The Rutgers coaching staff is immersed in a mad dash to the finish line with signing day is rapidly approaching. The entire staff was asked to a lot of recruiting in a very short time and wide receivers coach Zak Kuhr has found himself right in the thick of recruiting.
“I had a little more time than some of the other guys who got hired,” Kuhr told Scarlet Nation. “Is it pressure? Yes, but that is 365 [days a year] that you feel pressure. You might be six months away from signing day and you feel pressure. Do we need to turn it up a notch? Yes, absolutely. But it’s not anything out of the ordinary.”
Kuhr touched on his philosophy when it comes to recruiting.
“It is all about being aligned with coach Ash, who wants high character kids. We want football competent kids who are going to do it right on and off the field. I do think that those intangibles outweigh all the forty times. I will take a kid who won’t give me headaches in our Thursday academic meetings and will do all the right things over a guy that is going to run a 4.3 forty and jump out the gym.”
And how have the prospects been responding thus far?
“They seem excited. Anywhere you go, change gets people excited,” Kuhr said. “I get excited about these new guys. There has also been a lot of help from the high school head coaches. I don’t know if I have ever been in a state like this where the high school coaches are so involved with the kids’ lives. It is actually very cool. They are very helpful and brutally honest; sometimes positive, sometimes negative. There is nothing more I can respect than that type of honesty. It’s been fun.”
Kuhr does not yet have a designated region he will recruit and revealed how that will take shape.
“We are going to handle all of that later on and coach Ash will divvy all of that up. Right now I am just recruiting the wide receivers.”
The Northeast is not a brand new territory to Kuhr as he has some ties not too far from his new home in New Jersey.
“I have been up here a good bit. My brother lives in Brooklyn and my other brother lives in New Haven, so I have some family around here.”
