Rivals Five-Star Camp provides unique access and content

104 select national high school prospects all converged on Jacksonville on Tuesday to participate in the Rivals Five-Star Camp - an opportunity for The Osceola and other Rivals sites to meet, evaluate, interview, and develop relationships that will serve reader’s interest for recruiting information.

The group of prospects included 2026 quarterback commitments Brady Smigiel from Los Angeles, California and 2025 Tramell Jones, from nearby Jacksonville Mandarin. More than 20 of the 5-Star Camp attendees hold Florida State offers, are serious recruiting targets or are committed. They include: Shamar Arnoux, Zion Grady, Daylan McCutcheon, Derrek Cooper, Max Buchanan, J’Zavien Currence, Bryce Fitzgerald, legacy athletes Corbyn Fordham and Devin Carter - and many more.

These recruiting events are quite the logistical operation with flight arrangements having to be made, hotel rooms, conference rooms, use of the Jacksonville Jaguars training facility, a reservation at Top Golf for a player-only event and a room full of Rivals swag.

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“Rivals was really the first media company to put together a camp series, so we’ve looked at it through the lens of a media company,” said Josh Helmholdt, Vice President of Rivals Operations. “The reason we put the camps together was to celebrate the athlete as elite players but also to create unique content.”

Helmholdt emphasized that the Five-Star Camp is really a celebration of the athlete as well as an opportunity for them to make lifelong friendships.

“I was just out in the foyer talking to Adam Brenneman, who is here doing some media with us and he was talking about the guys he remembers from his class,” Helmholdt said. “He was a Rivals100 member back in the day. We were talking about the lifelong relationships he made here, guys who go on to play college together play NFL together, and the first time they met was at the Rivals Five-Star Camp.”

“When we first set up the Five-Star, it was really to bring the top players in the country to be able to go head to head against each other,” Helmholdt continued. “When a lot of these kids play high school football there’s very few other Division I prospects on the field. Unless you get an IMG Academy versus Miami Central you won’t have that quality of talent but not all the way across the field. That was really the genesis of the Five-Star Camp.”

Rivals wondered what it would look like if they brought the top players to one spot, put them in an NFL facility, and let them go at it. And that’s exactly why Florida State QB commit Tramell Jones was in California a week ago at the Elite11 Finals and now here at the Five-Star Camp.

“Competing against other high-level quarterbacks, competing against the best of the best in the country, showing what I have,” said Tramell. “Show I can put the ball in tight positions, my accuracy, arm strength, the timing piece, just being able to go out and compete and show the country what I can do.”

The camps also allow these 15, 16 and 17 year-old elite athletes who share so much in common to interact with others going through the same process.

“The BEST part of the camps are the relationships you build with the other players,” said FSU target Byron Louis. “It’s just good to pick everyone’s brain, see how they think, how they process. I think that’s the BEST part of these camps, not necessarily doing cone drills because every one of us can run the cones or pass routes. We all got here off of our ability but ultimately, I think the best part of this is getting to know these guys because you never know - these may be your future teammates or people you may coach with. You never know; they may become your best friends.”

Each of the players we talked with agreed with Louis.

“Camps do a lot of (relationship building),” Tramell Jones said. “A lot of people come from different backgrounds, different families, different personalities. At the Elite11, we talked about mind, body and soul, connecting yourself with each other. I think I’ve built a lot of friendships that can go a long way and I think camps also do that for you as well. Having that network. Being able to connect with people, those relationships. It’s not about what you know, it’s about who you know.”

Being able to spend as much time as needed with a prospect, without interruption, was a rare opportunity for sites like The Osceola to dive deeper into the recruiting process and develop deeper relationships with the prospect than on a typical recruiting visit when time for the media is limited. Listening in on Florida State prospect’s interviews with competitive schools also adds context and insight to the process.

“We are a media company so the opportunity to have the Top 100 high school prospects in the country, wearing the Rivals gear, sharing the details of their recruitment with the Rivals analysts, the Rivals team sites and personnel certainly gives us a unique insight into their recruiting process,” Helmholdt said. “Ultimately this event is for the players but our audience - the fans - benefit from it as well as they get to see the videos, the interviews, and the insight on the recruitments that only the Five-Star Camp can provide.”

When Helmholdt started in journalism, covering college athletics, it was pretty much just print media.

“Now there are a number of mediums in which information, events, are brought to the fans,” Helmholdt said. “The Five-Star Camp is able to tap into all of those mediums whether that’s podcasts, video, replays, action shots, social media and still the written word.”

While Rivals already has a relationship with many of these kids, the Five-Star Camp fosters growth and evolution of that relationship.

“They get to experience this, experience an NFL facility with the other top players from around the country, and that’s not something they will soon forget and that does endear them to the Rivals brand,” Helmholdt said. “The Five-star really sets rivals apart in their ability to do that.”