welcome to the secrets of college planning i'm your host anthony uva and today we're going to get some insight into football at division three level schools my guest today is bryant's a race and he's the head football coach at fairleigh dickinson university in madison new jersey and welcome to the show thank you if i am really happy to be here sure no problem so usually i start out my guess where they went to college so when you go to school absolutely i start out my college career at princeton university right down the road here for two years and then my final two years i ended up getting more college and graduated from there was a fantastic now let's go back in time before we get into what you're doing now high school how do you pick prissi university and then go to gettysburg how did it all begin for you with that it start freshman year senior year at an all star fantastic question my i grew up in mobile new jersey which is in southern new jersey about an hour and a half hour forty five minutes south of here and had a an older brother who attended princeton university who was five years older and really started to open up my eyes to colleges he started to to visit colleges his senior year  back when we went to school not many people really started to educate themselves about colleges and visit colleges maybe going into their senior year summer and obviously during their senior specially football players and i was able to go on a couple of crooning trips with him that were local princeton being one of them maybe being another and really start to open up my eyes toward that and obviously the opportunities not only athletically but academically with some of the schools that so picking princeton did it start freshman year senior year it really didn't start until senior year is as a football player back then you're going back twenty five years or so and that's a date myself but this was before the internet of video where coaches could watch this was before d v d s we were in reel to reel film when transferring over in the v c r of a and so many coaches didn't  come to the high school or were able to get film until really after your season your senior year so they had a little bit an idea huge in new york specially the very good players who were going to the division ones that we all know about the big ten schools c schools and a c c schools but as you work your way down in the levels of football they that time really began after your season so it didn't really you had an idea going into your senior year maybe of what level you maybe you were going to jump too far unless you had a growth spurt or had a change in your body type but that really started you know after my season my senior year so did you play football at prin absolutely played played two years there i was on one of or i think it was the second to last freshman team back then you could only play freshman football if you thought if you want even back even further in time all athletes can play as a freshman on the varsity level the ivy leagues and kept that role the longest and so in the early ninety's we were when the last teams to play freshman football and then i was on the team as a sophomore as a connection with gettysburg the head coach a went to my high school and had tepidly recruited me as a high school senior even those looking at a higher level  nick specially in football but i've always wanted to coach my father was a high school coach in mobile new jersey it was high school baseball coach for twenty five years and each sport and so i grew up around the game grew up around what influences coaches had on me and so when i was going through my college it wasn't a surprise to my family that i want to coach college football my brother was already in the business as a younger coach since he was five years older and i was able to attain an internship at kings college wilkes barre p a i wanted to attain my master's degree hopefully in sports management while coaching so that would pay for the degree and kings had a little bit of a feeder program in the springfield college and i was able to after year king's move on the springfield for two seasons and attain my master's degree there at the end of my term it springfield my last semester there was an opportunity to go to rocker's university and be a ga there so i went there for two spring balls in season in between and i was able to finish up my degree at springfield while i was coaching at rutgers being able to transfer the credits just like you would at any point in so that was a tremendous experience and because kings was a division three school springfield was a division two school who was moving down to division three and went through that process and obviously records division one school so i really took it all levels and my second spring there in may the universe for a full time job rensselaer polytechnic institute up in training york which israel side of albany division three school as the office of my coach and was able attain the job and i was up there for five years having different titles positionally and as a coordinator of start i was often to line coach added the coordinator tighter title the next year and for the next four years was a coordinator with the last year because of a coaching change actually in approach and quarterbacks in receivers and had tremendous success there we went to the national semi finals my last year and alternately had an opportunity to go to northeastern university in boston and jump a couple of levels they were in a tremendous conference and one double layer now they call it s c s football and i was the office of language there for six seasons with the last season painting the office of course played a title excuse me at the end of that year unfortunately north eastern decided to drop football office a line coach and then always wanted to become a head coach and i interviewed a few schools and helpful schools to out my career an opportunity come back to stay in new jersey and interview for the family the concerned university head football coaching job and was able to fortunately a team a job six years ago and i've been there ever since fantastic and that's that's all the time that's gross story but that's that's where we we so it goes to show you that coaching career is you've got to move around a lot of different schools sometimes to get to the level that you've got to get to absolutely it's a little bit of a change in life i know just like picking a school i kind of says some parameters for myself i don't  get too far away from my family because you know we're a close knit family and you know going across the country i would have enjoyed it as much as i do being being closer to home and being able see you know family when when you want to so now college football so tell us what you're looking for in a high school athlete for a division three level college football program what are you looking for in a high school athlete great question well the first thing no matter what any tools different is you have to have the academics to qualify for that school so whatever that may be  courses and figure out your g p a in the other big areas where you look at your test scores s a t scores or a c t scores and that's going to qualify you into a school that's the first thing that as a coach we're looking at because otherwise no we're wasting our time but we're