Georgia Tech’s Brent Key making an impression on state coaches with recruiting

Bennett said he wondered if the visit – and a phone call from Tech’s new director of high school relations, longtime Georgia high school coach Tim McFarlin – had more to do with Cambridge having a prospect (offensive lineman Gabe Smith, a rising junior) who already has scholarship offers from Arkansas and Miami than the new regime of coach Brent Key.

“Are they coming just because we have one (power-conference prospect) or is it new?” Bennett asked before answering his own question. “I think it’s new, to be honest with you. I think it’s just how they’re trying to cover the state. I have a lot of respect for that. I heard a lot of things about coach Key, so going to give them every benefit of the doubt that we can.”

If Bennett could ask Key himself, the new Jackets boss would offer assurances that the visit was indeed reflective of his efforts to recruit metro Atlanta and Georgia.

“I don’t believe that you rush into every high school and put a business card down and walk out so you can say you hit every school in the state,” Key said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It’s about building relationships.”

The attention given Bennett and other area coaches is one indication that Key isn’t speaking in empty platitudes. Another is that several of the hires made by Key indicate his priority on creating or building on existing relationships with Georgia high school coaches in hopes of bringing some of the state’s bounty of talent to Tech.

Of the seven new assistant coaches that Key hired, all are either from Georgia, have coached at the high school or college level in the state or have coached at colleges that recruit the state and Atlanta heavily. That includes wide receivers coach Josh Crawford, who had spent 11 seasons (2010-20) at five high schools across Georgia before coaching the past two seasons at Western Kentucky.

“To get him to come back to Georgia, that’s a steal right there,” said Brunswick coach Garrett Grady, who knows Crawford.

Key also added two high school coaches to his support staff – McFarlin was a head coach for 22 years at Roswell, Blessed Trinity and Fellowship Christian. He won a total of four state titles at Roswell and Blessed Trinity, becoming one of only 15 coaches in GHSA history to win state championships at two schools. Defensive analyst Bill Stewart came to Tech from powerhouse North Gwinnett after previous stops at Etowah and James Clemens in Madison, Alabama, a total of 14 seasons as a head coach.

Those two hires stuck out to Grady.

“I just think the relations that (McFarlin and Stewart) have with coaches across the whole state (are important),” he said. “Both coaches have been very successful, so I think they’ve got a lot of coaches that coached for them and have gone and become a head coach, and they know a lot of the players, too, that either they’ve played against them or seen them around.”

“I think they know what we go through,” said Bennett, the coach at Cambridge. “And they understand the high school game and what it means to high school coaches to have an in-state institution that recruits their area as well as be a resource for them.”

Key and offensive coordinator Buster Faulkner paid Grady a visit in January, stopping on a helicopter tour that Key made around the state. Grady and Faulkner had a connection, as Faulkner was on the Valdosta State coaching staff when Grady played for the Blazers.

“For the head coach to come down, that means a lot,” Grady said. “Not only for the kids to see that, hey, they’re trying to make a stamp on their program and recruit the state of Georgia, but for coaches as well. That means a lot that he took the time to come down here.”

For Key, beyond the wealth of high school talent in the state, recruiting close to home will be a priority for a logical reason.

“You want to go five hours,” Key said. “Because, really, when you start talking to young kids and their families, that five-hour radius is really kind of that drivable distance. You take a pin and you draw a five-hour circle around the city of Atlanta and you work inside out. You have to. To build the relations, even in the city of Atlanta, the state of Georgia, is really important.”

It does bear mention that the methods of former coach Geoff Collins bore fruit. To whatever degree coaches on his staff didn’t blanket metro Atlanta high schools, they delivered results. The 2020 class, featuring running back Jahmyr Gibbs, ranked 27th in FBS by 247Sports Composite, Tech’s highest ranking since its 2007 class. The 2021 class included six players rated in the state’s top 50.

If Key can succeed in the state, it would go a long way to lifting the program to the heights that Tech fans long to reach. There is no shortage of evidence confirming the volume of talented high school players flooding out of Georgia annually. In the 2023 signing class, for instance, Georgia high schools were responsible for 16 prospects in 247Sports Composite’s top 200, the third most of any state.

The challenge for Tech, perhaps one that may be as great as it has ever been, is competing for recruits when Georgia is the two-time defending national champion and a recruiting behemoth and Alabama, Clemson and several other ACC and SEC (and Big Ten) schools descend upon the state to raid talent. The addition of money available through name, image and likeness deals figures to add to the struggle.

In the past five years, Tech signed one player in the 247Sports Composite’s top 25 – Gibbs – and that was one more than the Jackets had signed in the five years before that. Key is not daunted.

“You’re definitely going to compete,” Key said. “We play those guys. We play those teams. To sit there and say you’re not going to compete with those people, well, you’re saying you’re not going to compete on the gridiron. Because it’s about personnel. A large percentage of the game is getting good players and developing those players. But we play those guys; we’re going to recruit against them.”

To sway the hearts and minds of the top recruits in the state, Key said he will pitch – as have his predecessors with varying degrees of success – the value of a degree from Tech.

“The ability to be set for your life after football,” Key said. “And that’s what I want kids to understand. It’s life after football; it’s not life after college. I anticipate bringing guys in, recruiting guys, developing them, to play for a long, long time. Now, sometimes it’s a year, sometimes it’s 12 years. But you want to prepare guys for life after football. We have the ability to do that here at Georgia Tech. To make it pretty simple, you want to recruit guys that want to be first-round picks and want to be CEOs also.”

He has the support of North Atlanta coach James Aull. Similar to Bennett at Cambridge, Aull said that a Tech coach had not visited his campus – located less than 10 miles from Bobby Dodd Stadium – since before the pandemic. But, during the recent contact period, quarterbacks coach Chris Weinke stopped by to get to know him.

“He was just saying they’re making a priority to get out to the schools in the city and kind of that 30- to 40-mile radius around the school, that it was important for them to recruit those places,” Aull said.

North Atlanta has not been historically competitive, but Aull said he shared with Weinke information on a couple of players who could be of interest to Tech in the future. The visit has the mutual benefit of exposing those players to Tech and at the same time informing Jackets coaches of their potential candidacy as recruits.

Said Aull, “It definitely feels like a different energy, for sure.”