Have helmet, will travel for elite prospect James Vaughters

By Chip Towers

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

As a college football recruit, James Vaughters is a perfect storm.

He's a large kid, at 6-foot-2, 235 pounds, and exceptionally strong. He's an honors student at Tucker High with a 4.0 GPA and an Ivy League-caliber SAT score. He lives in a big-market metro area with lots of media outlets. And he was reared by parents who have trained him, educated him and gotten him in front of opportunity.

That, and Vaughters can actually play a little ball, too.

He is a rising senior entering his third season as a two-way starter at linebacker and tight end for Tucker, a perennial powerhouse of a program that he helped guide to a state championship as a sophomore.

Put it together, and Vaughters is a coast-to-coast national prospect. He arguably is the top recruit in Atlanta and one of the top few in the state.

"I'm not sure if he's the biggest prospect we've ever had, because we've had Thomas Brown and Patrick Pass and some others that were pretty much national recruits," Tucker coach Franklin Stephens said this week.

"But James is more of a product of the Internet Age. The Internet has a lot to do with the explosion of recruiting. Nowadays you can put some video up on YouTube in three or four minutes, and it's everywhere in no time. And James just plays in such a way that it kind of jumps out at you on film.

"Throw in his attributes of being a 4.0 student, being a good kid from a good family, height, weight, athleticism, and he's about as close to a can't-miss prospect as you'll ever get."

At least 35 major college football programs agree. That's how many official scholarship offers -- 26 written, nine verbal -- Vaughters has received. He now has officially spurned all but five of those.

On Wednesday he narrowed his choices to Alabama, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Ohio State and Stanford. The news of Vaughters' downsizing was, of course, an Internet sensation.

Education first and foremost

How does one become what could be deemed as a true national recruit? Well, it's no accident.

As Vaughters tells it, he was encouraged at a very early age to focus on obtaining a college education. And in the beginning, that had nothing to do with football.

"I feel really blessed because of the way my parents brought me up," Vaughters said. "Ever since I started school I've always been expected to go to college, and the goal was to be able to go wherever I wanted for free. At the time I didn't know where that would come from. So as late as probably the eighth or ninth grade, I felt like I was working for an academic scholarship. I didn't think of football as the way I was going to get there.

"But, lucky enough, it turned out in the 10th grade that I was talented enough and big enough and strong enough that football became my best option."

That philosophy means academics are just as important a criterion for choosing a college as national-championship and pro-football prospects.

As a result, Vaughters' realm of possibilities literally stretched from coast-to-coast. And that, as we find out, is a good thing and a bad thing.

High cost of travel

Vaughters' father, Jonathan Vaughters, estimates they have spent upward of $6,000 over the past two years taking trips to college campuses with their son. They've been to California four times -- twice to USC, twice to Stanford – and have taken trips to the Midwest twice. They've been all over the Southeast as well.

NCAA rules prevent schools from paying for prospects' travel or lodging until they take one of their five official visits as high school seniors. So, all the travel thus far has been on the Vaughters' dime.

"In our case because I wanted to give James kind of a national view," said Jonathan, a consultant for an auction-services company. "Air travel is expensive, and when you do that, you've got hotels associated with it. There were times we flew in and out on the same day so we didn't have hotel expense. For a parent and a prospect, right off the bat that is probably a $600 or $700 [per trip]."

But most of the Vaughters' travel has been in ground vehicles. They have taken at least 11 recruiting trips, driving close to 8,000 miles, Jonathan estimates.

Seeing things for themselves, he said, was an important part of the equation.

"We wanted to, one, have an opportunity to see the campus and get a chance to talk to people. That was generally done best in the offseason," Jonathan said. "And then we wanted a second trip to go back and see what the game-day experience was. I thought those trips were important for giving James an appreciation for what the schools had to offer, not only for football but also the academics and the kind of support and the kind of student-life options that would be available for him."

Distance from home will not be a factor in Vaughters' final decision. In fact, it may give the out-of-state schools an edge.

"From the time I was a kid I thought about going off to college somewhere, possibly far away," James Vaughters said. "I would say I've always perceived it that way, that you go away to college. You don't just stay home. Some people have to stay home and commute to school."

A head start

Of course, most prospects are not going to garner the kind of recruiting attention Vaughters has as early as he did. That, too, was not a happenstance.

At the behest of a family friend, the Vaughters hired James a personal trainer. This, Jonathan Vaughters said, has proved to be their most costly expense, but also the most beneficial.

James went from playing on the 140-pound travel team in the Tucker Football Leage as an eighth grader to reporting to Tucker High School at nearly 190 pounds.

"Getting in the gym put me ahead of the game, football-wise," Vaughters said.

Football acumen was evident early, too. Vaughters was playing freshman ball at Tucker when coaches and parents began to tell his parents how he was.

He was going to be a big-time college prospect, they said. Jonathan Vaughters scoffed.

"Being the dad I am, I was like, ‘come on, get out of here, not my knucklehead,'"  he says with a laugh. "James' sophomore year rolled around and he got a chance to start both ways and they won the state championship. Then Coach Stephens started talking to me about it. He told me, ‘things are getting ready to get really hot and heavy.'"

After Tucker's championship season in 2008, Stephens put together a highlight tape and showed it to college recruiters. Jonathan Vaughters got a copy and decided to upload it on YouTube.com. It went "viral" with recruitniks.

By January, James Vaughters had landed seven offers, the first two coming from North Carolina State and Central Florida.

"That's when it sank in on me, maybe we do have something here," the elder Vaughters said. "I was, like, ‘Wow, this thing is real.'"