MORGANTOWN -
West Virginia's safeties may have felt like they had an
extra shadow on Thursday as they went through their meetings and their drills
out on the field.
Rachid Ibrahim, a rising senior from The Avalon School in
Gaithersburg, Md., was on an unofficial visit to campus, keeping a close eye on
the players who at one point held what he now covets: a scholarship offer from
WVU.
"I've been taking a couple visits here and there, but I
definitely want to build up the offers and hopefully I'll have a decent amount
by the end of summer and I'll start narrowing it down," says Ibrahim. "If West
Virginia were to offer anytime soon, that'd be really big for me."
Listed at 6-foot-2, 170 pounds, Ibrahim caught the eye of
Mountaineers cornerbacks coach Daron Roberts, who saw his film earlier in the
year and decided to get in contact with his head coach to begin some
conversation.
Little did Roberts know when he watched his film that
Ibrahim had already made his own attempt to get picked up on West Virginia's
radar.
"I always had interest before," says Ibrahim, who lives just
over three hours from Morgantown. "I reached out back when Coach [Bill] Stewart
was there, but they never got back to my coach and then out of nowhere Coach
Roberts called one day and I guess they found out. They've been keeping in
touch ever since then and I'm pretty excited about it."
Every offer that comes in excites Ibrahim at this point
because he knows that he is still a relatively unknown commodity. His name
isn't flying around all the recruiting circles and he has not yet received a
rating from many of the top scouting services.
His job right now is to get his film out and hope that
heading into his senior season he will have many more eyes on him than he did
as a junior. He currently has offers from Boston College, East Carolina and
Ohio and he's hopeful a fourth is on its way after his visit with the
Mountaineers.
"Coach Roberts said he's pushing for me to get that offer
from his defensive coordinator," says Ibrahim. "They said they just wanted me
to get up there so I finally did and now I should hear in the next week or so."
Of course, it isn't as though Ibrahim will just commit as
soon as he gets the offer. He intends to wait until he has more to choose from
before he begins to gets selective, but he certainly seems impressed by what he
saw on Thursday.
"We took a tour, they showed us around the whole place," he
says. "We came early for that and then we sat in on the safeties meeting, that
was really nice. The place was just gorgeous. All the facilities, everything
was just gorgeous. The practice was nice and I really enjoyed it overall."
If Ibrahim was shadowing the safeties, that meant spending a
day with co-defensive coordinator Joe DeForest as well. From the classroom
instruction to what he learned on the field, Ibrahim felt it was a productive
day.
"He's a really, really smart coach," he says of DeForest. "He
was pointing out even the littlest things because he really wants you to be
your best, which I could tell by the way he was directing his players. He wants
to bring the best out of his players and he's going to push them to get there
and I really like that."
The hope is that since he has met DeForest and seen the
facilities and shown that his interest is genuine, the defensive staff as a
whole will take a look at what Roberts has already seen. Once they have,
Ibrahim may be getting a call from his coach telling him that the school he
visited on his spring break has become the fourth to offer him a scholarship.
If it does, Ibrahim has a plan for how he would repay it.
"I'm just trying to be a hard worker. I want to be able to
show Coach that I can be that guy that he can rely on and I can out-compete and
beat out anybody that we play against," he says.
For now, he is back home, enjoying what's left of his spring
break and keeping close tabs on his phone, hoping it will ring.
All content © Copyright 2000 - 2013 WorldNow and WVILL. All Rights Reserved.