wasting the student athletes time as well because they can't get into school so whenever anybody contacts us or we have contact with them that's the first thing that we're going to talk about  make sure that they're almost there on the playing field that we think there's a possibility that they may get in and no matter what percentage a possibility is at least there's a chance so everybody's understands that you know they have an opportunity to possibly go to f t you or to any school and then we'll get into a mixture of you know qualitative football skills so we're going to look at who they are as a football player but ultimately you really want somebody who loves football who loves to compete because it is a competitive step up from high school no different than when they were playing pop warner youth league football and jumped up to high school this is the next step and we talk to players all the time  that think of the best players that you play with in pop warner and they moved up to play high school football well now the best high school football players that you played against are all the ones that you play against or with in college so there's a definitely  a competitive level that you need to play college football and then each position is going to have their own you know techniques and abilities that you like to see why you see who can catch a  quarterback who smart who can throw and be accurate maybe one more running quarterback or maybe more drop back or back whatever may be a certain size for lime and things along those lines and then the last piece is really a character piece that you want to get good feedback from people inside the program or the school really whether it's it's the coaching staff or even further because usually as a recruiter one of your first stops is to the main office in you may see a an administrative assistant or you may see someone in the hall who stops you and they're going to ask why are you here and where you're from and they're going to say the school that you're at fairly they can see the university and i'm here to see you know play x and a lot of times that first and the show contact when you talk to that person is going to give you a real good idea of who player x is he's a great person one a leader you'd be so lucky to get him or maybe may be a little bit of a hesitation that they him a kind of feel like wow that really wasn't there was an unspoken word but makes you think you maybe want to make sure that this is the right person for your program so there's really a character issue that you really want to look into to make sure that the person is a type a person that fits into your program with what you want to do as a program and i know you know a person that we're looking for we want them to understand that you know academics is a part of their football playing career at f t l and we also want not only be successful academically and athletically but we also want to be a leader in the community in this sport as well so now how do you how do you it do you go to high school games that they send you just film how does it all work at the college level every everything that you said and even more so even today with the computer age you receive emails you receive phone calls but also go to games and you may be looking at a couple of players and then a couple more kind of crop up in a new radar that you maybe weren't expecting and i need to do all the checks and balances that i just talked about  coaches may call your parents or the recruit may call you or email you instead there may be alumni that costs from from the area that say hey need to check this person out or i was at a game or you know he's playing with my cousin or whoever may be may tell us and now we just football players but we may have another athlete in another sport that may come come up to us and say i have a friend who goes to my high school or the so that so there's many different avenues as to how someone can kind of get in touch with us and from our end we are looking to were you know drivable school for the most part there is a section that if someone outside the drivable area contacts us we are going to recruit them just like the normal student athlete but we're not going out to california or texas let's say for football just to recruit football players but we will we will we have had them on the team and we will continue to recruit them hard but mostly you know we're going to every school in new jersey and we're going to split up the counties by coach and then driveable distance is around the state so now you've been at every level at the college level what the differences between a division one program looking at a football player a competitive vision three level program well division one is you're looking at the best of the best athletes when you look at a record university athlete princeton now there are athletes that he has that are in the n f l that may be the same year that they graduated maybe records only had one or two as well go to the n f l so you really don't know but maybe the overall quality of depth of the team athletically talented wise maybe is not as deep at each level even when i play that division three or coach coaching our division three there are players who could play at a higher level whether it be division two division one  or division one do you see sizes as one factor at the different level absolutely absolutely size of the first factor you want to see there athleticism you want to see how fast they are so you know really that bigger faster stronger t model to start with automatically it's going to be the film but you give the coach and show the coach but also there's going to be a certain criteria going way back to my rocker's days when i was a ga under terry shea who coached with bill last he used to say all the time that bill walsh talked about having that longer player because he's going to be able to get to a ball a lot easier than that shorter player so you know really factors in but even if you're a long you still have to have those other attributes and the football film to show that you can play at that level interesting so the sport itself at the college since we are division three there are n c a a rules that govern when students can come to to school everything was once so for division three fairly dickinson we will report to camp with our players when the n c a a allows us to we're right now allowed twenty five practices before the first game with that you can have double sessions right now when school starts or week before your first game whichever happens first also your first five practices have to be single practices where there's a heat acclimatization period the first two practices are how much only the next two are helmets and shoulder pads and the fifth one is full pads but they're all single day practices after that until that week before the first game or when classes start you can have a double session every other day so it really depends on when you're school when your first game is when school starts as to as to when you can start usually that time is somewhere in early to mid august we've started in my six teams are prag are starting camp somewhere before that maybe the in the tenth or eleventh somewhere along those lines as to when they start and they do they have the same amount of games as division one program ten ten twelve