High-Schooler Wins Recruiting Reporting Wars
David R. Cohen is the former Associate Editor of the Atlanta Jewish Times. He is originally from Marietta, GA and studied Journalism at the University of Tennessee.
USA Today asks Evan Miller to be its partner
Evan Miller wants to help high school athletes tell their story.
The 17-year-old Chattahoochee High School senior this summer launched recruitdiaries.com, a website providing a first-person perspective on college recruiting of high school athletes directly from the athletes themselves.
In August, a few weeks after creating the site, Miller was contacted by USA Today High School Sports about teaming up.
“A few thousand people had visited,” Miller said. “I got an email from Josh Barnett at USA Today, and he asked me if I wanted to partner with them because I do something that is different from what they have there.”
The partnership does not involve payment for Miller but should drive national readers his way.
Miller, whose mother, Melissa, works for the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta, got the idea for a new take on high school recruiting while he interned with SCORE Atlanta, founded by Jewish community member I.J. Rosenberg. Miller said he realized that traditional media rarely offer the athlete’s perspective when covering high school recruiting.
Recruit Diaries hosts personal entries from four- and five-star high school football recruits, including 2017 five-star wide receiver Tyjon Lindsey, 2016 four-star Notre Dame commit Parker Boudreaux and 2017 four-star University of Georgia commit Deejay Dallas.
Miller, who plays varsity soccer for Chattahoochee High, has been the one reaching out to athletes to ask them to write for his website. He hopes the partnership with USA Today will help athletes find him.
“When I started, I didn’t think about getting big. I just wanted to write about sports and help people tell their story,” he said. “When I got contacted by USA Today, I started thinking about what I could do for the future. Most of the athletes I work with are not going to graduate in 2016, so I hope to get a lot more recruits in the next year and keep building to see what type of relationships I can build and see where it takes me.”
Recruit Diaries becomes a part of USA Today’s network of blogs from top football and basketball recruits nationwide.
comments