sandy and Tyler found out once they got there that academics was only a small part of the scheduled program.

“We drove up there and stopped at the guard gate,” Sandy said. “The guard looks at us and says, ‘Football thing?’ He asked, ‘How tall are you? How much do you weigh? What do you do the 40 in?’ Tyler said 4.9. And he said, ‘You better get your feet up, boy.’

“We got inside and there were girls assigned to each group. Recruiting liaisons, they called them.”

That was Batson’s first contact with Kelly, recruiting liaison.

After the campus tour, someone from the admissions office spoke for 20 minutes. The rest of the hour-long program was centered on football and featured Coach Larry Smith, quarterback Rodney Peete and two assistant coaches.

“They had the Heisman Trophy winner Mike Garrett speak,” Sandy said. “The kids are like this (she makes a starry-eyed face). The (assistant) athletic director spoke and then the marching band played. This is low key?

“The USC people take this seriously. It was overwhelming. You can picture (Tyler) walking down a corridor of fans into the Coliseum. It sends chills up your spine.”

The atmosphere and tradition of USC were appealing. But all this did was cause confusion. He began to think about what it would be like to go to the other schools.

“You see so much you like, and you think about all these colleges and all the great things about each one,” he said. “But you finally realize that you can only go to one. You talk to some coaches and you are constantly getting stuff from their schools. I feel like, ‘I can picture myself going here, but I can’t picture myself not going there.’ ”

After academic day, Batson could picture himself going to USC.

JUNE 21-27: CAMP STANFORD

Two weeks later, when Batson went to a football camp at Stanford, he could just as easily picture himself as member of the Cardinal football team.

Torrey Pines Coach Rik Haines was invited to coach and bring a few players along.

Batson probably would have gone anyway. Running back coach Jim Walsh had seen Batson on film and watched him practice in the spring.

The fact that Charger Coach Al Saunders had written a letter in Batson’s behalf also helped to catch his eye, Walsh said. Saunders met Batson at a fund-raiser for Torrey Pines’ new stadium and wrote the letter on his own.

Walsh told Batson he would be one of Stanford’s top recruits a month before the camp. At that time, Batson said, he didn’t know what such promises meant. Should they be taken for real? Or were they only talk?

All he knew was that he was impressed by Stanford after he went to the camp.

“Coach Walsh was a real impressive guy,” Batson said. “Some coaches make you want to play for them. Coach Walsh gets you fired up and makes you want to try hard.”

Batson was sure Stanford was the place for him.

SEPT. 30 BILL McCARTNEY CALLS

Batson was sitting at the dining room table when the phone rang.

He was used to that; he received about six or seven calls on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday during the season. He asked coaches not to call on Thursday because he didn’t want to be bothered the night before a game.

But this call was different. It was from Colorado Coach Bill McCartney. Batson was a little pale when he walked back and sat down.

“You get pretty nervous the first time,” Batson said. “You think about who these guys coach.”

McCartney’s call came at the time Batson started to receive a lot of them.

Assistant coaches from schools such as Iowa, Nebraska and Arizona State called to express interest.

San Diego State was interested, too. SDSU recruiting director Dan Underwood’s son, Tom, goes to Torrey Pines, and Underwood is a friend of the Batsons.

Underwood gave Batson tickets to a game, but Batson quickly decided it was not the place for him.

“It’s a real loose campus, everything is all spread out there,” Batson said after standing on the field during a game. “They don’t have their own stadium, and not that many people go to the games. I want the place packed. Other colleges have huge cheering sections. State will never have that kind of thing.”

The calls kept coming, but Batson was becoming concerned about a frustrating on-the-field trend.

It seems opposing teams figured out that Batson was a pretty fair player. Since he was an outside linebacker, they would simply call plays that didn’t go to his side. If he switched sides, the quarterback would change the play at the line of scrimmage.

That made Batson wonder about what that would do to his chances. If he didn’t have a lot of tackles, would the coaches still be interested?

“Tyler figures the more he is in a play, the more he’ll be recruited,” Bob Batson said. “I don’t think it will make any difference, because most of the people watching know enough to know why they are (running away from him). But it adds to the frustration because Tyler doesn’t know that for sure.”

But both Pete Egoscue and Rik Haines said Batson’s statistics had little to do with his being recruited.

“I asked him one day why he thought he was being recruited by all these schools,” Egoscue said. “He didn’t know. I told him it was two things that he had no control over: his size and intelligence.”

Batson began to develop phone relationships with coaches. Stanford’s Walsh, Tom Roggeman of USC, Don Riley of UCLA, Bob Woodruff of Washington and Gary Barnett of Colorado called every week to see how things were going.

Stanford’s Walsh said the calls keep the player interested in the school. But he said he tried to make them more meaningful than that.

“I always try to call for a reason,” he said. “Sometimes you have to do it. You have to call to make sure he turned in his application or got his teachers to send letters. But the phone is going to be a burden.”

