Grootegoed Tackling His College Choice

Head-on is how Matt Grootegoed likes to tackle things. Running backs, wide receivers, any football player who is in his way.

Hit quick, hit hard, make a statement, leave the problem lying flattened and sputtering.

Yet now, Grootegoed sits and thinks. This isn’t his favorite thing to do. Grootegoed, the rock solid, monstrously strong safety and running back for Mater Dei High School, can’t just knock something over and feel good right now. It is nearing time for him to pick his college, time to choose where he will play football next, time to decide what he wants to be when he grows up and where he wants to learn to do that.

“It’s hard for Matt,” says Russell Grootegoed, Matt’s father. “Matt has loved high school so much and I don’t think he wants to think about that ending. If he thinks about college, he has to think about high school being over. So if you’re asking me where Matt’s going to college, I honestly don’t know. Matt doesn’t know. All I know? Matt’s going to see his girlfriend tonight.”

Grootegoed was photographed when he was 6 months old. Already he had a Mater Dei crew cut and the steady stare of an angry tackler. Little Matt was sitting up tall and holding onto a football.

The youngest of the six children of Russell and Jo-Anne, Matt was always going to be a football player. Matt has always looked like a football player. Square-shouldered, hard-headed, single-minded. “It’s all Matt has wanted to be,” Russell says.

Russell, a podiatrist, was a football player himself, a tough Midwestern three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust guy who played at Kent State and then came west to do a residency and stay away from winter. Matt’s only brother, John, played football at San Jose State and is now an assistant coach at Fountain Valley High. But, Russell says, “you could always tell Matt was special. Matt always wanted to make a statement with his hitting. He isn’t much of a talker, but Matt’s a lot of football player.”

While he was growing up, Russell says, Matt would always say three things: that he wanted to play football at Mater Dei, where all five of his siblings were going to school; that he wanted to play football at Notre Dame, and that he wanted to play football in the NFL.

Mater Dei, done.

NFL, a definite maybe.

Notre Dame? Never mind.

Though high school players are allowed five official recruiting visits by the NCAA, Grootegoed is making only three. Notre Dame is not one of them.

He has been to Michigan, walked onto the field of a 100,000-seat stadium, heard “Hail to the Victors.” He also came home feeling sick after spending most of his free time in his hotel room watching NFL playoff games.

He has been to UCLA, where Russell and Matt were put up in the Park Hyatt in Century City. Not a bad way to spend the weekend.

Next up is USC.

And that’s it.

“I don’t want to go anywhere else,” Matt says.

“Notre Dame got in a little late on Matt,” Russell says.

This is a pretty big indictment of Notre Dame. If one of the best Catholic school players in the West, a kid who grew up saying he wanted to play for Notre Dame, doesn’t even want to take the visit, even after his father urges him too--”I told Matt he should at least go, see the place, get his picture taken next to the Golden Dome so he can show his grandkids,” Russell says--then Notre Dame may need to review its recruiting process.

Ask Matt how he will decide on his college and he shrugs and says, “I’m hoping it will just hit me.”

In other words, Matt wants to feel a jolt just like the ones he gives out.

Matt is hoping something will knock him off his feet, pow, the same way he knocks the feet out from under opposing football players. He wants to feel it in his gut. He wants to look into a coach’s eyes or look around the stadium, or sit in a classroom and know. Just know.

“I just think I’ll have a feeling all of a sudden,” Matt says, “that this is the place for me.”

Having made his visit to Michigan, Matt says that “Ann Arbor is a nice little college town,” and that “it’s different there, but it wasn’t that bad.” Does this sound like the big hit, the pow, the feeling that Matt was looking for?

Probably not.

Matt stayed at the Campus Inn, went to the coaches’ offices, met his position coach (it will be strong safety where Matt will be working in college), went out with his host (a Michigan player). The next morning Matt had breakfast, took a campus tour, spent time in a classroom, talked to teachers, had lunch at the training table. Then came free time.

“I went back to my room and watched the NFL games,” Matt says. This is probably not what the Michigan coaches had hoped for.

Ever since Matt had the spectacular game his junior year when Mater Dei ripped Long Beach Poly in the Southern Section championship game, when he rolled up 245 yards rushing and hit everybody in his way with helmet-rattling force, Matt has been on every recruiters’ list.

He has heard all the pitches. “We’ll make you a star.” “We’ll make you an NFL player.” “We’ll make sure you don’t get injured.”

“You learn,” Grootegoed says, “to take it all with a grain of salt.”

Frankly, Grootegoed says, the recruiting process hasn’t been that much of a hassle either.

“Caller ID,” Matt says. “If it’s a coach and you don’t want to talk, you just don’t answer the phone.”

He doesn’t have e-mail or even a computer at home, so he doesn’t wake up every day to hundreds of computer messages from eager coaches as so many high school players do.

Russell says that when he talked to Matt about what Matt might want to major in, when Russell gave a fatherly speech about the worth of a business degree in whatever future employment Matt might enjoy, whether it is NFL-related or not, “I didn’t think he even paid attention,” Russell says.

But then one night Russell heard Matt talking to the Michigan recruiting coordinator and saying that he was thinking about majoring in business. “You don’t always think Matt’s paying attention,” Russell says. “But he is.”

Last summer it had been reported that Matt had already narrowed his college choice to USC or UCLA and that he might make his decision quickly. “Yeah,” Russell says, “but then Matt told another reporter that he thought he might just go to a small school somewhere. He was never going to do that. He might have felt like that one day, but it wouldn’t make any sense.”

It will be, Matt says, “with a big sigh of relief when I announce.” Some of those close to him feel Matt is leaning toward USC, but, as Matt says, “You just never know what is going to hit you.”

Words of advice that many opposing players wish they had heard before Matt put down his head and, pow, collapsed their guts, their legs, their shaking bodies.

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com