At the AFC Conference earlier this week, Matt Rule announced his intention to bring Texas players to Nebraska. Every single employee who made the trek to Charlotte was in the room for the Texas High School Coaches annual meeting, to face time with the most powerful recruiting alliance.
He hired a number of assistants with high school connections in Texas, including wide receivers coach Garrett McGuire and tight ends coach Bob Wager, from the Dallas-Fort Worth high school ranks.
And now here’s another step that will show Rhule’s intent to recruit the Texans: Sources tell FootballScoop that Rhule is working on hiring Interscholastic Athletic Director Dr. Susan Elza as chief of staff at Lincoln.
Elza is the Chief Athletic Officer of the Texas High Schools governing body. A former high school softball coach, Elza went on to administer athletics at the school district level in the Dallas-Fort Worth area before moving to Austin.
The relationship between Rhule and Elza dates back to when Rhule first got the job at Baylor in 2017. An outsider to the Lone Star State, Rhule has hired a number of Texas high school coaches, including current Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire and David Wetzel. , a San Antonio high school coach who was president of the Texas High School Coaches Association at the time. As part of building the network, Rhule Elza and the UIL executive staff brought him to Waco for a visit.
As Rhule’s chief of staff, he will represent Elza Rhule on all off-field matters and act as his right-hand man in building the program. While Elza won’t be doing any recruiting off the field, she will be an important part of the on-campus recruiting experience and, more importantly, making Texas high school coaches feel comfortable putting their players on a plane to Lincoln in the first place.
Elsa is scheduled to be inducted into the Texas High School Athletic Directors Association Hall of Honor later this year.
In an interview with THSCA last year, Elza credited the former Rice, Tulsa, Pittsburgh, Arizona State and Hawaii coach with pushing her into running athletics. “I think it started with my dad,” said Elsa. “When you’re female, when you’re in a minority, the time period — whether by gender or race — sometimes you have some special challenges attached to that. I wanted to get into a field that was primarily male, primarily football coaches. Starting with Homer Johnson in Garland ISD believed in me becoming an athletic director, Todd (Graham) helped with that vision, and gave me the role of assistant AD.”
As always, stay tuned the scoop for the latest.
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