LSU assistant football coach Frank Wilson has spent most of his life walking a tightrope.
Wilson, 37, serves as LSU’s running backs coach and recruiting coordinator — a job involving toeing the line between landing a blue-chip recruit and being hit with NCAA sanctions.
Wilson’s work ethic and natural passion for the job earned him LSU’s recruiting coordinator position after stops at Tennessee, Southern Miss and Ole Miss. It also earned him recognition as Rivals.com “Recruiter of the Year” despite having only one season under his belt at LSU.
As recruiting coordinator, Wilson has the task of protecting Louisiana’s border. This year, he helped pull in a top-10 recruiting class and kept five-star recruits La’El Collins, Anthony Johnson and Jarvis Landry in the state.
Wilson said LSU hired him because of his love for what he does and his ability to relate to his recruits.
“Usually, people who are socially adaptive and like to engage with people are the guys who usually do a good job recruiting,” Wilson said. “Then the next piece of it is not just being a good recruiter but being a good talent evaluator. It was just something I embraced. I enjoyed doing it.”
Today’s recruiters are paying for the sins of the past, Wilson said. Years ago, prized recruits openly flaunted new cars and piles of cash.
Now, with the watchful eye of the NCAA on all the major programs, even something as simple as a bottle of water or a sandwich could land a school in trouble.
“It may appear that it’s silly, I mean, he got him a bottle of water or something of that case,” Wilson said. “I guess unfortunately we’ve had a small group of the overall collegiate coaches that took advantage of those things. That bottle of water became dinner and that dinner became a car and that car became a house.”
Wilson has made a career of convincing indecisive teenagers to commit to play for his school. When he walks into the living room of a high school athlete, he said he shelves the sales pitch and relies on building relationships.
“[I tell them], here’s who I am,” Wilson said. “Here’s who we are as a university. Here are the standards and the things that we stand upon. And I’d like to share with you why you should allow us at LSU to be an extension of your family.”
Recruiting involves more than a speech about graduation rates or wins and losses, Wilson said. The most important factor in building a long-term relationship is trust.
“That young man and his family have to trust you,” Wilson said. “They have to trust your head coach, they have to trust your program, that they are going to have a complete development.”
Wilson, a graduate of St. Augustine High School in New Orleans, said LSU has always been home to him. It didn’t take much for LSU coach Les Miles to lure him away from an assistant coaching position at Tennessee in 2009.
“I always aspired to have the opportunity to come back home and coach at LSU,” Wilson said.
Shea Dixon, managing editor of TigerSportsDigest.com, said Wilson’s hometown roots have helped him find recruiting success in Louisiana because local boys can relate to him.
“So many high school coaches and players, especially in Louisiana, look up to a guy like that, one of their own,” Dixon said.
But more than that, Wilson’s background has allowed him to establish a rapport with recruits that other coaches can’t. Wilson grew up in a single-parent household after losing his father to a car crash in the fifth grade.
Wilson’s wife, Tiffany, said many of his players have also grown up without a father around and look up to him as a father figure.
“That is probably what makes him so personable with the kids,” she said. “He knew how it felt at that age when he played college ball. He knew the way it felt to not have his dad there to help him make decisions.”
Tiffany said Wilson’s players have become an extension of their own family over the years. The players have become like brothers to their children, she said.
“They’re always around,” she said. “I cook dinner for them, on birthdays we bring them food for the dorms. We cook for the parents. It’s a great experience. I don’t think we would have it any other way.”
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Contact Katherine Terrell at [email protected]