VALDOSTA — Valdosta State football player Erik Walden is one of four players featured in a just-released book on recruiting.

Walden, an All-State quarterback at Thomas County Central in 2002 and 2003, signed with the Blazers in December, and is currently enrolled in classes at VSU. He has spent the past two seasons at Gulf Coast Community College in Mississippi. He is expected to compete for the starting quarterback job this spring.

The other three players in the book “Signing Day” are Notre Dame running back Darius Walker, Florida State quarterback Drew Weatherford and Vanderbilt tight end Brad Allen.

The book was co-authored by former Valdosta Daily Times sports editor Corey Clark. Clark and Ira Schoffel, editor of The Osceola (a newspaper covering Florida State athletics), spent the fall of 2003 tracking the recruitment of the four players.

“It’s an inside look at the world of college football recruiting,” Clark said in a phone interview earlier this week. “We wanted to show what the recruiting process was like for these kids. It’s unbelievable.”

Clark said the four players wound up being four very different stories.

“They are all such different stories,” he said. “Darius was the All-American, recruited by everyone. Drew was the one who was an early commitment, and a firm commitment. He committed to Florida State in August, and after that, he was trying to recruit other players to come to FSU. Brad was the No. 2 or No. 3 tight end in the nation, but went to Vanderbilt because he wants to be a doctor, and their medical school is tremendous. His decision was based on academics.”

The authors found a couple of interesting angles with Walden.

“Erik was a player who had academic concerns,” Clark said. “They weren’t sure whether or not he would qualify, so a lot of schools backed off. He had Georgia, Florida, Alabama and a bunch of other schools recruiting him, but some backed off because they weren’t sure he was going to qualify.”

The other issue the book dives into with Walden is the clash between his desire to continue playing quarterback and his status as an “athlete,” an athletic player who could wind up at one of two or three positions. Walden had committed to Georgia, but de-committed once he found out the Bulldogs had no desire to give him a real shot at quarterback, instead envisioning him as a receiver or a defensive back.

“I’ve played offense my whole life — quarterback, receiver or running back,” Walden says in the book. “I never played defense my whole high school career or my whole little league career. Why am I gonna do it now?”

“He was frustrated that no one would give him a chance to be a quarterback,” Clark said. “He’d gotten the stigma of being an ‘athlete,’ and a lot of schools wanted him at another position.”

One thing working against Walden’s hopes to play quarterback was the offense he’d played in. Thomas County Central has run the splitback veer, a triple option offense, for many years. It didn’t give college coaches as much of a chance to evaluate his potential as a college quarterback as other offenses might have.

So on Signing Day 2004, Walden signed with Division II Carson-Newman, which also ran the veer and viewed him as a future star quarterback. But academic troubles derailed his hopes of playing there, and instead he wound up at Gulf Coast Community College in Mississippi. At Gulf Coast, he threw the ball well, and attracted the interest of VSU and coach Chris Hatcher. So Walden is now a Blazer.

“He’ll be a dynamic player for VSU,” Clark said. “He’s a Division I talent who has wound up at a Division II school.”

Clark says he learned a whole lot about recruiting while writing the book, and thinks readers will be surprised about some of the things they read in the book.

“It was eye-opening for me,” he said. “I had no idea that these recruits went through all of this. I knew a little about recruiting, like most people do. But recruiting has gone through the roof. It’s even more intense than most people think it is. With all the time these kids spend talking to recruiters, and fans, and the people from all the recruiting Web sites and publications out there, in addition to going to school and playing football, you wonder how they have a life.”

For example, Weatherford recalled that on his visit to Florida State, the visiting football recruits had easy access to both alcohol and beautiful women. And Allen recalled getting a postcard with messages that, as the book puts it, “read like the sentiments that friends might scribble in a high school yearbook.” Allen also talked about getting letters from football programs that were obviously written by women, not the coaches that they were supposed to be from.



Clark is currently trying to get the book sold in local bookstores. For now, the best way to get the book is by ordering it through the book’s Web site, www.signingdaybook.com or by calling (877) 308-9218. A portion of the proceeds from the book will go to the players’ respective high schools.