
Elic Ayomanor is talking about how he kept pushing himself through what should have been a critical recruiting year without a football season when he tosses out a phrase not many high schoolers would use. “It was definitely the environment around me that allowed me to keep pushing myself,” Ayomanor said. “And some intrinsic motivation as well.”
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Ayomanor is a 6-foot-3, 210-pound receiver from Medicine Hat, Alberta. He is in the United States to get a great education and to try to earn a football scholarship, but the pandemic severely limited the latter last year. The proper use of “intrinsic motivation” and Ayomanor’s professed love of Advanced Placement Biology suggest the former went just fine. Ayomanor spent the 2020-21 school year 3,700 miles from home at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. He had transferred there after a coaching change at The Peddie School in New Jersey, where he spent his sophomore season. The idea was to play well at a boarding school that has proven it can place students in Ivy League schools and football players at Ivy League and Power 5 football programs. But the pandemic wiped out the 2020 season, leaving Ayomanor with only video of a couple of intrasquad scrimmages.
As Ayomanor and his Deerfield Academy teammates practiced against one another, they wondered if college coaches would ever see them in person. Or would those coaches be limited to sophomore film and be forced to make educated guesses? Justin Dillon runs 730 Scouting, which helps players in Canada come to the United States to compete for college football scholarships. Dillon identified Ayomanor as a freshman in Alberta and helped him get to high school on this side of the border. Dillon knew Ayomanor had improved dramatically from that sophomore video from 2019, but he also knew the coaches at the caliber of schools Ayomanor preferred would need to see that improvement in person. “If we didn’t have COVID, all this stuff would have happened a year ago,” Dillon said. “I just had to tell him ‘Keep doing what you’re doing. You’re going to get seen. When it happens, it’s going to happen big-time.’”
When the NCAA opted to re-open in-person recruiting in June after more than a year of only virtual contact, it created two very different subsets of Class of 2022 recruits. There will be players who had dozens of offers based on their sophomore film who may find many of those offers aren’t committable once the rising senior versions of themselves show up at camps and play against other recruits from their class. And then there will be other players whose options remained limited through most of 2020 who will suddenly find themselves awash in real, committable offers because they popped in person in a way they hadn’t on those old videos.
Ayomanor belongs in that second group.
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As soon as he found out he could hit the road in June, Ayomanor knew he’d get his chance. He had started with interest from Dartmouth, Princeton and Yale. (Ivy League schools don’t give athletic scholarships.) West Virginia had been the first Power 5 school to notice him. Tennessee, with new receivers coach Kodi Burns leading the charge, jumped in. So did Iowa, Penn State, Vanderbilt, Ole Miss and more than a dozen others. That had all been done through Zoom and videos such as this one.
But Ayomanor wanted as complete an offer list as he could get before he made a decision later this summer. So he mapped out a plan for June. He wanted to see some of the campuses of schools that had offered him, and he wanted to put himself in front of coaches who hadn’t offered him but could be convinced by a great in-person showing. He decided to visit Notre Dame for its Irish Invasion event on June 6. Then he went down to Nashville to visit Vanderbilt and over to Knoxville to see Tennessee. This week, Ayomanor headed west to visit Cal and to attend a camp at Stanford.
To say those trips have gone well would be an understatement. Just before he had to leave South Bend to catch a flight to Nashville to see Vanderbilt (now led by former Notre Dame defensive coordinator Clark Lea), Ayomanor got pulled aside by Notre Dame offensive coordinator Tommy Rees, who wanted to put Ayomanor through an individual workout to see exactly how well Ayomanor could catch. “I want to see you do these drills,” Ayomanor remembered Rees saying. Rees wanted to see how naturally Ayomanor can catch the ball.
The NCAA is allowing individual workouts in the FBS on visits this season, but the rules require them to include only one prospect. Someone has to throw a receiver recruit the ball, and the Fighting Irish have the advantage of having a coordinator who happened to be their starting quarterback only eight years ago. With Ayomanor, Rees intentionally threw imperfect passes to gauge Ayomanor’s body control. “I think it was more to put some pressure on me to see if I could perform under pressure,” Ayomanor said. “It was awesome. I love being put in those situations. That’s my favorite thing. It’s kind of why I play football.” And it’s why, if he chooses, Ayomanor can play football at Notre Dame. Rees extended an offer before Ayomanor left for the airport.
Ayomanor was at Stanford on Wednesday, and that camp also bore fruit. As the day wound down, Ayomanor wanted to make one more impression. So he went to a coach and asked to be matched against the best defensive back at the camp for his final rep. Ayomanor caught a fade down the sideline, and the camp ended. But before he left the field, Ayomanor was ushered to Cardinal head coach David Shaw, who extended a scholarship offer.
Blessed to receive an offer from Stanford University!🌲 @StanfordFball @BKwrStanford @tavitap @730scouting @DABigGreenFB pic.twitter.com/GX7r0SDTtt
— Elic Ayomanor (@elicayomanor) June 17, 2021
Now that he has locked down offers from two more elite academic schools — which also happen to have the most recent football success of the FBS schools in that category — Ayomanor can start narrowing down the field. He’ll be back in South Bend on Friday for an official visit, and then he’ll head back to Massachusetts. He wouldn’t mind making a decision this summer, but he has time. Given his academic pedigree and the schools he targeted to earn in-person offers, it would seem academic prestige matters as much as football success. But Ayomanor said a school doesn’t necessarily have to dominate the U.S. News and World Report college rankings to have a chance. “All schools have ample ability to give you a good education if that’s what you want to do,” he said. “If that’s what you choose to pursue once you get there.” Ayomanor has an idea of what he wants to pursue when he gets to college, but he hasn’t made any final decisions. “I’m pretty sure I’m a STEM guy,” he said. “Maybe bio-engineering as a major. But as I get to college, I’m open to change. The big thing for me is pursuing a good degree while at the same time trying to make it to the NFL.”
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Ayomanor doesn’t mince words when he explains the difference in the player he is now versus the one who came from Canada two years ago. He was always taller than his classmates, and he grew gradually. But what changed quickly was the way he moved. When he arrived in the U.S., he didn’t look like a player who would be entertaining the kind of offers he has now. “When it comes to movement skills, my growth was pretty rapid,” he said. “When I came to the Peddie School as a sophomore, I was pretty stiff. I hadn’t really learned much of the technical side of football. The coaches there helped a lot with my development. And over the past year, my movement skills have grown pretty rapidly.”
Ayomanor was excited to show how much he’d learned in that first season on this side of the border when the season was wiped away. He certainly created enough content to keep college coaches intrigued at his size, speed and explosiveness, but he knew they’d eventually want more proof of concept.
— Elic Ayomanor (@elicayomanor) July 26, 2020
He had the good fortune to spend most of his days working against teammate Donnie Gray, who will be a freshman receiver at Northwestern this fall. Gray also was an excellent high school cornerback, so he forced Ayomanor to get better. Meanwhile, both players got to catch passes from Cortland Dicks, a lefty who will be a freshman at Brown this fall. Those two and Deerfield Academy head coach Brian Barbato helped build a better player.
“I wouldn’t even say that it’s close,” Ayomanor said. “This year compared to my sophomore year, you’d think I was a whole different player. I’ve definitely grown by leaps and bounds from what I was then to now.”
And now the coaches whose attention Ayomanor wanted to get have seen that up close and in the flesh.
“The videos never do the in-person justice,” he said.
(Photo courtesy of Elic Ayomanor)
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