KNOXVILLE - There are a number of factors that make Brian Niedermeyer one of the top college football recruiters in the country.
Earlier this week, Tennessee head coach Jeremy Pruitt gave his thoughts on what some of them are.
"I think, No. 1, he's young," Pruitt said. "He's not married, so what else does he have to do? It's not like he's got a wife to go home to or any kids to go home to, so what does he do? He recruits. He recruits all the time. He builds relationships with the players that we're recruiting."
Niedermeyer, who will turn 31 on Dec. 28, laughed Thursday when told of the assessment from his 45-year-old boss.
"I think being young helps," Tennessee's tight ends coach said. "It's always good to be able to relate to people. More than anything, it's about building relationships and identifying with people.
"Living in so many different places really helped me out to be able to understand other people."
Tennessee tight ends coach Brian Niedermeyer, shown on the sideline during the Orange and White spring game at Neyland Stadium in April 2018, is known for his recruiting skills but is also doing a good job on the practice and game field, said head coach Jeremy Pruitt.Niedermeyer was born in Alaska and grew up in an area where football wasn't even an option. He wound up in Anchorage with dreams of playing Division I football but had to take the junior college route, going to Glendale Community College in Arizona for a season before heading to Butte College in northern California.
During one of those junior-college stops, he wound up in a four-bedroom apartment with "like 10 dudes" hailing from all parts of the country. After that, he went to the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, a historically black college that plays in the Football Championship Subdivision.
"My mom is from Coral Gables (Florida), and I spent three months every year there," Niedermeyer said. "We would spend the whole entire summer in Miami and learn to adjust to and understand different people's upbringings, which is a really empowering thing for me. I've really enjoyed going to all these different places and really interacting with all these different people.
"Everything is so different depending on where you grow up, how you grow up. You really understand it's a beautiful thing to be around a lot of different people."
It's that comfort level that led to Niedermeyer being named the national recruiter of the year by both 247Sports.com and ESPN.com for the most recent completed recruiting cycle. He was instrumental in the Volunteers securing the commitments of a number of key signees for the 2019 class, including linebacker Henry To'o To'o and offensive lineman Darnell Wright.
It's worth noting Niedermeyer's primary job at Tennessee is going well, too.
Dominick Wood-Anderson - one of his coach's first signees after Niedermeyer followed Pruitt from Alabama when he was hired by Tennessee in December 2017 - caught a pair of touchdown passes in his first season with the Vols and looks to have a bigger, much different role in the offense in 2019. The team has also been pleased with the development of redshirt freshman Jacob Warren, as well as true freshmen Sean Brown and Jackson Lowe.
The combination of recruiting and on-field success has led to Niedermeyer's rise as one of the top young college football coaches in the country.
Not just because he's young, which Pruitt readily admits.
"I think he's very personable," Pruitt said. "He's real. He's a guy that kind of stays on people and he uses the resources that we have here. I think he does a good job.
"He's a good coach, too. A lot of people don't appreciate how good a coach that he is. He does a really good job. He could coach any side of the ball on defense. That's what he always was for us (at Alabama and Georgia), was a defensive GA (graduate assistant), but he's a very intelligent guy and it really comes easy to him."
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenley3 or at Facebook.com/VolsUpdate.