Most who follow college sports, particularly the recruiting side of it, have heard or read the new terminology.

Virtual visits. Zoom tours. Online officials. Whatever you want to call them, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the traditional rite of passage of the campus visit has been replaced with a remote version via video conferencing.

“A lot of times when you have different things like this in the world, you just have to figure it out,” first-year James Madison men’s basketball coach Mark Byington said. “We’ve had to learn very, very fast how to do it.”

In some ways, both players and coaches consider themselves fortunate modern technology allows the process to continue even with coronavirus leading to a shutdown of all in-person recruiting activities.

But how exactly to use the available resources is something everyone is learning on the fly. A typical video chat to talk and get to know one another is relatively easy, but when it comes time to show off the campus and facilities, things are a little bit different.

Some high school recruits say they’ve seen various kinds of pre-produced videos that substitute for campus tours.

“They like to show videos of the campus,” Andrew McConnell, a rising senior guard from Georgia, told the Daily News-Record after a Zoom visit with JMU. “Sometimes they use drones.”

Byington has tried a variety of methods, even occasionally walking around campus with his phone to show players and their families as much as he can of JMU.

“There were times a month or so ago where you might have seen me holding my phone up in the air,” Byington said. “I was just saying ‘look at how great this building looks,’ because I haven’t been on my official tour yet either.”

Being in his first year at JMU has created some additional challenges for Byington and his staff. For Dukes’ women’s coach Sean O’Regan, his staff is actively trying to fill out its 2021 recruiting class with players they, for the most part, have been following for years.

That means many of them have already visited JMU or at least have a deeper sense of what the program and community are like.

“Some of them just asked for a Zoom or FaceTime call,” O’Regan said. “Some of them have been here a couple of times. So it all kind of depends on where they are at with it. But it is a totally different way to recruit. We’ve had to adapt very quickly.”

For O’Regan that has meant preparing more online presentations and video packages that can be shown via video chat. But there have been other adjustments.

“We’ve spent a lot of time with the 2021 class and Zooms, but for the 2022s, not as much,” O’Regan said. “I think they are going to have a chance to come to campus. I like that because my style is more face-to-face, getting to know them. I didn’t use video very much at all on an on-campus visit, so we really had to ramp that up. It’s hard. You don’t get as much with body language and seeing where their interest is and what makes them perk up.”

At this point, it seems as though coaches have risen to the challenge.

“It’s something we weren’t very good at first,” Byington said. “We had to learn quickly. We’ve already had experience with eight guys committing to our program without having set foot on campus or meeting face-to-face. We’ve had to become good at it.”

While it is expected that official campus visits will once again become a crucial part of the recruiting process at some point, coaches believe the new kind of video visit won’t completely go away.

“This way of using Zoom of different forms of communications, it’s not going to go away even when the coronavirus is set back,” Byington said. “I’ve gotten better at it. In the long term, this technology is going to be good for us.”