‘Jaylen knows everyone’: How NU volleyball recruiting coordinator Jaylen Reyes keeps Huskers stocked | Volleyball

John Cook is an outstanding college volleyball coach, the most obvious proof being the four national championships he’s won as Nebraska’s head coach.

Cook is good at developing talent, just a few recent examples being Annika Albrecht going from a defensive substitute to all-America outside hitter as a senior, and Justine Wong-Orantes going from high school setter to Olympic-level libero.

And Cook excels at coming up with a game plan and making a team believe its training has prepared it to win the match.

But all of those things are a lot easier when you start with good players, and in college sports that begins with recruiting. And while Cook has a major role in recruiting, a lot of Nebraska’s work in recruiting now is led by assistant coach Jaylen Reyes.

Reyes, who will be in his fourth season with the Huskers this fall, took over as Nebraska’s recruiting coordinator in 2020 when Kayla Banwarth left Nebraska to be the head coach at Mississippi.

The recruiting coordinator job is a big one in order to get the players needed to fuel Nebraska’s championship aspirations.

And while recruiting is a 12-month a year task, the job ramped up last week when college volleyball coaches were able to really begin the process of recruiting the players about to be high school juniors. Now coaches can contact those recruits directly and host them on visits.

And with Nebraska already in a good spot with the 2022 recruiting class of high school seniors, it’s the high school juniors that the Huskers are now focused on.

Nebraska already has three commits for the 2022 class: outside hitter Hayden Kubik, middle blocker Bekka Allick and setter Maisie Boesiger. According to PrepVolleyball.com, Kubik is the No. 1 recruit in the class, and Allick is No. 6.

So Nebraska will now focus on its 2023 class. Nebraska already has a relationship with the current No. 1 player in that class, outside hitter Harper Murray from Ann Arbor, Michigan, because she attended a Nebraska camp in 2019. Murray’s sister, Kendall, plays for Michigan.

After Banwarth left, it was an easy transition for Reyes to take over the recruiting job. He was already familiar with some of the players Nebraska would be recruiting from working at Husker volleyball camps.

It also helped that Reyes already had made relationships with club and high school coaches across the country.

“John always said, ‘Jaylen knows everyone,’” Reyes said. “I know a lot of people around the country from being on the men’s (volleyball) side, and being on the West Coast a ton. And then coming here and getting to know people in the Midwest, and down in Texas and Florida.”

There isn’t a perfect formula for ranking volleyball recruiting classes, because if you only have one or two open spots it can prevent you from having a highly ranked class. But five times in the past nine years, Nebraska has had a top-10 recruiting class, according to PrepVolleyball.com. That includes the 2013 class that was ranked No. 1 and helped Nebraska win national titles in 2015 and ’17.

Reyes says it’s a huge responsibility to be the recruiting coordinator for Nebraska.

“There is a ton of pressure that comes with it, but there is a ton of pressure that comes with working with everything here at Nebraska volleyball,” he said. “It’s awesome because everyone will take my phone call. Everyone is interested in Nebraska. So we can recruit anywhere and we can recruit almost anyone. But the kids we’re looking at, so are Wisconsin, Minnesota, Stanford, Penn State, Texas. We get to recruit the best, but we also have to recruit against the best.”

Nebraska has a lot to offer recruits, though.

“There is a lot of advantages to being the recruiting coordinator here because we have all of these resources and all of these amazing things to sell,” Reyes said. “Whether it’s the tradition, playing in the Big Ten, the media coverage that we get, playing on TV all of the time, playing in front of a sold-out arena.”

When coaches weren’t able to go on the road to scout players at club volleyball tournaments due to the COVID-19 recruiting shutdown, they were still able to watch matches online. And some clubs even filmed practices for college coaches to watch.

Reyes spends a lot of time calling club and high school coaches.

“It can be time consuming, but if you end up getting the blue-chip kid, it’s all worth it,” Reyes said.

With the class of high school juniors, Nebraska was looking closely at about 15 players.

“We have a board,” Reyes said. “Some kids move their way up on the board, and some kids move off, and some kids pop up on the board.”

In volleyball, teams have only 12 scholarships per season, so some years you may only be recruiting two or three scholarship players and one walk-on. But the coaches still put a lot of time and thought into it.

“We try to talk (as a staff) a couple of times a week, especially about that top 1% that we’re trying to recruit,” Reyes said. “We spend a lot of time identifying and comparing.”

A lot of times the Nebraska coaches will find a player while scouting at a club tournament. But sometimes they’ll learn about a player from a different club coach.

“I think a lot of people have seen kids that have gone to Nebraska or Texas or Penn State, so they kind of know when Lauren Stivrins or Mikaela Foecke was a (high school) freshman they looked like this,” Reyes said. “So sometimes we’ll identify kids through other people without even seeing them. They’ll be like this, ‘This is a kid you should put on your radar.’ So we’ll send them a questionnaire and get in touch with their club coach.”