WORTHINGTON -- So you’re a talented high school senior from out of state (say, Florida) who’s thinking about continuing his football career in the Midwest. You’ve been contacted by the coach at Minnesota West Community and Technical College and you’re intrigued. It might be a nice change-of-pace, you think, to relocate for a couple of years to a rural Minnesota community like Worthington and play for a veteran coach like Jeff Linder, who seems like a nice guy. Seems to know his stuff, too.
The campus seems nice. You’ve participated in the “virtual tour.” But you’d like to see the campus in person. You’d like to see the coach in person, too, and of course, the town. But that’s just the problem -- you can’t. At least not yet.
Oh, and by the way: you don’t even know if there will be a football season in the fall.
This is life in the spring of 2020, where the coronavirus pandemic has gripped a whole nation by the throat. Everything’s been turned upside-down.
For Linder, football recruiting is especially difficult now. It’s not impossible. The Bluejays head coach signed five new recruits this week, in fact, but the pace is definitely slower than normal. Why? Because nothing is normal nowadays.
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“There’s just so much uncertainty with these young men,” Linder said.
Some recruiting tasks are easier, actually. It’s easier to get ahold of potential players because they’re not in school. They still have their cell phones at hearing distance, and they constantly check their text messages. But, as Linder said, when they don’t even know there will be a season, it’s hard for them to make decisions. There is housing to consider; when to put deposits down.
Many of their parents are suffering. The coronavirus has put some of them out of work, and the jobs that others still hold are tenuous.
“People are scared out there. They just don’t know what to do,” Linder said.
Linder, the 2019 Western Division Coach of the Year, still sends out his text messages, still makes phone calls. He says he’s always been able to sell the campus to student-athletes who see it first-hand, but he can’t sell it if they can’t come. The college has been shut down; the learning is done online now.
“And that’s the fun part. They bring their parents with them and they can see for themselves. That’s when we can really sell them,” he said.
Minnesota West men’s athletic director Bob Purcell agrees.
“That one-on-one is what we’ve been able to sell with our college. But when you don’t have the chance to do that and they don’t know better, how are you going to do that? He asks.”
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“You can talk about a good ice cream stand, but if you can’t get ‘em here to taste it for themselves, that’s a different thing,” Linder mused.
For Purcell, the coronavirus shutdown has freed up some of his time to work on Minnesota West projects, like continued improvements to the baseball field (drainage issues have been a major source of trouble) and the procurement of new dugouts (and maybe some bathrooms) for the softball field.
Both Linder and Purcell teach online classes. Linder also has three school-age kids at home, where he must help them organize their online schoolwork. His son Tyler, a former standout football player at Worthington High School who finished two years at West, is taking online classes at home through Minnesota State University-Mankato while taking a year off from the sport.
Through all these changes and all this uncertainty, Coach Linder remains optimistic about what comes next.
“I think there’ll be a season,” he says.
So he continues to work -- as best he can.
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