Speaking the truth is essential to the recruiting process.

“We do almost-inverse recruiting at college fairs. We talk to them about making a real radical choice. We say, ‘You’re going to go 10-15 hours away from home to go to college, you’re not going to be able to come home to Mama every weekend.

“We tell them it’s a great place, but it’s not perfect. We don’t sugar coat the Wabash experience.”

“It’s the guys who keep coming back as alumni that are the absolute strength of Wabash. So I look at a prospect not for the four years they’ll spend on campus, but for the 30-40 years afterwards.”

Magazine
Fall/Winter 2001

Building Community
One Wabash Man at a Time
With Mississippi sending fewer of its young men to out-of-state colleges than any state in the Union, the greatest recruiting challenge Lee Cline ’66 faces is convincing prospective students to leave home.

by Steve Charles

Lee Cline ambles up to the College’s Detchon Center and shakes hands with a group of Wabash students waiting for him on the steps. He greets each man by name in his laid-back Texas/Mississippi drawl as Betty Cline hugs two of the young men, asks one how he’s feeling and another how he’s settling in after his first weeks in College.

The couple had returned to Wabash for Cline’s 35th reunion, but this gathering with Wabash freshmen and sophomores is a reunion of another sort. The attorney from Laurel, Mississippi recruited all of them—eight of 14 students from Mississippi who have matriculated at Wabash in the last two years as a direct result of Lee Cline’s efforts. With 50 more students from the region already referred this year, the Mississippi pipeline is rivaling the Wabash-Texas connection that has brought so many quality students to Wabash. The fact that Mississippi has the nation’s lowest percentage of students attending out-of-state colleges makes that an even more impressive statistic.

“Some people play golf, some people hunt. I recruit students,” Cline explains. “Bringing these guys here and watching them grow up is a great experience.”
An occasional recruiter for the College for 15 years, Cline shifted into overdrive in 1997 after discerning a new attitude from admissions at Wabash.

“[Director of Admissions] Steve Klein made a commitment to broaden the geographical base of the College through admissions, and I know that was President Ford’s philosophy, too. We really have to back that up now,” Cline says. “Fortunately, the College generated a lot of Wabash men who are now living in Mississippi and in the South, so I’ve got a lot of help down here.”
Cline rattles off the names of his comrades in recruiting.

“George Taybos ’66 in Jackson, Ron Rychlak ’80 in Oxford, Jim Davis ’83 in New Orleans, and John Ryder ’71 and that group in Memphis do a heck of a job. This isn’t just me doing the work.”

But Associate Director of Admissions Mike Reidy says the work Cline does is “phenomenal.” Besides attending multiple college fairs with Reidy, the attorney is always on the lookout for prospective Wabash men.

“All you have to do is read the damned paper,” Cline insists. “In smaller towns, local papers really promote their youngsters. They start promoting them in their freshman and sophomore years, and that’s when you want to reach them; the earlier we can make contact with the student, the better.”

He keeps an eye out for promising students in other places, too.

“I’ve known [Wabash sophomore] Jerry Bowie since he was nine,” Cline explains. “He grew up in the Boys and Girls Club in Laurel, and in high school he was head cashier on the 3-11 shift at the grocery store. That’s a lot of responsibility. Wabash just fits for Jerry.”

He meets with counselors to introduce them to Wabash and even arranges visits to campus for them.

“Those counselors can be your greatest ally or worst enemy,” Cline explains. “If you establish a rapport with a counselor, that’s great. We’ve got some counselors in Mississippi who are big fans of Wabash.”

And he talks with sons of his friends and fellow lawyers if he thinks they might be a good fit with Wabash.

[Wabash sophomore] Jim Hull’s dad and I have litigated 20 or 30 cases together,” Cline says, recalling that his own father’s good friend—Jim Anderson ’43—was instrumental in Cline’s decision to leave Texas in 1962 to attend Wabash.
“A student needs to hear from someone he already trusts,” Cline adds. “When I talked to Jim Hull about Wabash, he knew I wasn’t going to blow something by him.”

Speaking the truth is essential to the recruiting process.

