The Mighty O’Ba Sports Report
The Importance of Local Athletic Recruiting
An Open Letter to our Leadership and Athletic Directors

By Patrick Freeman

(BUFFALO, NY) During the last 25 years of being a part of sports media in Western New York, I have had the privilege of traveling around the country as an impartial observer of the top athletic departments across this nation.

The last few years I’ve paid even closer attention to their recruiting practices because even on down years, these schools have generated tremendous local followings.

The University of Buffalo has showed success in football and basketball in recent years, due to these teams having qualified for the NCAA tournament in basketball, and a bowl game in football. These successes have resulted in an upswing in attendance, and local enthusiasm.

The issue that I think needs to be worked on to put our local college programs on par with other universities around the country is to increase our local recruitment effort by working with the local board of education to create a feeder program into our local schools. Local recruitment generates the interest on an area level to maintain attendance, and generate revenue to help sustain these programs.

Some of our local colleges and universities are doing an excellent job recruiting locally but some need to question why they are not trying to fill their rosters with local talent. Below I’ve looked at basketball, and football recruitment locally of some of our colleges and universities.

Obviously there are some that are not recruiting enough locally and we need to find out why? Athletics is a great way to supply universities rather than the prison industrial complex and to build and create successful athletic programs that peak the interest of their geographical areas.

These programs must improve on their local recruitment of our athletes. The information from these rosters was gathered from the listed programs based on the latest available updates in 2018, 2019, and 2020.

Total Local Recruits from Western New York

Medaille Women Basketball- 8
Medaille Men Basketball- 4
Daemen Women Basketball- 10
Daemen Men Basketball- 12

Buffalo State College Football- 47
Buffalo State Men Basketball- 3
Buffalo State Women basketball- 10
Niagara Women Basketball- 3
Niagara Men’s Basketball- 2
U.B. Football- 23
U.B. Women Basketball- 3
U.B. Men Basketball- 3
Canisius Women Basketball- 2
Canisius Men Basketball- 2

Just examining these two sports we find some of these local recruiting numbers need to be improved – so now what do us as an area needs to do to improve some of these
numbers?

The Mighty O’Ba

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