It got to the point where Batson dreaded hearing the phone ring. He could not even escape the phone on a ski trip to Oregon in December. Two coaches found him.

Excitement was turning to irritation.

“You’re trying to concentrate and study something, and you get a phone call,” Batson said. “Then you sit down, and you just get into it, and you get another phone call. During football season, you are tired and you want to get to bed. It’s 9:30 and you haven’t gotten a lot of homework done, but you end up just going to bed because you know how tired you’ll be the next day if you don’t get some sleep.”

Bob Batson said Tyler almost had to keep answering the phone, if he wanted to be sure he would play college football. Most schools had said whether they would offer a scholarship by that time, but Batson and his family were not sure scholarships discussed in November would be there Feb. 10.

“We were trying to keep all his options open,” Bob Batson said. “It’s a numbers game. And if they run out of scholarships, you’re out of luck. You have to listen to what they have to say and get to know them. But you know that if you get an offer from another school, you’re going to take that. Since you are not sure . . . you have to keep listening.”

The calls were a factor in a drop in Batson’s grade-point average. He had a 3.5 before his senior year, but he received a 3.0, including a C+ in chemistry, for the first semester this year.

“It did affect my grades,” he said. “I tried to fool myself and say it didn’t, but it did. I found myself thinking about schools instead of school.”

NOV. 27-30 TOO FAR FROM HOME?

Batson and his father went to the Colorado-Nebraska game. It was not an official trip because they paid their own way. The thought was that they would first make an unofficial visit and return on an official trip.

Batson liked the Colorado campus.

“If I were just going to college, I’d probably go to Colorado,” Batson said. “I couldn’t get into Stanford and UCLA without football.”

He was impressed by Bill McCartney’s morality. He was impressed by the spirit and the packed stadium. It was nice to see snow on the ground.

But Batson did not return thinking of Colorado as his top choice. It was not something he could put his finger on. It was a feeling.

Maybe the fact he was up all night with bronchitis each night had something to do with it. Maybe it was because Colorado lost to Nebraska.

More likely, it was because Colorado was a little too far from home. If he were going out of state, it likely would be to Washington. His father had visited there once, and Batson had been impressed by the coaches on the phone.

“Washington was still my top choice,” Batson said. “The other schools weren’t out of the picture. You just think about different schools at different times during the recruiting process. It goes in phases.”

DEC. 3 COWBOY BOOTS

Batson was worn out when he returned from Colorado, but he didn’t have much chance to rest. Dec. 1 was the first day coaches were allowed to visit a recruit at his house.

Stanford’s Walsh arrived Dec. 3.

“That is a key,” Walsh said. “I always try to be the first one to visit them at their house, and have them visit our school last.”

USC Coach Larry Smith and Roggeman were there Dec. 4. The next night was UCLA’s Terry Donahue and Riley. Woodruff of Washington came and Barnett followed up on Batson’s visit to Colorado. Coaches from Cal, Air Force and Navy followed the next week.

And Batson was recovering from bronchitis.

When the head coaches visited, they usually wore coats and ties. But the assistants . . .

“They all wear cowboy boots,” Sandy Batson said. “I don’t know what it is or why, but they all had them on.”

Similarities did not stop at footwear. The pitches each made was about the same.

“They just want to let you know what their school is about,” Batson said. “They want to let you know what is different about their school. None of them say, ‘This is the school for you. You’d be dumb not to go here.’ ”

Batson said he mostly just listened. But Bob and Sandy had more definite ideas about what they wanted to hear.

“We wanted to hear about academics and counseling,” Bob Batson said. “We wanted to hear if they pushed him into a four- or five-year program. It is not realistic to take a full load, play football and try to get out in four years. And we wanted to hear a lot about their weight and diet programs.

“We also wanted to know where a coach is in his career. How long are he and his staff going to be there?”

There were some heavy rumors that two of the coaches recruiting Batson--Smith and McCartney--would not even make it to the signing date at their current schools. Supposedly, Smith was going to Ohio State and McCartney would try to bring morality to Southern Methodist.

“They told me point blank they weren’t going to take those jobs,” Batson said. “Smith said there was no way . . . He said he wants to coach 10 years and then retire (at USC). And I don’t think McCartney and SMU would mix that well.”

Batson said Donahue really impressed him. But so did Smith. But then again, he still liked Walsh. Batson and his family felt so close to Riley, Sandy called him “our great uncle.”

Somehow, USC came to the forefront out of that mess.

“When I was skiing, I thought most about USC,” Batson said. “Just about its reputation. It wasn’t anything concrete, really. It just seemed like a place that I liked.”

JAN. 8-15 UCLA VS. USC

The two had played on the football field a couple of months earlier, and Batson had been in the locker room after USC won a trip to the Rose Bowl.

