It has been no secret that Virginia Tech has seen in-state recruiting results fall off. That started late in the Beamer era (recruiting results in general fell off, too), but it's been a major issue under the current staff. They've tried to make up for it by focusing on some other areas, but that hasn't always been a success, either.
However, the changes to the coaching staff - both in terms of non-coaching staffers and the coaches themselves - indicate that Justin Fuente and the administration want to do a better job close to home. It just makes sense: even if you build a pipeline in, say, Atlanta, unless you're getting every top player (you will not!) the return-on-investment is still going to be difficult to match. I've long been an advocate of the principle that the Hokies don't need to build the bulk of their classes from Virginia. But if you aren't landing high-four-stars or five-stars from anywhere, it makes more sense to try to change that when you can sell geography and other aspects to players.
Safeties coach-turned-DC Justin Hamilton and GA-turned-LBs-coach Jack Tyler are not just Virginia natives, they're former Hokies. They can not only tell recruits that staying closer to home makes sense for them - they've already put their money where their mouths are (and in Hamilton's case, turned his time in Blacksburg into an NFL stint). This applies to off-field hires too, with former Hokies Jeron Gouveia-Winslow and Corey Fuller helping to fill out the recruiting staff. For those two guys, there's also been major improvement in canvassing, contacting, and offering players throughout Maryland and Virginia. A systematic approach has been the weakness of the recruiting process under this coaching staff, and those two guys in particular are helping make it a little bit more comprehensive and coherent.
Of course, it's early in the process for some of these changes to really take hold. The recruiting world nowadays operates in a way that sees most prospects have a pretty firm idea of where they want to go prior to their junior seasons. That means a lot of these improvements for VT can't really take root until the 2023 class - though there will be some impact on 2022, and of course the pandemic has altered recruitments in ways that are unpredictable, too. We've seen in-state LB Shawn Murphy, a five-star LB, eliminate Virginia Tech from the hunt, but that can't be a knock against the current makeup of the coaching staff, because Murphy's been trending in that direction since long before they had a chance to change that status. (And of course, there's still the hope that they can sway him back, albeit a slim one with the usual suspects of Alabama, Clemson, and Ohio State in strong position for the DC-area kid).
There have been incremental steps forward, many of them with a focus on getting back to what the Hokies need to do well on the recruiting trail - and where they can set themselves up for more success without having to radically increase the amount of effort. They're "work smarter, not harder" types of moves. The consistency of contact with players near the top of the recruiting board (another weakness of this staff so far in their tenure, at least since the departure of Chuck Cantor) will take a little longer to evaluate. But sources indicate that at least the philosophy there has taken a turn for the better. It remains to be seen whether the implementation and success of that philosophy will follow through.
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