Penn State College of Communications comMedia

This story is present in three parts, from the perspective of the coach, the athlete and then a look at the bigger picture.

Part 1: A Coach's Perspective

Penn State men’s volleyball head coach Mark Pavlik’s recruitment of his current starting setter wasn’t typical.
For one, redshirt freshman Edgardo Goas wasn’t the coach’s first target at the position — he had originally recruited Riley McKibbin and Kasey Crider, who now direct the offenses for western powers USC and Pepperdine, respectively.

But secondly, Goas’s recruitment was atypical because the recruiting process included little to no face-to-face recruiting pitches. Because Goas hailed from Puerto Rico, the majority of the process was done electronically.

“That’s the way it generally works,” Pavlik said of recruiting over long distances. “People will send us video, or now with YouTube available we’ll get e-mails with a link saying ‘Check out my video.’ That’s really the way that most of us in the men’s world get it done. I don’t think a lot of men’s coaches are globetrotting out there looking for players like that.”

That system has become common for Pavlik, and even though the Penn State coaching staff didn’t need video to evaluate Goas — former assistant coach Craig Dyer, then on duty with the U.S. Junior National Team, had seen him play with the Puerto Rican Junior Team — the rest of it holds true in Goas’s case.

There were no scouting trips to watch the 6-foot-5 Goas dominate his high school competition. There were no flights to San Juan, Puerto Rico to persuade Goas to quarterback the Penn State offense.
There was only a coaching staff in central Pennsylvania realizing it needed depth at the setting position beyond the two juniors on the roster and a family in Puerto Rico.

“We had heard of a setter from Marista High School,” Pavlik said, referring to the same high school as former Penn State setter and three-time All-American Jose Quinones. “When [McKibbin and Crider] chose not to come here, we had been touching base with Edgardo. At that point we went to him and said, ‘We really want you as our setter,’ and we just kept up the conversation between him, his father and us.

“Then we got him in for a visit. From what I remember, he really enjoyed the guys on the team. I think they did a great job of recruiting him on that official visit. That was really about it.”

Part 2: A Player’s Perspective

The name “Jose Quinones” is all over Edgardo Goas’s Penn State athletic department bio.

It’s in his personal section because he attended the same high school as Quinones, the former Penn State setter and three-time All-American. It’s in the section quoting Penn State’s head men’s volleyball coach Mark Pavlik, inferring that his playing style “may evoke memories” of the Penn State great. Goas even considers Quinones to be a friend -- but none of those helped initiate his recruitment.

In growing up in San Juan, Puerto Rico and attending Colegio Marista, Goas was significantly out of Penn State’s recruiting range.

“For me to come here, it all started when I played in the NORCECA ? that's a tournament where we play against the U.S. and Cuba and other countries,” Goas said. “I was 16 I think. But in the NORCECA we played the U.S., and thankfully we won the gold medal. But the coaches from the USA team, they coach in the NCAA, so that's when I started talking to them about how I was interested in coming to the states. After that it was like any other student in the United States. The hardest part was getting in touch. They had seen me play, and thankfully that tournament, it opened eyes of everybody.”

At the recommendation of the U.S. Junior National Team coaches, Goas e-mailed several Division I coaches across the country.

And so it began.

He started communicating back and forth with Pavlik. There were e-mails, then there was video, and eventually, a recruiting trip.
“It was all through e-mail, because the NCAA has a bunch of rules and it's not like they could fly down there, see me play and speak to me verbally,” Goas said. “I started sending videos from my volleyball games back in Puerto Rico, but it was pretty much all e-mail.

“So they started talking about me, I came on a recruiting visit and I liked it a lot so I came here.”

Part 3: The Overall Trend

This story originated as a review of the number of foreign athletes on the rosters of Penn State’s 27 NCAA Division I teams — in fact, during the 2008-09 academic year, 33 Penn State athletes hailed from international backgrounds. That number rose to 35 if Puerto Rico is included. Those athletes were spread across 16 of 27 varsity teams (nine of 14 men’s teams and seven of 13 women’s).

When asked why those numbers are higher than they were even four short years ago, the coaches interviewed for this story all mentioned advances in communication technology among the reasons for the increase.

“I think it’s like anything else in this global world economy that we live in,” said Penn State head men’s volleyball coach Mark Pavlik. “With communications now being so simple to go around the world, more people hear about Penn State. I’d be interested to see if you go to engineering, if you go to IST, if you go to those majors, to see what their percentage of foreign students are also.”

Pavlik’s team, which includes one player from Brazil and two from Puerto Rico, has one of the heaviest international presences after the men’s tennis and gymnastics teams.

“I don't think it's only a trend here,” said Penn State head men’s tennis coach Todd Doebler. “I think it's a trend in all competition with athletics. I think you can look at every sport and programs are looking to be really competitive, and if you can't get the top U.S. kids, you can look elsewhere. There's a lot of talent everywhere.”

Both Pavlik and Doebler specifically highlighted the role e-mail plays in the recruitment of athletes who reside outside of their immediate recruiting territories.

And because the NCAA limits the number of calls a coach can make to a potential recruit (as well as text messaging and recently, Facebook-related contact), e-mail has become that much more important of a recruiting tool as coaches have recruit with little to no face-to-face contact.

“It's huge,” Doebler said of e-mail. “The world's become real small. A kid can send you a video the day you ask for it. You can e-mail with that kid back and forth. A lot of kids have Blackberries and iPhones, so kids will e-mail a couple times a day once you get it going. The world has become small quickly.”

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