College football recruiting is nuts. Recruiters hit high school games across the country every Friday night and Saturday afternoon, but now they’ve taken the prospect of finding new players to a whole new level.
“Bunchie is a kid that comes around once every 10 years,” Los Angeles-based trainer Mike Evans told ESPN.
But that’s because Maxwell “Bunchie” Young is 10 years old. That’s right, 10.
Despite his age, Bunchie already has scholarship offers from Illinois and one mystery Pac-12 team, according to Evans, who trains more than 150 youth athletes at his LacedFacts Training center in Norwalk, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. It’s only a matter of time, he says, before college coaches all over the country know who Young is, along with discovering several of the other kids he works with at his facility.
Kids like Havon Finney Jr., who, at 9 years old, has an offer from Nevada and an Instagram following of nearly 22,000. Kaleb Herndon, 6, doesn’t have any scholarship offers, but Evans insists he has schools looking at him already because “he looks like a 9-year-old” and his parents are 6-foot-1 and 6-foot-7.
The buy-in isn’t widespread — why would a coach spend time recruiting a kid who can’t sign a letter of intent for another decade? — but Evans said that’s changing.
“A lot of these schools are not hip to it yet because you still have a lot of old-school coaches at programs,” he said. “It’s the new wave that’s going to change things. It’s people who came from the computer era and the social media age that are going to change things. We’re the first to do what we’re doing where kids are getting official offers.”
Bunchie made a video when he was 9. It’s gotten more than 1 million views on YouTube.
How soon until recruiters are hanging around delivery rooms, handing out their cards?