Batson did not have such a tangible way to resolve the differences between the two. He had to evaluate them mentally.

UCLA was his first official visit. He had seen the campus when he went up and used the allowable free game tickets. But he saw a different side of it this time.

He saw the weight room. He talked to Donahue for an hour. He went to parties and walked around Westwood with his host, UCLA player Scott Spaulding. He saw the night life.

He loved it.

“Coach Donahue is such a great guy,” Batson said. “He said that at UCLA you can have your cake and eat it, too. A top football program with a top education. And that’s true.”

His parents loved it.

“Personally, I thought UCLA was the place,” Sandy Batson said. “I had never been on a campus like that before. Our eyes were like diamonds.”

They felt the same way about USC the next week.

As always, they met outside of the USC’s Heritage Hall where four Heisman trophies dominate the first floor of a building dedicated to athletic achievements.

“You always meet there, and if you have to go anywhere, they take you through there,” Bob Batson said. “And all you can do is look at those Heisman trophies in the middle of the room.”

One of Bob’s business associates, who has the USC fight song on the horn of his car, told Batson: “You will go to USC.”

Batson was not quite that sure.

While the trip to USC did nothing to enhance Batson’s opinion of the school, it did not hurt it either. It was still one of the Big Three in his mind.

JAN. 16-18 FIGHTING WEARINESS

Batson and his dad flew to Stanford the next day. They had planned on making visits to both USC and Stanford in the same weekend.

But Batson did not have any idea how tired he would be when that decision was made.

He was so tired that he nodded off during a film session with a defensive coach. Sandy Batson, who flew up and met them in Palo Alto, said Tyler even dozed off while he was talking to Coach Jack Elway. His head hit the back wall.

“You find out after a while that all those trips do is tire you out,” Batson said. “Stanford was a good example.”

But he stayed awake long enough to see a lot of the Stanford campus and meet several professors.

“The professors are real close to the students,” Batson said. “They were totally into Stanford football. I liked that a lot.”

Batson’s parents met professors everywhere they went. They even talked to a psychiatrist who explained that Tyler fell asleep during the movie because of the pressure he was under.

But Batson was really there to see what the football program was about.

“You want to think that what you want to see is what kind of education you are going to get,” Batson said. “But deep down inside, its all football. I talked to a lot of players and I was impressed. Stanford is an up-and-coming program. They are serious about becoming a Top 10 team. They are on their way.”

JAN. 21: THE DECISION

Four days later, Walsh called, and Batson told him he wanted to be a part of Stanford’s program.

“It was such a close decision between Stanford, UCLA and USC,” Batson said. “Washington and Colorado were there, too, but I decided I wanted to stay in California.”

But he didn’t let his parents know. They thought he’d be taking his trip to Washington the next weekend. Sandy came home on that Thursday to find Tyler telling Terry Donahue on the phone that he would go to Stanford.

“I was surprised,” she said. “I figured the football at UCLA or the alumni at USC would win out. As a 17-year-old football player, I would have gone to USC or UCLA.”

Donahue was supposed to visit with Batson that night; Roggeman was scheduled for the next night.

“I felt guilty,” Batson said. “They were shocked. Donahue said, ‘Are you sure?’ ”

Now that he had said yes to Stanford, he had to say no to everyone else.

“Saying no was the worst,” Batson said. “These are guys I really like and admire and would love to play for. And I told them no. But they were all class guys. They understood. Washington sent me a card congratulating me on my decision.”

Batson was sure that Stanford was the right place. It had everything he wanted.

“From the atmosphere at Stanford, I can have the life style I want,” Batson said. “I want to make a lot of money, have a chance to play pro ball, get a good job after that. At Stanford, I have a chance to do all that.

“I felt like I fit in there. I felt like I fit in at USC and UCLA. But I felt like I fit in more at Stanford.”

Right after he decided, Tyler and his family were relieved.

“Ever since he was a little kid, we’ve joked around that it would great if Tyler could get a scholarship to play football at Stanford,” Sandy Batson said. “He was always a brute, but he was smart, too.”

That elation did not last long.

On Friday, Batson began to wonder if he had made the right choice.

“I had no idea if it was the right decision,” he said. “I said no to some pretty good schools. I wished I had someone to tell me, ‘This is where you are going, and that’s the way it is.’ ”

His parents were somewhat gloomy, too. They worried that they had put too much pressure on their son.

“I wished I hadn’t said so much about Stanford,” Sandy Batson said. “I felt guilty about all those jokes over the years. I was afraid that the pressure of the whole community had made him choose Stanford.”

Batson said that it hadn’t.

“There was a lot of pressure on me, but I made my own decision,” he said. “The first few days (after the decision) were shaky. I went over the facts in my head, and I was really glad. Like I am now.”

The excitement had returned. But this time, Tyler Batson said, the uncertainty had faded out of the picture.