In order to land No. 1 recruit, Trojans had to be ‘ relentless’

USC put all it had into signing Corona Centennial’s Foreman, and the work paid off.

After nearly a year of daily texts and phone calls and in- depth Face Time conversations, Donte Williams felt pretty good about where he stood with the nation’s No. 1 overall recruit. Then, all of a sudden, Korey Foreman went quiet.

USC’s top recruiter and cornerbacks coach had spent his Trojans tenure thus far developing a close relationship with the Corona Centennial High defensive end. On a revamped defensive staff, Williams was the only new assistant who had actually met Foreman in person before the pandemic.

So it stood to reason he was the Trojans’ best hope of delivering the potential program- altering prospect.

Now, in the f inal stretch of the most critical recruitment in recent memory at USC, Williams began to wonder: Am I seriously being ghosted?

“I’m sending him 10, 15 text messages a day,” Williams said, laughing as he realized how it sounds. “I’m calling him three, four times per day. And he’s responding with one word. I’m here like, ‘ Dang.’ Korey was the guy who, if I sent one text, he’d write back a paragraph.”

Still, Williams kept texting anyway. “It didn’t matter he wasn’t responding,” he said. “I was going 110% until I knew.”

Only a few at USC knew at that point that Foreman had signed his national letter of intent on the last day of the early signing window in December, becoming the f irst top- rated recruit, according to 247Sports, to join the Trojans in more than a decade. His clandestine signing would seal the most significant recruiting victory of the Clay Helton era, helping to validate the effort made by USC’s new regime to overhaul and reimagine its recruiting operation.

But for two weeks, no one outside of Helton and a couple of staffers had any idea.

It was exactly how Foreman intended to quietly wrap up a whirlwind recruitment that also included such powerhouses as Clemson, Louisiana State and Georgia. Mostly, he just wanted to make Williams sweat it out until the end.

Everyone understood the stakes. After a 2020 class that bottomed out at 64th in the national rankings, USC set out to rebuild its entire recruiting operation. It invested new resources and refocused its vision. It added support staffers with expertise in graphics and video and built an in- house creative studio focused on personal branding.

All with the intention of convincing top recruits like Foreman that there was no better place to become a star.

Perhaps most importantly, USC hired Williams, who would play an integral role not only in signing Foreman but also eight other prospects in the class of 2021. Williams met Foreman on an unofficial campus visit as Oregon’s cornerbacks coach. Gavin Morris, the Trojans’ director of player development, was the only other staffer who knew the f ive- star prospect all that well.

But before USC could finalize its defensive staff, Foreman committed to Clemson.

Williams went about slowly building trust with Foreman. They talked most days, often about anything but football. “Our personalities just kind of gravitated to each other,” Williams said. “He had a lot of questions. Where would he fit in not just schematically, but as a person? How could he grow?”

USC already set out to answer those lingering questions, when Foreman decommitted from Clemson in late April. Over the eight months that followed, Foreman said, the Trojans’ staff was “completely relentless.”

Almost every day, the staff was briefed on whatever happened the previous day with its top target. “It was point No. 1,” defensive line coach Vic So’oto said. “We had updates about conversations he had throughout the building every day. We knew if we were going to take the step we wanted to take that the No. 1 player being right down the road was objective No. 1.”

The objective might have never been reached if the Pac- 12 hadn’t played its season. Even Foreman acknowledged he probably would’ve been off to the Southeastern Conference. “I needed to see the progression from the SC staff,” he said. “I needed to see what all they were doing and fixing from recent years and everything they had going on.”

On Dec. 19, the day of the Pac- 12 title game, Spencer Harris, USC’s director of player personnel, received a phone call from Morris shortly after midnight.

“He was freaking out,” Harris recalled.

The Foremans were on the line. “He’s ready to go right now,” Morris told him.

So Harris found himself praying that Kyle Siemer, USC’s football compliance officer, was still awake to verify Foreman’s paperwork. In a fortunate twist, Siemer answered his phone and Foreman was officially signed.

Helton awoke to the news in the morning. But for another two weeks, the few who knew sat on the huge secret.

So’oto was driving to a wedding Saturday when that reveal finally happened on national television. He streamed the announcement on a phone with his five kids listening intently in the car, well aware of who “Korey” was by this point. When Foreman announced for USC, the car erupted with screams and cheers.

Williams, who like Soto was unaware of Foreman’s plans, could barely contain his excitement as he watched. He had been promoted to associate head coach, in part, for his work reeling in Foreman and other recruits. And now the moment he had been working for had f inally arrived. USC had landed the top prospect in the land, vaulting to No. 8 in the recruiting rankings.

It was mere seconds after affixing his USC cap to his head that Foreman was on FaceTime with Williams, his ghosting sentence f inally over. “He was like, ‘ I had you! I had you!’ ” Williams said.