“The worst thing that can happen is for someone to come to Wabash, have a bad experience, and tell everyone all about it. So we do almost-inverse recruiting at college fairs. We talk to them about making a real radical choice. We say, ‘You’re going to go 10-15 hours away from home to go to college, you’re not going to be able to come home to Mama every weekend, and you’re going to get homesick—but you get over all that stuff if you stick it out.

“We tell them it’s a great place, but it’s not perfect. We don’t sugar coat the Wabash experience.”
Cline also tells prospective students that Wabash is interested in more than test scores and a high GPA.

“We look for well-rounded, solid students taking a good curriculum. They should be active in athletics or another extra-curricular interest. Lately, we’ve been actively recruiting fellas in speech, debate, and drama, and those in student council or community activities. These people have the discipline to make it at Wabash.

“I tell counselors and students, ‘if all you’ve got is a 36 on the ACT or a 1600 on the SAT and a 4.0 GPA, you’re probably not going to get admitted. That’s not what we’re after. We don’t want someone who’s going to go up to Wabash for four years, get a degree, and leave, ‘cause if we have too many students like that, our school will wither away.

“It’s the guys who keep coming back as alumni, more than just sending a check, that are the absolute strength of Wabash. So I look at a prospect not for the four years they’ll spend on campus, but for the 30-40 years afterwards.”
Cline believes the alumni that recruit with him are part of that “absolute strength.” They don’t all have his freedom to rearrange schedules around recruiting, but all have learned the rewards of the game.

“I tell guys, ‘try it once; it will grow on you,’” Cline says. “When George Taybos moved to Jackson, he told me he’d tried to squeeze in a little time to recruit. But now he’s gung-ho. What really locked it in for George was when he got to present one of those scholarships.”

Scholarship presentations—Cline and his recruiters attend high school award ceremonies to personally hand out the College’s scholarships to future Wabash men—are a windfall for the recruitment process.

“That presentation not only rivets the student’s attention, but also the attention of the school officials and parents,” Cline says, noting that Wabash is often the only private college represented at these ceremonies. The alumni presence shows the value Wabash places on the individual and community, and it’s a blast for the recruiter.

“It’s just damned wonderful, man. These kids and their parents are proud as can be,” Cline says. He recalls several parents and teacher approaching him after he presented Tobias Brown’s scholarship in Columbus, Mississippi.

“They said, ‘You just got the best one,’” Cline says, laughing. “That has to make you feel good!”

The former Wabash political science major says it’s a buyer’s market for students of this caliber.

“We’ve got competition for every one of these students,” he says. “But even if they don’t choose Wabash, they finish the decision-making process with a good taste in their mouth from Wabash. That builds the College’s reputation with the counselors and other students."

Cline warns recruiters, “You can’t get disappointed. It takes time to get this, but once it starts paying off, it’s fun as heck.”

Quay Gordon smiles when he calls Cline’s recruiting style “persistent.”
“Sure, he called me—maybe every week, but I didn’t mind,” the Mobile, Alabama sophomore says. “He was the only alumnus from any of the schools I was considering that called, except for one guy from Hampden-Sydney who didn’t sound very enthusiastic.’

Cline’s persistence doesn’t end once Cline’s recruits enroll.
“I keep in touch with all of them, and I keep in touch with their parents,” Cline says. “It just takes a little time on the telephone to tell them their son’s doing fine, and it can mean a lot.”

Sometimes follow-up requires more than a phone call.

Freshman Nikeland Cooper, who plans to enlist in the U.S. Marines after his Wabash graduation, spent last summer in boot camp. He didn’t have time to return home to pick up all of his belongings before moving to Wabash. So Cline, already planning a drive to Wabash for his reunion, stopped by Cooper’s grandmother’s house in Moss Point, Mississippi.

“She had everything packed for him—we just loaded it in the car and brought it up. We got in Thursday night, took it over to the Kappa Sig house. Then Nikeland, Betty, and I went out to dinner.”

“It’s the little things like that that make this so much fun,” Cline says. “It’s also little things that build the community/family atmosphere that’s essential to Wabash.”

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