CU L8R, recruiting TXT MSG

Johnny M. Recruit is sitting in his math class, second row when the cell phone he forgot to turn off starts humming, then beeping. Frantically, Johnny grapples to find the gadget and turn it off as his teacher stands a few feet away fuming over violation of the school's disruption policy. Johnny is disciplined.

The text message came from a college football recruiter, just sending a short message that reads: "Good morning, JR, call me."

Come Aug. 1, 2007, the NCAA will ban college recruiters from sending text messages, a shortcut used by coaches to go around the NCAA rule restricting certain times coaches can call recruits by telephone.

The text message phenomenon is primarily a 2- or 3-year-old fad.

By mid-2004, text messages were being sent at a rate of 500 billion per year at an average cost of 10 cents each. Now there are bundle services that almost make it free with a cell phone service.

BYU and Utah recruiters are among those who used this technology while it was legal to do so. But complaints over misuse (some recruits began receiving hundreds of messages a day) have put the thumbs of coaches to rest.

Duane Busby, BYU director of football operations, doesn't believe the ban on text messaging will significantly impact Cougar recruiting.

Coaches will still use e-mail, send letters or call the coaches of athletes to leave messages.

BYU's most deft text messaging recruiter is Brandon Doman. Utah's younger coaches were more apt to use text messages more often.

Utah's director of football operations, Jeff Rudy, believes it could be a big deal because BCS schools with a lot of money were rumored to use rooms full of people to text message recruits. "Text messaging was kind of getting like the old wild west, a free-for-all," Rudy said. "At Utah we don't have the resources to do that."

Neither BYU nor Utah invested in computer software used by some college football staffs that would generate a message and send it to a cell phone as a text message.

Ute and Cougar recruiters would do it the old-fashioned way — pecking buttons on their cell phones.

That software, said Rudy, was expensive. Depending on bells and whistles, it could get up to $3,500 for the initial package, then $1,500 for a license renewal, plus a $300 or $400 fee for each coach to have it set up on his personal computer — all to send text messages from a database.