Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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sign into every part of the program he could — from media guides to posters in the locker room to the lanyards and credential recruits received on official visits. The focus on recruiting started to pick up, he said, when Nick Saban ar- rived as the team's head coach in 2007. "We started asking, 'What is this communicating; what is that com- municating?' Everything that you can touch that they're going to see or expe- rience should be excellent," Overstreet said. "That's when it clicked that we need to be involved in everything. We need to interject strategic design into every experience a recruit has with us. "It's not going to sway a kid one way or another, but it shows the attitude and the value that the program places on quality. Branding has turned into a huge deal. I think these kids under- stand it." The industry grew enough during the past decade that Overstreet was able to leave Tuscaloosa last August to create his own business for sports marketing and design focused heavily on helping college football programs. He connected with the Irish through former Notre Dame recruiting intern J.R. Sandlin, who held a similar job at Alabama before coming to South Bend. Sandlin led the full embrace of mar- keting and promotions in the recruiting game for Notre Dame last year before moving on to a coaching position at Jacksonville State. He connected with recruits and drummed up attention using some of Overstreet's work on social media. "It was promoting Notre Dame foot- ball through the lines of communica- tion that 16-, 17-, 18-year-olds use. Snapchat, Vine, if he's got to talk to a mom, maybe Facebook," Kelly said. The coach said he doesn't think Notre Dame was necessarily behind the times in the way it approached high schoolers, but he wanted to add more "sizzle" to some of the things the staff did. The Irish made a splash this winter when they sent hundreds of letters at a time to select recruiting targets. They called the mailbox invasion the "Pot of Gold." While the ploy didn't help land any new prospects, it was at least temporarily buzzworthy. Notre Dame took the same approach to its marquee summer camp this June, dubbed the Irish Invasion. Kelly said he tried to create a carnival-like at- mosphere to attract big-time recruits and their families to campus. The staff touted its guest list of blue-chippers to attract other highly ranked prospects. Selected campers received a sleek invi- tation made up of four separate pieces of paper that fit together with a gold embossed leprechaun in the middle — another example of Notre Dame's new recruiting designs. Overstreet expects that more and more parts of college sports programs will be viewed through the lens of de- sign and branding, with athletic de- partments attempting to put out a co- hesive message about their school. The challenge will be continuing to find fresh and original ways to stand out from the pack as more schools buy in. C o m m u n i c a t i n g w i t h re c ru i t s through more visual means is a neces- sity at this point, and Notre Dame ap- pears to be getting the picture. ✦