Emporia State football head coach Garin Higgins has announced the largest recruiting class of his coaching career at ESU.
The signing class consists of 32 high school players and 16 transfers, some of whom will move out of state to play for the Hornets. California, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin each had one player sign, as well as Oklahoma with 15, Texas with 12 and Missouri with six.
Of the 48 recruits, ESU signed many to help offensively, with 10 receivers, seven offensive linemen, four running backs and three quarterbacks. To assist on defense, the Hornets recruited nine linebackers, eight defensive backs, and four defensive linemen. They also added to special teams with two Stinger backs and a long snapper. Some, if not most, of the recruits have already transferred to ESU for the Spring 2025 semester.
Higgins said the reasoning for such a big recruiting class was due to the loss of many seniors.
“We’ve lost 47 or 48 seniors over the last two years, that’s a lot of guys,” Higgins said. “With COVID, we had a couple of combined classes. A lot of them were veterans that had been here for five and some of them six years. That’s a lot of veteran leadership that knows how things are done at Emporia State and played a lot of games in the MIAA.”
Higgins noted that they did not focus on any particular position in high school recruiting, but did focus on trying to bring in immediate help with the transfers they signed.
“We try to be fairly consistent from year to year with probably offensive and defensive lines always being a priority,” he said. “It kind of rotates when it comes to skill players – we signed a lot of receivers this year because last year we didn’t sign very many. With the transfers we concentrated on bringing in some immediate help.”
Despite the broadness of their search, Higgins said the Hornets did try to fill positions where they would be missing valuable upperclassmen, namely with linebacker, quarterback and defensive back positions. He said their primary goal in recruiting was to build depth while seeking that immediate help.
“The MIAA is so physical that you never know how far down the depth chart you may need to go. And we lost a lot of good players,” said Higgins.
Higgins shared that he isn’t just excited about a specific few recruits, but is optimistic about all of them.
“We feel good about all of them, but you never really know until they get on campus and go through our system,” he said. “I use Tyler Kahmann as an example. When he came here out of high school, we were glad we got him, but I never thought to myself when he came out of high school that he was going to go down as the MIAA record holder for touchdown passes and the school record holder in just about every receiving category.”
