Syracuse head coach Dino Babers said he’ll prioritize recruiting players in the northeast at his introductory press conference on Monday.

“Why can’t we go out and get the best players in the country? And we start right here in the state of New York,” Babers said. “… We’re going to work our way out and go wherever we need to be to make Syracuse great.”

Babers enters a situation in which all 15 players in the Orange’s Class of 2016 were brought in by a different coaching staff. But after Director of Athletics Mark Coyle fired Scott Shafer two weeks ago, he and other members of Syracuse’s athletic department contacted recruits and said their commitment would still be honored.

On SU’s current roster, 45 players are from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut or Massachusetts. As Babers puts together his staff, he said he will consider recruiting ramifications as well.

“If you hire good recruiters, they can recruit anywhere,” Babers said, “(but) we will have representation from the northeast.”

While Babers stressed keeping players close to home, Syracuse’s 2016 class only has four members from the northeast. Though there’s still two months until National Signing Day, there haven’t been any reported decommitments since Shafer’s firing. And the decision to honor commitments was made before Babers was even hired.

Coyle said he contacted commits to relieve any anxiety they had during the transitional phase. It was a strategy he learned at Boise State while the Broncos were replacing head coach Chris Petersen, who left for Washington.

“We were trying to keep this thing moving during this transitional period,” Coyle said. “We wanted to make sure we answer a lot of their questions … and now that we have a head coach in place, we can start to move forward in the next process.”

Already, multiple Bowling Green pledges have decommitted since Babers was hired at SU, adding another potential avenue for Babers’ staff to explore.

While he said on Monday that he wouldn’t target Bowling Green commits, he left the door open to go after uncommitted players.

But regardless of all the options Babers has, he said his recruiting strategy will start with local talent.

“You need to start in your backyard. We need to take care of the state of New York,” Babers said. “We need to get over to New Jersey. We need to start to work near Philly, we need to shoot down that corridor to Pittsburgh, Chicago, Detroit and then we got to hang down there and go back down to Florida and cross our T’s and dot our I’s. But we’re always going to start close to home.”

Published on December 7, 2015 at 10:52 pm

Contact Paul: pmschwed@syr.edu | @pschweds