Latest recruiting class contains numerous multi-sport athletes
Football team adds 30, including Middletown lineman, other locals.
At this time of year, Dayton Flyers football coaches focus on the 2023 recruiting class. They hit the road for three weeks, visiting their most important areas and as many schools as possible while building a list of potential recruits. They narrow it down all summer and fall with the goal of landing on 100 potential future Flyers by December.
There’s pressure to get the Dayton name in players’ minds because commitments come earlier than ever these days.
“Kids want it to be done quickly,” coach Rick Chamberlin said. “If you’re not in contact with them early, like here in the spring — let’s say all at once you pop up in August — it’s going to be a little tougher to keep their attention.”
As a non-scholarship program, Dayton doesn’t recruit as far ahead as other schools. The 2024 and 2025 classes are not a priority at this point.
UD coaches hope to get a class with close to 30 players, and the 2022 class Chamberlin announced Wednesday is exactly that big. The 2021 class had 26 players. Dayton had 45 recruits in 2020,
35 recruits in 2019, 26 in 2018, 35 in 2017 and 38, 36, 38 and 28 players in the previous seasons.
As usual, it’s a group full of team captains (17), strong students (3.5 is the average GPA) and accomplished players. Eighteen of the 29 players starred in more than one sport in high school.
“This might be the biggest class of multi-sport athletes coming here to Dayton,” Chamberlin said. “They’re basketball players, volleyball players. They play baseball and run track. We’ve got two kickers coming in, and one is a pole vaulter, and the other one’s the captain of the volleyball team. That shows you two things. One is they’re competitors. They don’t want to just go through the fall competing. They’re competing year round, most of them. Also I think that shows you a little bit of athletic talent because you’re using one type of athletic skill in football, and now you go to baseball and that’s a little different — hand-eye coordination, that sort of thing.”
Chamberlin likes athletes who play multiple sports and doesn’t support the idea of spring football coming to Ohio — a long-debated issue — for that reason.
“It all comes down to the skill level they’ve been born with, first of all, and then how they’ve developed it over their life,” he said. “Spring football, 10 practices, to me is not going to make that big a difference.”
One of those multi-sport athletes is Catholic Central wide receiver Ashton Young, a Division III state qualifier in the 100-meter dash a year ago who also ranked second on the basketball team in scoring as a senior. He caught 11 touchdown passes last season, ran for three scores and scored on a kickoff return.
“We’re excited about Ashton,” Chamberlin said. “He’s fast. He really is. He just stands out on film with speed.”
There are two quarterbacks in the class. Logan Landers, of Dixie Heights High School in Edgewood, Kentucky, and Joey Daniels, who helped lead Mt. Lebanon High School, of Pittsburgh, to its first state championship in Pennsylvania last season.
Dayton coaches paid special attention to safeties in the recruiting process. One is Vandalia Butler’s Luke Mitchell, whose mom played soccer at Dayton.
Another player from the Dayton area is Carroll defensive tackle Elliott Braun.
“Elliott is one of those guys that can develop into a very good football player,” Chamberlin said. “He’s got good size. They played him at linebacker, his coach told me, just so he could run all over the place. He has that body build we think can really develop and has the tenacity of a defensive player that we like.”
Among the three offensive linemen on the list is Middletown’s Logan Osborne.
“We can never get enough offensive linemen,” Chamberlin said. “We only got three this year. But we think they’re three young men that have great feet. That’s what we look for. And they’ve got size. We think Logan can even get bigger. But he’s very athletic.”