Scottie Montgomery might not be the most high profile name on the Duke Football coaching staff, but the 31-year old wide receivers coach and former Duke standout has played a crucial role in some of the team’ most high profile recruiting successes of late, including the signing of four-star running back Desmond Scott from Durham’s Hillside High School. The Chronicle sat down for a half-hour with Montgomery to talk about his time at Duke as a player and coach as well as life on the recruiting trail.

What aspect of the program’s recruiting strategy stands out in your mind?

“I think that what we do here, more than anywhere, is that we close as a staff better than any staff in America. I would say that there’s not one home that as a staff the guys that we have out on the road wouldn’t be comfortable in. We can go anywhere in America. We can recruit from Camden, New Jersey to Miami, South Florida all the way to Beverly Hills, California. We can go anywhere, and that’s because of the staff that [Coach Cutcliffe] has put together. But at the end of the day, we don’t really have to work hard once we get them here. We take them upstairs to the corner office with the view, and he does his work.

How do you respond to recruits who are apprehensive about going to an elite academic university like Duke?

I would think that any time you have a university that is as prestigious as our university is, people who don’t know the truth are just to a certain degree—they’ve never been around it, only read about it, only seen it on television. You have no clue what they’re truly like, but when you see them, you see them for what they are on television, and you see it as a glorified thing. You do run into that, but I would think that with the personalities we have on the road recruiting, we do a really really good job of being able to get across the message that we are Duke. That’s a positive term, that we do believe in doing things the right way, and then we have something  we can sell not only from an academic standpoint, but we have the best head football coach in America, so we do have some things that we run into and encounter, but some of our battling tools are a lot stronger than some of the things that we encounter.

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