Hixson High School football head coach Jason FitzgeraldWhen Andy Kelly and then Jason Fitzgerald were finishing their Rhea County High School football careers, ESPN was a still-learning-to-walk cable network and the Internet was even less of a commodity.
Telephone conversations were limited to landlines, CB radios were still a rage and the closest many got to computers was Atari games played through the television set.
Yet each found his way to a major college football program, Kelly going to Tennessee in 1987 and Fitzgerald to Auburn two years later.
“Yep, things have changed,” said Fitzgerald, now the head coach at Hixson. “Back then it was colleges sending questionnaires to high school coaches, word of mouth and the newspapers. I think back then a lot of [college programs] looked at the papers to see who the best players were.”
Today it’s primarily Rivals.com, the Internet recruiting giant long ago surpassing such national recruiting gurus as Tom Lemming and Allen Wallace’s SuperPrep and the regional offerings of Jeff Whitaker and Forrest Davis.