The Process: Part 1 – Marques Hicks’ Road to College Football

This is my first article in a series about what players go through in the recruiting process. There are a lot of questions that I think players, parents and fans alike would be interested in hearing the answers to and just my luck, I happened to have a D1 athlete in my house! So my first article is on my son, [player_tooltip player_id="137286" first="Marques" last="Hicks"], Running Back for Camden Catholic. Part 1 will be on the recruiting process in general. Part 2 will specifically be about his recent commitment to Kent State University. <span style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong>PRZ: So you got 8 Division 1 offers. Who was your first one and what was that like?</strong></span> <strong>Marques:</strong> My first offer was from Temple University. It was honestly one of the best experiences I’ve ever felt because I had put in so much work up until that point and it finally felt like it was paying off. <strong><span style="font-size: 14pt;">PRZ: What surprised you most about the whole recruiting experience?</span></strong> <strong>Marques:</strong> What surprised me the most was all the politics and behind the scenes stuff. Also the fact that a good portion of recruiting is about who your coach knows and their ability to get college coaches eyes on you. <em>(From the Author: One thing I’ve found in following recruiting is that some programs have coaches that have a lot of college connections. Maybe they played in college, or they’ve been coaching a long time and know college coaches all over. Some coaches can make one phone call and get approved for a dozen players to be on the sidelines for a college game. If you’re on one of those teams, consider yourself lucky because the experience is different for everyone.)</em> <span style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong>PRZ: Was there anything negative or something you’d tell players to watch out for?<img class=" wp-image-269925 alignright" src="https://prephoops-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/redzone/uploads/2022/01/54-Marques-Hicks-e1657213983396-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="240" /></strong></span> <strong>Marques:</strong> Another thing that I learned from this recruiting process is that everything that glitter isn’t gold. There’s a lot of kids out there that get offers that aren’t committable, but they don’t know that their offer is not committable and end up getting their dreams crushed. There’s a lot of college teams that give out hundreds of “offers” to kids when there’s only a couple of spots. And yeah those are cool to post on your Instagram and stuff like that but these kids can’t actually commit to these offers. Another thing that’s cool to post on Instagram are edits. Believe me I’ve gotten a lot of edits but I realized at a certain point that edits just show a surface level of interest, if they aren’t calling, texting and inviting you to take visits then an edit isn’t really worth much other than something cool to post on social media. <em>(From the Author: Marques brings up a very good point here. There are a lot of things that go on in recruiting. Non-Official visits, game invites, getting edits, texts, phone calls and all of it is exciting at first. The thing is it doesn’t all add up to an offer and even if you get one, it’s not always committable. It’s all very confusing when this is your dream and you think it’s happening for you, but maybe it isn’t.)</em> <strong><span style="font-size: 14pt;">PRZ: What was your first call like from a college coach?</span></strong> <strong>Marques:</strong> It was exciting because it was an experience I’ve never had before. Other than that it was just a phone call talking about football. <strong><span style="font-size: 14pt;">PRZ: You’ve been to a few junior days and practices. What stood out to you? <img class=" wp-image-376331 alignright" src="https://prephoops-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/redzone/uploads/2022/07/Marques-story2-scaled-e1657214040115-225x300.jpg" alt="" width="158" height="211" /></span></strong> <strong><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Marques: </span></strong>What stood out to me is the intensity of some teams’ practices versus the intensity of other teams’ practices. You would go to some practices and see a lazy practice for 3 hours and go to others and see them flying around for 2 hours. <span style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong>PRZ: What advice would you give players that are getting recruited?</strong></span> <strong>Marques:</strong> I would say know what’s important to you as far as the program you want to be in because if you don’t you’re going to either hate the next 4 years or want to transfer out immediately because you didn’t find the right place for you. A way that you could find that out is by asking as many questions as you possibly can and taking visits to find out the place you want to call home for the next 4 years. &nbsp;