On Dec. 10, most of the University of Illinois was shut down, if not because it was Sunday then in preparation for the final exams period that would start the next morning. Even Illinois’ basketball practice gym lay quiet to allow the in-season Illini a chance to focus on academics over athletics. Inside the football offices, however, Ron Zook and the rest of his coaching staff, including trainers, academic advisers and office staff, went about their workday.

The difference, however, was that this was one of the most important workdays of the year. More than two dozen of the nation’s top high-school football players had just jetted home after their three-day official visits to the campus.

“Recruiting’s like another season now,” Illinois offensive coordinator Mike Locksley said. “It used to be something that just took place and then, ‘Who do we have?’ It’s a process that everybody’s intrigued with, from fans to the media. It’s really become a three-ring circus, who can top who.”

Zook, Locksley and the rest of the Illini coaching staff hope all the extra effort pays off today when high school seniors across the country put pen to paper and commit to playing college football. When the last fax has been threaded through the machine this afternoon, Illinois is expected to have one of the best recruiting classes in the country – despite finishing last season with one of the worst records in the Big Ten.

“Recruiting is used to make your team better,” Locksley said. “For us it’s all about getting better at each individual position, bringing in the best players you can to create competition.”

In less than 10 years, recruiting has become one of the most high-profile segments of the college athletics scene. The rise of recruit-tracking Web sites and increased pressure to produce consistent bowl-game appearances have forced most Division-I football programs to begin picking up players earlier and earlier. In many cases they are forced to offer scholarships before players have even settled into their high school programs. For schools like Illinois, landing that star recruit could make or break a team’s future.

The right high-profile player can attract other big-name high schoolers who want to know they’ll play with the best of the best. That ultimately makes the difference between floundering at the bottom of the conference and breaking into the upper echelon of college ball.

Which is why Zook logged hundreds of hours on the road and in the air this year, piecing together a class that includes almost 20 of the top football players in the current crop of high-school seniors. The Illini have landed at least two five-star recruits in defensive end Martez Wilson and receiver Arrelious Benn; a half-dozen four-star standouts; and enough solid three-star recruits to round out the third best recruiting class in the Big Ten – behind only Ohio State and Michigan.

“These guys, they eat, sleep, live, breathe recruiting,” said Bobbie Duval, Illinois’ associate recruiting coordinator. “They are definitely all about it. It’s important to them. I think when you’re trying to rebuild a program, it’s got to be important to you.”

Coaches like Locksley treat recruiting as an extension of the game, full of the same maneuvering and mind games that play out on the football field. Locksley said piecing together the perfect class means knowing how to land the big-name players, who’ve received a dozen or more scholarship offers, while also finding the lesser-known guys who might blossom in your program. The advent of the Internet has played a major role in the new intensity in the recruiting game.

National Web sites have local affiliates tied to each major university. On each branch site, staff members are charged with contacting players to track which coaches they have talked to and how much interest the players show in each school.

The sites also rank players based on reports and observations, then relay that information to fans, who are hungry to hear if their teams will succeed in coming seasons.

“Some of these kids are like rock stars depending on how heavily they’re recruited and how many stars they’ve got behind their name,” Locksley said. “I definitely think the recruiting services have played a major role in driving this train.”

But while the pressure is on coaching staffs to bring in the best possible players, athletes get their own dose of demands from the process. Benn, ranked by Scout.com as the No. 2 wide receiver in the country, said he received as many as 25 phone calls a day before verbally committing to Illinois on Nov. 5. He said coaches would send text messages to his phone long before he woke up each morning, and that he regularly received texts after going to bed. Many times, he said, the messages had nothing to do with football.

“Somebody texted me at like 5 a.m. and was like, ‘Tell your mom you love her and give thanks,'” Benn said last fall.

Because texts are considered written correspondence, the NCAA does not currently limit the number of times a coach can text a player in one day. Coaches will use the trendy medium not only to keep in touch with recruits but to try and build personal relationships.

“Recruiters are like a girlfriend. It’s like having another girlfriend,” Benn said. “If you respond to them and pay attention to them, they like you. But if you don’t, they get angry.”

Benn got out of that relationship by making it public knowledge that he planned to play for Illinois. He finished high school early, made arrangements to start classes in Champaign this semester, and moved from Washington, D.C., to the Six Pack. Benn had his pick of some of the top teams in the country, including Notre Dame, Florida State and Maryland. But he decided to come to Illinois, in part because he says the Illini coaching staff seemed to have a genuine interest in the players outside of football.

“You can’t just sit and talk with most coaches. You can’t just walk into a coach’s office. You have to go through two secretaries to see your head coach,” Benn said. “I’m like, ‘Come on, man.’ The places I’ve been to, you had to sit outside their office and wait to talk to those guys. It seems like Coach Zook was made to coach college football.”

Josh Brent, a four-star recruit from Bloomington, Ill., said most of the programs that recruited him seemed insincere about what they claimed to be offering. He said almost every school he talked to claimed to have the most Big Ten All-Academic players; and each one acted like he could continue throwing shot put and discus in college, something recruiters knew was important to Brent. But Illinois, he says, took a more honest approach to the whole process.

“A lot of schools came with their track coaches, and I don’t know if it’s just me, but you can tell if they’re sincere about it,” Brent says. “With Illinois, it’s not that they wouldn’t let me do track, but they’re honest. You have to put another sport on the back burner and know that football’s bringing home the bacon.”

Locksley said recruits who have solid support systems in place often have no problem easing through the process. Those who have supportive families, trusted mentors or even friends who have already been through the pressure of being recruited often know what to expect and are better prepared to handle it. It is the player who is alone in the process, Locksley said, who often falters under the pressure.

“Kids who come from environments where they have good mentorships, sound family support, they tend to be a little more grounded with the process. They tend to control the process more than the process controls them,” Locksley said. “It’s the guys who don’t necessarily have someone to lean on – someone with experience in this process – to be able to direct them and really channel and control what information is being given, who the kid’s listening to. Those are the kids who struggle with it.”

Vontae Davis is a freshman cornerback at Illinois whose brother, Vernon Davis, played for Maryland and was the No. 6 pick in the 2006 NFL draft.

Davis said his brother taught him to make a game of being recruited, playing with coaches’ confidence and trying to throw off some of the most adamant recruiters. It’s a strategy he says he passed down to Benn, a high-school teammate and one of his closest friends.

“I had Locksley convinced I was going to Michigan State. Man, was he sweating,” Davis recalls. “You have to have fun with them because once you sign that letter and get to campus, they have four or five years to pay you back in the weight room and in practice.”