Alexandre on flipping to Pitt: "I knew it was where I wanted to be"
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Deslin Alexandre made a decision about his future on Friday, and it wasn’t an easy one.
"It was the hardest decision I've ever had to make," he told Panther-Lair.com. "But I was praying on it all week long. It was just the whole feeling I had there."
The decision? Whether to stand by his six-month commitment and enroll at N.C. State in January or follow the feelings he had on his official visit to Pitt last weekend and join the Panthers.
To make the decision, the Deerfield Beach (Fla.) defensive end prospect consulted his parents, who visited both schools with him, and his coach. He prayed about it and tried to consider every angle of each opportunity. But when it came down to it, Alexandre knew what the answer was for him.
"When I was there, I knew it was where I wanted to be," he said Friday night, shortly after announcing that he was flipping his commitment to Pitt.
“It was really about how, when I went there, the feeling I got when I was there,” he said. “It was a home feeling and I really liked being with the coaches and the players.”
While Alexandre’s willingness to visit indicated an interest in Pitt, he said he viewed the trip to Pittsburgh as nothing more than an all-expense-paid weekend excursion. But that was before he landed and started experiencing the city, the school, the football program and the people.
“I thought I was just going to take a visit to check it out,” he said. “I thought I would see something different and that would be it.
“But in life, you have to make the best decision. I could see on the visit that this was the best decision.”
Still, Alexandre took the better part of a week to finalize his decision. And he actually intended for the decision to come later than it did.
“I didn’t know I was going to do it today,” he said Friday night. “It just happened. I was planning for Monday. But I talked to my coach and my parents, it just came down to knowing where I wanted to go.”
Alexandre said that Pitt defensive line coach Tom Sims and head coach Pat Narduzzi also played a big part in his decision.
“Coach Sims is a great dude. He had a lot of knowledge of the defensive line and a lot to share. I can’t wait to learn from him.
“And I love Coach Narduzzi. He’s a great leader and a fiery guy. He knows how to get everybody motivated and he’s a great coach. People go off his energy, and I could tell that from watching him and from hearing coaches and players talk about him. The players says he goes out of his way to make sure you’re good.”
Alexandre is the third recruit to commit from the official visit weekend, joining Palm Beach Gardens (Fla.) offensive lineman Jerry Drake and USC grad transfer quarterback Max Browne. He is the second defensive end prospect to commit to Pitt in the 2017 recruiting class, along with Worthington (Oh.) Kilbourne’s Carson Van Lynn, and the Panthers now have four commitments from the state of Florida: Alexandre, Drake, American Heritage receiver Dontavius Butler and St. Thomas Aquinas linebacker Albert Tucker.
In total, Pitt’s commitment list for the class of 2017 stands at 18.