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A lot has been made of how Iowa State’s new football staff uses social media as a recruiting tool. But most people don’t know the story of an integral team member in that effort, in large part because he’s not able to show a lot of his work.
Taylor Wilhelm is Iowa State’s director of new media, a somewhat generic job title for an intriguing creative position that is evolving all the time and didn’t even exist – in Ames anyway – just one short year ago. Wilhelm is part of a blossoming specialty niche of artists within college football as schools compete with each other for the attention of coveted recruiting prospects.
One way to do that is through the creation of edits, which is the shorthand lingo for a unique new style of graphics that is permeating through athletics at all levels, especially college. And if you can come up with really good ones – a.k.a. sick edits – well then you might just have what it takes to do what Wilhelm now does for ISU.
Scroll the bottom of this story to view samples of Taylor Wilhelm's Iowa State football edits!
Wilhelm, a former Division II football player at Malone University in Canton (Ohio), has moved rapidly from teaching himself basic graphic design over a college holiday break to having a full-time job in a Big 12 football department.
The lifelong Ohio State fan credits his favorite school growing up for inspiring him to pursue a new passion.
“Probably about four years ago I would say, they started doing a lot of the recruiting graphics,” Wilhelm explained. “I saw them and I was like, man, that’s just really cool. I kind of want to learn how to do that.
“So one year for Christmas, I got (Adobe) Photoshop and just the rest of Christmas break was just teaching myself, watching YouTube videos, and just trying to learn how they make those cool graphics like that.”
After self-teaching himself how to use the cornerstone software of graphic artists and designers, Wilhelm went back to Malone for the second half of his junior year and continued to practice his new art form. He made an illustration featuring Ohio State standout Joey Bosa – an edit – and got a big boost from the Buckeye All-American when he re-tweeted the digital image to tens of thousands of his followers.
“I was like, man this is really cool, getting recognition for what I’m doing on my own,” said Wilhelm. "After that, basically I started doing it just for fun for other college athletes and just for my friends on my team (at Malone). And then even started doing it for NFL athletes.”
The Toledo Opportunity
And that fateful decision to play around with some NFL player edits was what really launched Wilhelm into his new career, in large part because of one random decision.
“I’m a big Browns fan, Cleveland sports fan, so I just chose one of the players on the team to do - just picked a name,” Wilhelm explained. “I would do these split jerseys - they’re half college, half pro - and I just chose Andrew Hawkins randomly. I found out that he went to Toledo and I did a half Browns jersey and half Toledo jersey edit of Hawkins.”
The NFL receiver liked the edit and re-distributed it to his own followers and friends on social media, where it caught the attention of Toledo assistant coach Tyson Veidt (now at Iowa State). Veidt reached out to Wilhelm.
“Coach (Tyson) Veidt actually saw it on twitter and they messaged me, asked what my plans were, and what was I doing after graduation?” Wilhelm said. “At that point I was a business major and didn’t have anything set in stone. He said they got to together as staff and decided that they wanted me to come on as a recruiting G.A. there at Toledo.”
Wilhelm only spent five months at Toledo, working with a football staff that included much of the new Iowa State staff, led of course by Matt Campbell. When Campbell took the Iowa State job in December, Wilhelm had reason to start wondering what was next for him. The one thing he was pretty sure of was that he wouldn’t be following Campbell & Co. to Iowa State. He was wrong.
“Once Coach Campbell took the job here, I figured, there wasn’t anyway I was going to come,” said Wilhelm. “One day we were getting ready for our bowl game (at Toledo), and I got a call on my phone and it was a Bowling Green (Ohio) number. I was like, who’s calling me from there?
“I picked up and said hello and I heard, ‘Hey, this is Coach Campbell, Taylor. How’s it going?’ As soon as he called me, my jaw just dropped, I almost dropped my phone out of my hand. I was like oh, my goodness. I knew what was coming after that. I told him yeah, definitely, it’s a no-brainer.”
Wilhelm was indeed Ames-bound, filling a position that Campbell wanted created as part of an expanded support staff focused on the recruiting component of rebuilding I-State football. And Wilhelm was like everyone else that came on board in the early days of the Campbell regime – going from 0 to 100 as soon as he stepped foot in Cyclone Country.
“I got out here in January, just like the whirlwind time of everything that was going on with the recruiting, just trying to catch up and keep up,” Wilhelm recalled. “I think we worked every single day for the first two months, seemed like 12- and 13-hour days. It was crazy. But now we’ve gotten into the groove of things. It’s slowed down a little bit for me and I’m getting more comfortable with what I’m doing.”
Behind the Scenes Impact
A big part of Wilhelm’s to-do list involves creating customized edits that are sent out to recruiting prospects in both digital and hard copy form. And those graphics can’t be shared publicly by Wilhelm or anyone else at Iowa State. Fans can get a glimpse of Wilhelm’s work, though, when those recruiting prospects re-tweet or otherwise share the edits on their own social media.
Wilhelm also creates more general recruiting and team graphics that he can disseminate through any number of channels, from various social media to the Cyclones.com web site and sometimes through a positive working relationship with Cyclones.TV.
The new media effort within the Iowa State football program continues to expand. A new staffer named Alex Sherrill has joined the department as a video production specialist, fulfilling Campbell’s desire to do more with moving pictures as Wilhelm continues to work his magic on still images. Wilhelm said he expects the booming field to do nothing but continue to expand and he feels that Iowa State has put itself in good position by committing to a full-time person in his role – even though the low profile nature of the position is hard for people to understand sometimes.
“A lot of what I do is behind the scenes,” Wilhelm said. “People don’t really realize that I am full time on the staff. So they ask, ‘Are you like a grad assistant or an intern?’ And I’m like, no, they actually created a full-time position.
“In Division I, I feel like it’s getting to the point where if you don’t have graphics being sent to recruits, you’re behind everyone else,” he added. “Now even Division II and Division III are starting to catch up, I’ve seen that a little bit. It’s pretty important to recruiting and moving forward with your program.”
