Video: The High School Side Of Recruitment

COLUMBUS, Miss. (WCBI) – The Ole Miss football program is dealing with some serious charges of cheating by the NCAA.

Among those is a claim a staff member offered a prized recruit up to $15- thousand dollars to sign with the school.

That player went elsewhere, but it opens up the question on how do high school coaches steer elite athletes away from temptation to play for pay?

College football is a billion dollar business now and the pressure to put winning teams on the field can lead college coaches and rabid fans to bend, if not break the rules.

Part of the burden of keeping kids inside the lines falls on their high school coach.

“There are some strict guidelines that these coaches have to follow, you know, according to the NCAA and you know, as we’ve seen sometimes they don’t.”

Columbus High coach Randal Montgomery has more than a decade of coaching under his belt and he can tell when a kid is going to draw a recruiters eye.

That’s when he starts the process of shielding his kids from the dark side of the recruiting game.

“I mean, that’s something we talk to them about you know, as soon as we feel like they’re going to be a kid that maybe, start to draw some interest and be recruited, you know, just talk to them about the guidelines, like I said before, you know, when coaches should calling you, or texting you, or when they’re going to be looking at coming by the school. Those sort of things.”

His latest player to reach the next level is four-star running back Kylin Hill.

Hill’s mother needed only to look at the family’s mailbox to know her son’s high school career was going to be different.

“A whole bunch of letters. It got to a point where he was getting a hundred letters a day,” says Karenda Hill.

Hill’s coach says he started early on telling all of his kids being courted by recruiters, what to watch for.

“We just kind of try to talk to our the kids the best we can and kind of teach them, you know, what’s right and what’s wrong, and what you can do, and when coaches should be talking to you, and when coaches should be calling you, and that sort of thing, and you know for them as players, you know, they just have to try to do the right thing. You know, they can’t really control what the coaches do.”

Eight Columbus High School football players were recruited to take their talents to the next level for the upcoming season.