Until he accepted his current job as Washington State’s outside linebackers coach, Roy Manning had never lived on the West Coast.
So when Manning joined Alex Grinch’s defensive coaching staff at WSU in January 2015, Manning moved west for the first time and was immediately faced with a novel challenge: How to make recruiting inroads with prep coaches and prospects in a part of the country he had no ties to.
“It’s some work because you just don’t have that network or this established database of guys you know,” Manning said. “It’s a lot of busy work at first.