Scottie Montgomery might not be the most high profile name on the Duke Football coaching staff, but the 31-year old wide receivers coach and former Duke standout has played a crucial role in some of the team' most high profile recruiting successes of late, including the signing of four-star running back Desmond Scott from Durham's Hillside High School. The Chronicle sat down for a half-hour with Montgomery to talk about his time at Duke as a player and coach as well as life on the recruiting trail.
What aspect of the program's recruiting strategy stands out in your mind?
"I think that what we do here, more than anywhere, is that we close as a staff better than any staff in America. I would say that there's not one home that as a staff the guys that we have out on the road wouldn’t be comfortable in. We can go anywhere in America. We can recruit from Camden, New Jersey to Miami, South Florida all the way to Beverly Hills, California. We can go anywhere, and that’s because of the staff that [Coach Cutcliffe] has put together. But at the end of the day, we don’t really have to work hard once we get them here. We take them upstairs to the corner office with the view, and he does his work.
How do you respond to recruits who are apprehensive about going to an elite academic university like Duke?
I would think that any time you have a university that is as prestigious as our university is, people who don’t know the truth are just to a certain degree—they’ve never been around it, only read about it, only seen it on television. You have no clue what they’re truly like, but when you see them, you see them for what they are on television, and you see it as a glorified thing. You do run into that, but I would think that with the personalities we have on the road recruiting, we do a really really good job of being able to get across the message that we are Duke. That’s a positive term, that we do believe in doing things the right way, and then we have something we can sell not only from an academic standpoint, but we have the best head football coach in America, so we do have some things that we run into and encounter, but some of our battling tools are a lot stronger than some of the things that we encounter.
What aspect of recruiting do you feel you most excel at?
I would say that I'm pretty dadgum good with the kid, with the parents in the home, on campus. My knowledge of campus is of course a little better than everyone else’s. What I strive to do is to continually build relationships from the first time that I can recruit them, and I don’t just mean relationships a far as, “How are you doing?” If I’m going to recruit a kid, truly, I think that I’m going to be around him for four years because I have the idea in my mind that I’m going to get the kid that we want. I’m not just going to recruit him over an eight month period. I’m really trying to build a relationship for a lifetime.
What was your initial reaction upon hearing that Ted Roof had been fired as head football coach?
Of course, disappointment. A lot of sadness. Ted was unbelievable and still is to this day. I respect him. You couldn’t believe the amount of respect I have for him, and then at the same time you have to respect the decision of a university, of administrators who have been doing this a lot longer than I have been doing it. When you're on the inside looking out, it’s kind of easy to point the finger at everyone else, but when you're on the outside looking in, sometimes you can have a little more of an objective look at what’s going on. So I was sad, but at the same time as a Duke fan I wanted to get this thing going as quickly as possible, and as a Duke man I understand sometimes that change is necessary. There were some job offers that came along during that time. I didn’t want to leave Duke, but at the same time I didn’t know about the guy who was going to be coming in here.
Coach Cutcliffe said that when he evaluated you as a candidate for an assistant coaching position, he ran you through a series of "tests." Can you describe what those tests entailed?
I really think that sometimes tests are not what we think they are. Tests can come on what type of person you are. With my guys on the field, and primarily in the classroom, I like putting timetables to those guys, and I'm sure that [Cutcliffe] is probably the same way.
He called me, and some of the stuff probably surprised me, but he called me and asked me if I could get him a list of some names and some guys that could help us and do some different things, and probably 5 minutes after we were off of the phone I had him a list that was compiled. And then, he wanted to see how I responded to certain things, and also different job situations, and how forthright I was with him. He knew some of them, because he knows a lot, and I was just really forthright with him, and those are the tests that I think he’s talking about.
And then, from a football standpoint, there were certain things that I though we needed to get done here, and he wanted to hear them, and they aligned with a lot of the things he believed in. He wanted to know if I would have any interest in learning and staying, and not just using it as a stepping stone. This is a different business than its ever been, and I assured him that I was looking to stay and I wasn’t going to be one of those guys who would just up and leave whenever I had the opportunity to.”
What differentiates Duke from other programs when you are pitching the University to a prospective recruit?
The four pillars of our program are Family, Faith, Future, and Football. They are going to hear that, and we want to make them understand that what we have is unique. At the end of the day, what we have to sell, no one else in America can sell. The best staff in America. No one else in America has President Brodhead for their president. They don’t have Dr. White as their athletic director, but we do. We are Duke...with our fans and our kids coming out last year, I wanted to go up into the stands and join them they were so energetic. But they don’t have what we have, they know it and our staff knows it, and I’m very very proud to be here.
What is it like to go up against more established in-state programs while recruiting in North Carolina?
Like who? [Laughing]
I will say that they are good programs. They are really, really good football programs in our state, and they’ve done a great job of recruiting. Our ability to work is something that I don’t think anyone can match. Is it sad that sometimes other guys might not work as hard but they still have a little bit more recognition in some places? Yeah, but so what. I don’t have time to sit around and say, “This could have happened, this would have happened.” You can talk to high school coaches—there's not a stronger force in recruiting than Duke Football in the state of North Carolina. Theres not a high school that we haven’t either called or been in since we’ve been here. Not one.
Take us back to the recruitment process of Desmond Scott.
The relationship I had with his father and mother, and the kid, at the end of the day, that made that recruitment a lot easier than location. I would say that there were times in the summer when everybody was coming in on the kid trying to get him to do this or do that, and we just stayed to the course. One of the phrases you will hear the head ballcoach say more than anything is “slow and steady wins the race."
We put on more steam, put on more steam, put on more steam, put on more steam. And then, it was just an explosion when Coach Cutcliffe and I went to the home. It was just he and I, and the family, and everyone was just bouncing off the walls. It was the essence of a home recruiting visit. There was so much power in him speaking, and him explaining what he had envisioned for Dez and just the relationship I had already built with the family, he understood who Dez was better than any head coach in America, so I think that’s what it came down to.
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