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Academically, she finished in the top 10 percent of her class. A classic overachiever, she couldn’t think of any time when she had given up. “I’m a really honest person,” she said. “I honestly said that I had not.”
    A month later, the list of twenty girls who had been chosen to join Orange Pride for Lane Kiffin’s first season was posted outside the admissions office. The make-or-break tension felt just like trying out for an athletic team. Nervous, Henry ran her finger down the list. Her name was on it.
    Orientation began immediately. There were packets to read and endless meetings with experienced hostesses and school officials. They suggested topics of conversation with recruits (Rule No. 1: Do not talk about the weather); how to conduct a campus tour; the importance of keeping a calendar; and instructions on how to dress, apply makeup and do their hair. In the ever-important quest to land top recruits, the athletic department wanted these girls to look as attractive as possible. There were also sessions on NCAA rules governing recruiting.
    The hardest part for Henry was remembering the names and titles of all the coaches on Lane Kiffin’s staff. To get them all down, she pinned each coach’s name and title to a bulletin board above the desk in her bedroom. “I would study it every night before I went to bed,” Henry said. “I wanted to know exactly who these coaches were because when an athlete comes in—especially a top recruit, like a potential quarterback—the quarterback coach would come in and talk with them. So I had to know their names.”
    Henry was a quick study. By the start of the 2009 season, she had foundher groove with recruits. “I had no problem making these guys feel at home,” Henry said. “There was flirting. Your goal or your job is to put all your attention on your recruit when he’s there. The point of all this is no matter what the NCAA regulation is, when you have an official recruit that is torn between, say, Florida and Tennessee, your relationship is not to start and stop at the beginning of a football game. It just doesn’t work like that.”

    By the start of the 2009 season, Tennessee had turned its attention to the top high school running back in the 2010 class—Marcus Lattimore from James F. Byrnes High School in Duncan, South Carolina. At the same time, Tennessee was after two of Lattimore’s teammates, defensive stars Brandon Willis and Corey Miller. Both had attended a summer football camp at Tennessee in June 2009. Earps and another Orange Pride hostess, Dahra Johnson, met Willis and Miller at the camp. Earps and Johnson had become virtually inseparable. Johnson was the other member of Orange Pride who was offered a job in the football office. While Earps and Johnson were hanging out with Willis and Miller at the summer camp, Earps observed that one of the players had three championship rings hanging from his necklace. When she pointed that out, he responded, “You should come see us play sometime.”
    Earps and Johnson said they might just do that.
    “Our job was to flirt with them, to be honest,” said Earps. “So we said, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll come see you play.’ ”
    But Earps and Johnson weren’t serious about driving more than two hundred miles to Duncan, South Carolina, to watch a high school football game. They did, however, stay in regular contact with Willis and Miller through social media, building an online relationship much as Earps had done with Brown. By the third week of the 2009 season, the communication had intensified to a point where Earps felt as if both players were going to commit to Tennessee. They planned to visit campus on an unofficial visit on September 26 to watch the Vols play Ohio.
    But the night before—a Friday—Byrnes had a home game. Willis and Miller wanted Earps and Johnson to attend. That Thursday night, Earps Skyped with one of the players until 4:00 a.m. The last thing he said to her was “Please