How a high school student turned his passion for recruiting into a job at Texas A&M

When Mike Elko first arrived at Texas A&M to be defensive coordinator, he noticed someone on social media going by the moniker 979SportsEditz seemingly knew everything about recruiting.

So on top of all his other duties, Elko and others on Texas A&M’s staff did some sleuthing of their own to find out who this person was and how they knew so much about a lot of top prospects including almost all of the Aggies’ recruits.

Enter Matt Salvaggio, who was then a junior at Bryan (Texas) Rudder, trying to build up his clientele in the burgeoning hobby of making graphics for football recruits.

Elko recruits teenagers for a living. Now he was recruiting his first non-football player for access into what these prospects were thinking.

“Matt is such a cool story,” Elko said at a recent press conference. “When I got here as the defensive coordinator, there was this kid on social media … who seemed to know everything about recruiting. I just remember going into (former staffer) Mark Robinson’s office one day saying we need to figure out who this kid is.

“This kid has to be local and he seems to have a really good pulse on recruits all over the country and we ultimately uncovered a junior at Rudder High School.”

Salvaggio started to follow recruiting closely in the 2017-18 range with Kellen Mond, Anthony Hines and others. He reached out to top prospects across the country to make top-five and top-10 graphics and once recruits saw his work, they started reaching out to him.

After downloading some apps and starting a Twitter page, Salvaggio was up and running.

“That’s when it took off and I realized I could do something pretty cool with this so I kept going and before I knew it I was building relationships with recruits but I was also building relationships with coaching staffs across the country.

“They would DM me and they’d say this is really cool work here. They would ask me what my plan was out of high school. That was a time when graphic design was starting to become more instrumental in the recruiting process, a lot of the schools started focusing more on their creative media departments and they saw I was tied in on the recruiting side and I guess my work was pretty good and they wanted to see where it would lead me in the future.”

Elko was one of the coaches that got involved with Salvaggio through a meeting with coach Tyler Santucci (who’s now with the Baltimore Ravens) and as he graduated from Rudder, Salvaggio talked with Robinson about possibly creating a position at Texas A&M in due time.

So Salvaggio went to Blinn College for two years to meet certain requirements and then transferred to Texas A&M to finish out his college life.

By that time, though, Elko had left to become Duke’s head coach. As Salvaggio went through college and then Elko was brought back to College Station, the two ran into each other in the Kyle Field tunnel.

“He said, ‘Oh, man, you’re still here,’” Salvaggio said. “And I said, ‘I’m still here.’ So he said we have to talk soon.

“Couple days went by and once he got settled in, just met with him and it was really cool. It was a surreal experience because I didn’t know what was going to happen at that time because we were going through a transition, not only that but I had just graduated so I wanted to make sure I had a plan set up to make sure I was going to be taken care of and that’s exactly what he did. He’s always been a man of his word. We harp on family here but when I met with him I felt like he truly meant what he said and he still does to this day.

“He’s taken care of me and I’m forever grateful.”

In a few short years, Salvaggio has gone from a teenager in his childhood home making graphics for top recruits to becoming the coordinator of player development for Texas A&M.

It’s a murky title but his day-to-day is pretty clear: Do a little bit of everything from making sure players are going to meetings, classes, workouts, the learning center or helping them through classroom issues, relationships, social life problems.

“Anything you can think of,” Salvaggio said. “They know I’m here for them.”

That goes for recruiting, too. Salvaggio strikes up relationships with Texas A&M’s targets even before they visit College Station sometimes to keep them in the Aggies’ loop and then once they get to town, there is a familiar face.

“It’s always been about relationships and it’ll always be about relationships and I was told if you work relationships the right way they can last a lifetime,” Salvaggio said.

Elko said: “He’s really good with players. He’s got tremendous relationship skills, does a really, really good job with recruits and certainly has been a large part of us landing some of the top prospects we’ve been able to land here over the last four or five years. He’s a great addition to our staff.”