The End of High School Championships Mean Recuiting Season Is Here

It seems like the Lehigh Valley isn't even done celebrating Liberty's first-ever state high school football PIAA 4A title (with a parade and everything), in this football-crazy part of Pennsylvania. But as the bands put away their instruments and the crepe paper is put away, folks in the Valley are already looking over the high school seniors to see which athletes might be able to play Division I football in the Patriot League.

Liberty has an assistant coach with a Lehigh connection - Jim Tkatch, whose son Bo played for Lehigh before tragically taking his own life only a year ago. Firmly ensconced in the Liberty program physically and emotionally, you have to hope that Mr. Tkatch might be pointing some high-academic seniors to South Mountain to play football. Liberty has recently put players like FB Andres Morales (Rutgers) and the son of former NFLer Bo Orlando, WR Joey Orlando (New Hampshire) in Division I programs.

Liberty isn't the only place that the rumor mill is starting, with RB Lyle Marsh (Bethel Park HS, PA) already getting floated as a possible recruit with a 4.0 GPA for Lehigh. (Bethel Park was Liberty's victim in the PIAA 4A championship game, played at Hershey Park Stadium two weekends ago.)

Here's some players that are rumored to be approached by Lehigh at this early stage, all local players:

RB/DB Michael Yaeger (St. Joe's Prep, Philadelphia, PA)
The Skinny: 5'10 171 lb senior rushed for 1,151 yards, averaging more than 100 yards per game.

WR/OLB Rick Bailey (Penncrest HS, DelCo, PA)
The skinny: The 6'3, 200 lb receiver led the DelCo area with 678 receiving yards and averaged 26 yards per reception.

QB/SS Eric Gilbert (Academy Park HS, Delco, PA)
The skinny: Running and passing QB: 791 yards passing, 1,011 yards rushing.

TE Harold Spears (The Pennington School, NJ)
The skinny: The 6'5 senior may play football or basketball.

PK Scott Trench (River Hill HS, Clarksville, MD)
The skinny: Has only made one FG attempt in career, but has 28 touchbacks on kickoffs and is 57/61 career on extra points.

[UPDATE:] One more name popped up:

RB Quinton Cobb (Duluth HS, Duluth, GA)
The skinny: Two-way player has "interest" from Lehigh, Wofford and several other FCS schools. The article quotes "modest" numbers rushing (585 yards on 138 carries, 4 TDs).

Comments

Anonymous said…

PK Scott Trench - Clarksville, MD

7:58 PM

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results. In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago . Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth. Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled. Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season. The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League....

Merrimack at Lehigh Game Breakdown and Fearless Prediction, 9/28/2019

It's what we do every week: copiously go over the opposing game notes and analyze the upcoming game matchup. I'm starting to call these the "football nerd" previews because it feels like the audience for these detailed team breakdowns are other football nerds like myself. For Lehigh fans, there is no greater need for a "football nerd"-level breakdown of an opponent than Merrimack. Few opponents have been as big as an unknown to Mountain Hawk fans as the school that formed right after World War II in North Andover, Massachusetts. Helping that sense of mystery is that the Merrimack Athletics' website offers no football game notes, and when you click on the link called "Weekly Two-Deep", you get a two-deep from 2018. Merrimack, until recently a member of the Northeast-10 conference in Division II, announced they are going to join the NEC as a full Division I member in time for the 2023-2024 season. “The College’s 2011 strategic ...

Fifteen Guys Who Might be Lehigh's Next Football Coach (and Five More)

If you've been following my Twitter account, you might have caught some "possibilities" as Lehigh's next head football coach like Lou Holtz, Brett Favre and Bo Pelini . The chance that any of those three guys actually are offered and accept the Lehigh head coaching position are somewhere between zero and zero. (The full list of my Twitter "possibilities" are all on this thread on the Lehigh Sports Forum .) However the actual Lehigh head football coaching search is well underway, with real names and real possibilities. I've come up with a list of fifteen possible names, some which I've heard whispered as candidates, others which might be good fits at Lehigh for a variety of reasons. UPDATE: I have found five more names of possible head coaches that I am adding to this list below. Who are the twenty people? Here they are, in alphabetical order.

Lehigh Football Nation

Search This Blog