June has been an exhilarating month for the Georgia Tech football recruiting team.
Fourteen of Tech’s current 17 players who have pledged to sign with the 2025 class committed this month. It is a class that now ranks 17th nationally, according to the 247Sports Composite, and third among 17 ACC programs.
Tech coach Brent Key, speaking June 12 at an alumni event on campus, said his program has hosted more than 105 high school teams for 7-on-7 competitions this spring and will have seen more than 5,000 high school players pass through the facility by the end of this month. A handful of those players have been prospects Key and his staff have pegged as possible future Yellow Jackets and who have given a verbal pledge to play for Tech in the near future.
The standout among the current recruiting class is Dalen Penson, a 5-foot-10, 165-pound cornerback from Sandy Creek High School. Penson is a four-star prospect and would be Tech’s 11th-highest ranked recruit since 2000, according to 247Sports, should he sign.
Duke, Louisville, Kentucky, North Carolina, Notre Dame and Penn State were among the schools recruiting Penson, also a quarterback during the 2023 season who threw for more than 1,000 yards and ran for more than 800. Penson is a reigning state champion in both the 110-meter hurdles (14.05) and triple jump (49 feet, 5-1/2 inches).
The secondary as a whole has been an area of focus for Tech. Three-star defensive backs Fenix Felton (Eagles Landing Christian Academy), Rasean Dinkins (Warner Robins) and Jayden Barr (Eastside-Covington) committed this month, along with Penson.
Tech also has ventured outside the state to build its class with players like running back Isaiah Groves from Cross Plains, Tennessee, offensive lineman Kevin Peay from Lancaster, South Carolina, and tight end Kevin Roche from Darien, Connecticut. Groves ran for an astounding 3,085 yards in 15 games last season and totaled at least 20 yards on the ground in eight of those contests. Roche is a 6-foot-9 lacrosse player who recently shifted his athletic focus toward football.
In April, Oklahoma quarterback Grady Adamson committed to Tech. Five of Tech’s 17 commits hail from outside Georgia.
“Georgia Tech’s a national brand,” Key said recently on The Nat Coombs Show podcast. “The GT that I wear so proudly, that’s recognized everywhere. There’s a lot of places that might have an animal as a mascot or a fancy little slogan or whatever it is, but that could be a high school team, a college, professional, we don’t know. Well GT is a national brand and a national logo, and it’s recognized everywhere. So we do have the ability to reach out and be a national product when it comes to recruiting.”
Sunday marks the end of a quiet period on the recruiting calendar and Monday begins a monthlong dead period. That stretch ends the same day, July 24, that the Jackets begin preseason practice ahead of the 2024 opener against Florida State in Dublin, Ireland, on Aug. 24.
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