Inside one of South Carolina’s most heavily recruited high schools

There’s a table against the wall that faces the desk of Fort Dorchester High football coach Steve LaPrad. It’s got a few trophies on it, several footballs and a couple poster boards with collages of images and headlines from seasons past.

Slipped under the central trophy: the day’s recruiting correspondence.

“They just come by and pick it up,” LaPrad said, gesturing to a small pile of letters. “After a while, the really good ones just leave it because they’re getting as much at home as they get here. I tell them, that’s what I call courting mail. They hear me talk about it all the time. There’s not too many offers in those piles. That’s just courting. They only ask you out for a date on that one; they haven’t asked you to the prom.”

He’s saying this as LSU assistant coach Jeff Grimes sits on the other side of the wall on a couch a few cushions away from John Simpson. Later in the day, Clemson coach Dabo Swinney will swing by to chat with the 6-foot-4, 290-pound lineman – who happens to be the top-rated uncommitted player in the state for 2016.

This is life a week before National Signing Day at Fort Dorchester, a school that pumps out next-level talent with regularity, and occasionally some future NFL stars. This year’s rolls include 6-foot-4, South Carolina-bound receiver Diondre Champaigne, Simpson and a two-star lineman with an East Carolina offer, plus sophomore quarterback Dakereon Joyner, who held a South Carolina offer within a month of turning 13 years old.

A few turns down the hall from LaPrad’s office, athletics secretary Brandi Griffith’s office is overrun with about 10 students. The school recently switched to a single lunch period, meaning an overloaded cafeteria and students spilling into hallways and open classrooms.

In the small, windowless room, Griffith is tasked with corralling and sifting through the deluge of correspondence aimed at all the school’s athletes, especially football players. Each day, she works through the stack of letters and faxes, sometimes carrying a pile the thickness of a small dictionary down the hall to the table in LaPrad’s office.

“There are certainly certain schools that are sending stuff everyday,” Griffith said. “One of the things that I think is really funny is technology is such that we communicate in many ways, but some of the schools are still sending faxes to John.”

Yes, faxes. In the era of Twitter and texting, Facebook and Facetime, schools still fire up the fax machine on a Friday to tell a senior good luck in the night’s game.

She’s even seen a handwritten note from a cheerleader direct to a player.

The bigger challenge for Griffith: the coaches who come by to visit.

“A lot of times they just show up and want to see somebody,” Griffith said.

The day Swinney came by, the school had at least five or six coaches roll through before noon. It’s nothing for 10 to show up in a day and Griffith recalls times when 20-25 visited. The bigger schools usually at least touch base with LaPrad, but sometimes, it’s just dropping in.

And a school has to exercise some level of guidance on that front.

“You’ve got to watch and not be pulling them out of class every two minutes,” LaPrad said. “They all want to meet him. They all want to talk to him. So I kind of try to control that a little bit. Try to get the times when kids have an open period, lunch, weightlifting, whatever. Sometimes you have to get them out of class, but I try not to. You’ve just got to manage it.”

This is a coach who has seen three of his athletes – Robert Quinn, Carlos Dunlap and Byron Maxwell – go to big-time college programs and onto strong NFL careers, so this much hype isn’t unusual.

With the likes of them, Simpson and Joyner, it’s also not unusual to see the hype around a player grow early in his high school career, and that brings its own pitfalls.

“It was kind of getting to where my teammates, I feel like they were getting, they were feeling down because it was all me,” Simpson said. “And I hated that. That’s why I hate to talk about football around them. I just go out there and play. Now that some of them are getting looked at, it’s amazing. It’s a great feeling.”

LaPrad insisted it’s not a case of Fort Dorchester having more athletes than anywhere else, but just doing a good job academically and in terms of football preparation that many of them make it to college in some way.

These players are facing a choice their coach describes as structuring the rest of their lives. In a world where millionaires stroll in daily to pitch and woo students who can’t even vote, there’s a lesson the coach wants to pass on.

“Really, the hardest thing for most of these kids is to learn how to say, ‘No,’ ” LaPrad said. “We as adults need to learn how to say no. That’s the hardest thing for a lot of people. ... But they have to learn to tell the guys that they know they’re not going to go to these schools, that it’s not where they want to go, it’s not what they’re interested in.”

Then again, all the hoopla beats the alternative.

“I guess it’s going to be worse when nobody comes,” LaPrad said. “It means I don’t have anybody any good. So you’ve got to enjoy it.”

This story was originally published February 1, 2016 at 8:59 PM with the headline "Inside one of South Carolina’s most heavily recruited high schools."