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c o v e r s t o r y : 2 0 1 3 r e c r u i t i n g c l a s s ���An Amazing Class��� Darrell Hazell���s first Purdue class came together quickly BY BRIAN NEUBERT BNeubert@GoldandBlack.com O n a Monday in January, DeAngelo Yancey���s commitment to the University of Kentucky was fully dissolved. By Tuesday, the wide receiver from Atlanta first heard from Purdue���s new coaching staff. By Friday night, he was in West Lafayette for an official visit. Twenty-four hours later, he was committed, part of first-year Boilermaker coach Darrell Hazell���s debut recruiting class at Purdue. It was a wild week. ���I���m glad things worked out the way they did, though,��� Yancey said. ���I feel like I made the right choice.��� Yancey���s story is just one of many from the Boilermaker signing class of 2014 that illustrates the chaos in which Hazell had to put together his first class amidst. Offensive lineman Jason Tretter was recruited for a week or so before committing to Purdue, relying on a past connection with offensive line coach Jim Bollman ��� he���d camped at Ohio State as a sophomore when Bollman coached for the Buckeyes ��� as his comfort zone. Tom Campbell On national signing day, Coach Darrell Hazell placed (from left) David Yancey, John Strauser, and Danny Etling in front of the media. They showed a remarkable amount of poise considering they should be high school seniors. Wide receiver Dan Monteroso���s story isn���t much different. He knew wide receivers coach Kevin Sherman from a camp he attended at Virginia Tech, while Sherman was coaching in Blacksburg. Neither Tretter nor Monteroso had all that extensive an opportunity to get to know the men he was committing the next four or five years of his life to, but took a leap of faith of sorts on Hazell nonetheless. But that speaks only to the new recruits, the 11 players who committed to Hazell in the span of roughly two weeks prior to signing day. For the holdovers, those recruits who committed to Danny Hope prior to his ouster, the process was equally interesting, as things were turned upside down on them when Hope was fired Nov. 25. ���There���s some sort of anxiety because you didn���t really know what type of coach Coach Hazell is,��� said wide receiver Myles Norwood, who committed to Hope in mid-July. ���You see his name, but you don���t know him as a person and as a coach, so you have to build those new relationships and get to know his background and what his plans are for you as an individual player in the future, so you 6 ��� Gold & Black IllustrateD ��� volume 23, issue 4 have to kind of make that relationship with him where you feel as comfortable as with the old staff. ���It was a big change for me, not as much as a shock as a big change and an adjustment, where I had to adjust to the new coaching staff. Getting to know the new coach and building new relationships was probably the biggest change. But once you fall in love with a school like Purdue and everything it stands for and everything, you put the grudges aside of Coach Hope getting fired, and you try to build relationships with the new coaching staff.��� That said, it was a nerve-wracking period of time for Norwood and many of his classmates. It could have been a particularly anxious time for three commitments in particular, those being quarterback Danny Etling, running back David Yancey and defensive end prospect John Strauser, each of them being slated to enroll at Purdue midyear, providing them an even shorter period of time to get comfortable with Purdue���s new coach. All three stuck. ���I stayed because I met Coach Hazell, and I realized he was going to put together a great staff, and football, college football, is much more than playGBIprint.com GoldandBlack.com