Keeping 'em at Home

Caraun Reid

I hope many of you got a chance to watch the Senior Bowl this weekend, particularly the strong overall play from Princeton DT Caraun Reid.

I’m starting to think that Reid has a shot to be an early round draft pick, maybe even the earliest pick for an Ivy grad since Columbia’s Marcellus Wiley went in the 2^nd round back in 1997.

While this will be a great credit to the league in general, perhaps Reid’s incredible success is bittersweet for Lions fans considering he is a local NYC product and played his HS ball super close to CU at Mount St. Michael Academy in the Bronx.

Columbia hasn’t had much of a pipeline to Mount  St. Michael’s, with just four documented alums coming to play football for the Lions and no one since John Re ’84.

Of course, we should all be aware that the overall quality of high school football in NYC’s public and Catholic school leagues is not what it once was. There are still many super-talented individual players, but the teams themselves would not challenge the kinds of teams coming out of the Catholic school leagues in New Jersey or the public schools in Pennsylvania.

The question is: how did we lose out on Reid in the recruiting process?

Many readers here already know that I don’t believe that CU’s location in New York City is a hindrance to recruiting, in fact I believe it’s a very strong positive lure. But the one exception may be for football players who are from New York City and played their high school ball here.  Getting a change of scenery, especially for a football player who wants to have the larger and greener athletic facilities you find outside of New York, make sense as a reason to not consider Columbia as seriously as a place like Princeton.

In Reid’s case, there may be some other factors at play. He comes from a religious family, (his father is a Bishop), and he is active in his family’s church. I can speak with strong authority when I say that Columbia is not a very comfortable place for most religious people to be. Religious Jewish students are mostly an exception to that rule because of the many decades of work these students have done to create their own community within Columbia, (although this does not insulate them against the horribly anti-Israel leanings from much of the liberal arts faculty), but devout Catholic and Evangelical students at Columbia have a very tough time of it if in general. If that’s the reason why Reid declined or never even considered Columbia, I don’t know if I or anyone can blame him.

That’s especially because Princeton’s student body remains the most conservative, (I know relative term), of all the Ivies. A devout Christian is going to be more comfortable at Princeton than anywhere else in the Ivies and a lot of places in between. That’s much to the chagrin of Princeton’s mostly radical faculty, but that’s a subject for another time.

So here’s the second question: If Columbia is a double minus for city-based high school football stars coming from a good Catholic school or from a devout religious home, how can we help to reverse this trend?

I recommend a two-pronged approach.

First, the ability to stay comfortably cloistered at Columbia from the usual pace of the city needs to be emphasized to the local players and their parents. While it will be easy to come see their sons play every week, the amount of access family and old friends will have to any student at CU is entirely up to the student. My parents lived in NYC during my first year at Columbia and I saw them in person on campus no more than once other than move in and move out day. I might as well have been a student in California. The same goes for the usual hassles of city life. If an individual student wants to remain on campus for all his or her academic, social, and dining needs, it’s easier than ever before to do just that. Columbia can really be a greener pasture within the city limits. This is a message Columbia recruiters need to do a better job of getting across to our local prospects. I suspect the fact that almost all our coaches in all sports aren’t NYC natives or CU alums, hurts us in this regard. You really need to have lived here to understand how Columbia is of the city, and not of the city in many ways.  The simplest way to get this across to a recruit’s family is to say: “Your son will be close by if you need him or he needs you, but there’s also plenty of space for him to grow on his own.”

Second, as hopeless as the Columbia campus proper is for students of faith, there are many houses of worship and adjoining religious communities very willing and able to offer spiritual support. I don’t want to try to list every place because I’ll definitely leave some out, but every denomination and every religious community you can think is active within a few minutes of campus… some of them on foot. As a private school, our recruiters from all sports should have the freedom to help prospective students of faith contact these churches, community organizations, etc. Obviously this kind of partnership could aid recruiting in all areas of the country.

One constant we’ve seen in CU recruiting for 30 years now is a dearth of players coming from the city limits. Usually, the Lions don’t bring in more than one player per class from the five boroughs.

That needs to change.