The coronavirus pandemic has impacted lives in so many ways, and for high school football players hoping to play college football, Orlando Edgewater coach Cameron Duke summed it up quite succinctly: “It’s a huge deal, huge deal. We’d have everyone in America on campus.”
But the pandemic hit, and the football fields across Florida were empty for the first spring in at least 60 years, according to longtime coach Phil Ziglar, now an assistant at Orlando Timber Creek.
The “everyone” Duke referred to is college football recruiters, whose spend several weeks in Florida every spring looking for talent, unearthing those “diamonds in the rough,” as Orlando Jones coach Elijah Williams puts it.