“I woke up one day and I realized that I was the oldest one in the recruiting department.”

That early morning realization this summer led former UT Player Personnel Analyst Jake Langi to leave the all demanding world of college football and find a new path in life.

“Unless you're like the director of player personnel, I think I think the recruiting aspect is more of a young man's game,” Langi told me this fall.

During his time at UT, Langi helped recruit some of Texas football’s brightest stars. The current roster is full of players that Langi helped lead the charge on, including Junior Angilau, Alfred Collins and Vernon Broughton.

Langi said the hardest part of leaving was saying goodbye to the players and their families. That included a two-hour conversation with the parents of one of the kids he recruited, letting them know their son would still be in good hands.

“I didn't recruit, I built real relationships,” Langi said while explaining that he only targeted players who would be a good fit with UT. “I did a ton of homework on guys that I pursued and it wasn't it wasn't hard to figure out which guys were being authentic about their own process.”

Langi said that oftentimes, the kids weren’t the problem.

“I think a lot of times, the parents want to be wined and dined and be recruited more than the players,” Langi said. “If that was the case, and I kind of knew that, I was gonna step out of that recruitment because I didn't want to waste anybody's time.”

He also jealously guarded the time of the kids he was in contact with, which meant not indiscriminately firing off a ton of texts and DM’s.

“I wasn't just going to text just to text because you're supposed to,” Langi said. “If I had something meaningful to text then I would, but if I didn’t then I actually would want every recruit to have some space from grown adults who are trying to steal his time.”

The sometimes absurd world of recruiting really hit home for Langi once his daughter Lusia, a volleyball player, began to get noticed.

“In what other world is it okay for non-family, adults to be calling your 16-year old daughter and texting her?”

His new job as a scout for Catapult (more on that later) will allow Langi to spend more time watching his daughter’s junior and senior seasons of high school volleyball before she goes off to Utah Tech to play for the Trailblazers.

"Once my daughter started receiving recruiting interest, I knew that my time in college football was probably going to be done soon because I wasn't going to miss out on her career,” explained Langi.

It will also allow him to be there for his son Cannon who is Autistic.

Langi, who spent years pouring over film evaluating high school prospects, is putting that skill to work for Catapult, a company that’s most known for producing wearable technology that tracks player movements. The company is expanding into the high school markets to help players get noticed.

“There's about 20 of us scouts across the country,” Langi said. “We're the ones that are helping to build the high school prospect database. So it's a recruiting service as well.”

The biggest difference between his work with Texas and his work for Catapult is that he’s no longer limited to a certain type of player to scout.

“When I evaluate players I'm not necessarily just looking for Texas-level players anymore,” Langi said. “I'm looking for guys that can play NAIA, D-3, D-2, FCS, G-5, P-5, and even JUCO, and putting them in a database and then that will go to every school.”

While the recruiting database is a new division for Catapult, the wearable device has become the industry standard for tracking players in the NFL, college football and now even some high schools.

The device, which is stored in a player's shoulder pad, tracks every movement they make.

“Covers any type of movement that you could do; vertical, side to side, or forward or back,” explained Andrew Ervin, a former strength and conditioning coach for the Nebraska Cornhuskers who now works for Catapult as a sports scientist. “You have positional, inertial, and accelerometer based data and then you also have heart rate as well. So that all falls underneath that umbrella. I think it's about 1000 metrics at this point.”

Texas is among the schools that use the devices to track each player's output to make sure that they are pushing themselves as much as possible, without overdoing it.

“I believe in science so we’re obviously monitoring how much we’re working our guys, how much we’re pushing them,” said Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian following the Iowa State game. “I also think there’s a time to monitor human nature. Are we mentally or physically fatigued to go along with what it looks like but what the numbers tell me? The numbers tell me that we’re in good shape. I felt like Saturday we didn’t play quite as fast as I’m accustomed to seeing us play. Not to mention some of the mental breakdowns. So we had to kind of make sure that we kind of relit the fuse in them for one more week before we get to the bye.”

No telling what the numbers said after Oklahoma State. That kind of information is proprietary.

But, the University of Texas has invested a lot of time and resources into the product.

“This is not me just being biased because I'm talking to you about an article for Texas, but they probably have one of the better models in the country,” Ervin said. “They have sports science, a department within the university that has actually contracted through the local health system, or the hospital system. They actually are contracted into the university but they are actually part of the athletic department.

“They are in a position where they have one employee who is overseeing football and then they have a little bit more of a department with three or four employees that are actually working on the Olympic side working with the other teams such as basketball and soccer as well.”

Mitch Cholewinski, the Associate Director of Applied Sports Science at UT, works closely with the strength and conditioning staff to utilize the Catapult system at UT.

"He (Cholewinski) has been there now… this will be his second year and he came over from Baylor,” Ervin said. ”Without a doubt he's probably one of the best in the country."

While Cholewinski came to UT from Baylor, he was probably destined to end up in Austin. After all, he got his undergrad degree from Slippery Rock.

Langi told me that the information the UT sports science department gets from the Catapult system is so accurate that they can usually predict within a hundredth of a second what Texas players will run when they move on and work out at the NFL combine.

In fact, the NFL frequently asks teams across the country for data on players they are evaluating for the draft.

That process has begun to trickle down into the college ranks with Ervin saying that he’s heard of some teams throwing the devices onto players working out at their elite summer camps.

“They might throw a device on them just to kind of figure out what their max velocity or max acceleration look like? Like what can they actually produce for us?,” explained Ervin.

Now that high schools are beginning to use the equipment, there is hard data to show that some players who may have been overlooked in the past are worth a scholarship.

“My colleagues are already finding gems because of the data that we're collecting,” Langi said. “Sometimes people question a player's effort. Man, you put that baby on him, I guarantee he’s going to play hard.”

Of course that knife cuts both ways.

"A kid doesn't have to run a 40 for you, you already have the times on him. You also know if the kid plays as fast as his 40 or if he doesn't,” Langi said. “What if you're recruiting a guy and he says he's a 4.4 guy but you get game data from Catapult that says he's more like a 4.65 guy? It's not the entire puzzle, but it's another piece of the puzzle that the coaches can use to evaluate the totality of a player."

And Langi says they can help with self-scouting as well, “you can pick up on habits, you know, like if a running back tends to cut to the right side, the data will prove it.”

This kind of information is still new for many coaches, just like adjusting to life outside of college football is new for Jake Langi.

“I've definitely missed the families and my colleagues,” the former player personnel turned scout told me. “But that football grind is different though.”

Something tells me Jake will get used to the slower grind outside of the gridiron.

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