games so division three you're allowed ten games division one right now you're allowed twelve i believe and tea into your conference championship indoor ball game but there are some the ivy leagues they stole a whopping games as well so really depends on your conference division three there's a thirty two team tournament if you think of the basketball tournament that we all know the in favor basketball tournament it's just like that where you started thirty two teams and so i believe it's a five week tournament that will run from the weekend before thanksgiving until rate before christmas whether it's a weekend or two before christmas depending on when when that holiday falls the longer of a tournament and then division one obviously which only has four teams  and i believe it's still a little bit bigger than the than the division two tournament in division one double a tournament i believe numbers wise i've lost count of how many to their limit women so now how about the winter break what are the kids do during the winter break x x one question again we just got off of ours we have a fairly long winter break our kids get done finals sometime before christmas monday after martin luther king day so there's a there's a long gap in between the semesters what we encourage and obviously from a football standpoint we're going to give them a workout that they can do at home or in their high school or the workout facility but also encourage them to get some work experience in their field if not if they're not going to take a class you know whether it's after you or another place in that time period but the shadow someone to volunteer to in turn so they can get a feel of if they're a business major do they like a small company do they like a large company or do they want to be behind a desk all day or do they want to be interacting with people and it's a great time to do your feet wet and make some contacts as to what you want to do down the line after school and then in the spring is their spring ball how does how does that all work up until you know it's may again good question we're in the mix that now so we have our team in a lifting program with our strength coach that's four days a week and that'll go through the first half of the semester through spring break when they come back from spring break now we're going to change up and lift three days a week and we're going to we're allowed in division three right now sixteen spring practices within five weeks but there's no contact there's no pads it's footballs only so it's totally different than the spring football you may see some games on the big ten network may and then you give them some kind of regimen from may until school starts in august again absolutely so will give them a second conditioning program again just like when we give them one in the winter time when they're on their own will do the same thing in the spring time and that financially at the schools you know it's a burden for a lot of these parents and at a division one level they always hear about the scholarships what division to relevel schools have is there anything at a division three level school excellent question something that we run into all the time especially being a small private university but the first thing i would say is this schools have academic scholarships so again going back to my point you want to open up as many doors as you can for your college career do as well as you can academically and i go back to my situation with my brother and it really opened up my eyes to some some opportunities that maybe i may not have seen  and then besides academic scholarship you because there's no athletic scholarship that's going to fully pay your bill or partially pay your bill you can fill out the fafsa which is the f a a f s a online it's a government program where they're going to make a determination the government that is they are going to make a determination of what they think your estimate family contribution should be and then they will let send that to each school that you get accepted to and  put down on the application and now the school's going to send you what they think you should pay for that school so there is an opportunity for money there's no question about  it whether it's princeton university fairly they can see their versus your records university you want to go through the process i really thought our parents being in the business for as long as i have been don't allow money to too early on factor in to where your son or daughter applies and is looking go through the process with an open mind and see what happens at the end because even though at a school like f t use i've come to realize for a variety of factors but in essence in some cases it's cheaper to go there than some state schools in new jersey for new jersey residents and that really shocked me until i got there but you again you just don't know until you start to in all these levels of financially than academic scholarships and other scholarships that each school has available to you to be able to help you pay for school because it is a costly ordeal no matter what school you go to nowadays you know so we're going to whatever are coming to the end of our show and usually i asked my guests what advice you want to give to moms and dads out there that their sons want to go to college to play football what advice you might give those fans well i think the first level advice is this and i think there's so many schools out there for them as you know when that when they originally start is to make a list and figure out what is important to them meaning the student athlete not not their families not their teammates or their friends but what's going to make them happy and what they think is going to allow them to succeed at that school and be specific with that list and you can bring it up in many different areas but obviously academics should be a part of it football obviously being the football coach if you deal with football affleck should be a part of it and by and by football what's important is that the locker room is that the weight room is of the ability to play the type of defense whatever it may be and then the third thing i talk about is environment big school small school close to home far away city country suburban setting you may have ten or twenty things in your list they're all going to be intertwined but that's really going to help you to organize your thoughts for really what's going to end up being one of if not the biggest decisions i make in your life because it affects so much down the line because it's going to you you know keep an idea as you visit schools what you like the what you didn't like about the list because you have a ranking system then as you visit the school and you're driving home with your family that you can have a number ranking system or  letter ranking system and that will help you reflect back on that list when it comes time to because when i was their age as a soon athlete i visited three schools and it was very confusing to remember what coach said what and what player said what and all the little intricacies but that list that that i was that was mine really helped me give me an idea of what was important to me thank you very much for coming to the show really p so you've been watching the secrets of college planning on the host anthony yoga and so next time