ODD’S N ENDS

So you want to be a college athlete? After a loss to a weaker opponent a parent emailed me and said the coach made the players run for two hours in the gym starting at 3AM when the got back to campus after a 6-hour bus ride home from an away game. I won’t even comment on what I think about this.

I was reading an article about interviews at colleges that student take. One athlete started telling a story about how he broke into his neighbor’s kitchen and took some food because they were hungry and how funny it was that the neighbor still doesn’t know. Needless to say, the student wasn’t admitted to the school. Try to leave that type of story out when you go on your interviews!

The NCAA is reporting that graduation rates for student-athletes are up. Well, actually they aren’t really up, the NCAA is just counting the numbers differently and now counting student-athletes that transfer to another college whereas programs were penalized for this in the past. The current number is around 75% factoring in students who transfer while in good academic standing from their first school for all D1 athletes.

Columbia University has hired the first African-American Ivy League football coach named Norries Wilson. Wilson was an assistant at U-conn since 1999 and the team’s offensive coordinator since 2001. Best of luck!

Could someone please explain to me how difficult it is to make a lay-up during warm-up for a high school basketball game? I went to my friends game last week and 6 players in a row on both teams missed a lay-up with no one guarding them and half the time it’s because they are trying slap the backboard, which I thought went out in the late nineties as being cool. If I am a college recruiter in the stands and a player I am interested in cannot get the ball into the hoop with no one guarding him, then I might have serious questions about that player when the actual game starts. Some players would rather look good and play bad than look bad and play good, and those are usually the players missing lay-ups before the game.

After a decline over the last few years, the popularity of applying Early Decision is picking up steam again according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

According to the Boston Globe, the population of high school students will start to go on the decline for the next several years. The ripple effect to this is that New England Colleges, both public and private, are gearing up for a big marketing push into other parts of the country to attract new students.

Wow, I found an old copy of The American College Golf Guide that I used in high school in 1990 when I was trying to pick colleges. After a quick glance, three things were apparent. One, at the time that book was not that great as an educational resource with about 40 pages of stuff available from the NCAA and 200 pages of school addresses. Two, my handwriting hasn’t improved much, and three, my list of schools I had was totally ridiculous and extremely baseless. Here is my list of schools I had written down. Uconn, Maryland, Rutgers, Seton Hall, Temple, Villanova, Virginia, William and Mary, Vanderbilt, La Salle, Boston College, Tulane, Bentley. There is only one thing I know about all those schools, everyone has heard of them and many probably had a golf program I wasn’t capable of playing at. Anyway, I got a good laugh.

Last year I was doing some work for a recruiting service called At First Glance. I was providing books for clients and I re-wrote their entire web site and all the marketing literature. The owner, Jeff LaFrance, stole 20 copies of The Making of a Student-Athlete from me, then decided he didn’t need my help anymore and cut me out of the business. A year later I had to go to court to get my book money and LaFrance ran the company into the ground bankrupting it and taking money from a few families he didn’t even help towards the end. Before the paint was dry on his bankrupt company, LaFrance has already started a new company called Premier Prospects doing the same exact thing based in a batting cage in New Hampshire that is opening soon. The entire text on his new web site is text I wrote for his old web site that he never paid me for and to make matters worse, LaFrance comes nowhere close to performing the tasks listed on his web site. So if you come across it or him, I would walk away!

Michael Vick says his brother was unfairly kicked off the Virginia Tech team. This was after 2 arrests in college, having sex with a minor, marijuana possession, reckless driving, stepping on a player intentionally in a game, and driving with a suspended license. 3 days after he got kicked off the team, he was arrested for waiving a gun at 3 teenagers in a fast food parking lot. Is there any other level of college or sport where someone would think doing this stuff shouldn’t get you kicked off the team or are we so enamored by big time college football that we should look past these “minor incidents” as boys being boys? I would have kicked him off the team for any one of those events above, but D1 college football is a business!

NEWS ON INDIVIDUAL COLLEGES

Lyon College (Arkansas) named Chris McNaughton new men's soccer coach

Methodist College (Fayetville, NC) has added lights to it's baseball field.

Middle Tennessee Head Coach Rick Stockstill announced today the hiring of Danny Lewis as the Director of Football Operations.

SIGNIG DAY

Perusing the NCAA D1 baseball signings some things stood out to me. The University of Arkansas signed 21 players in the early signing period. Their current roster lists 38 players with only 6 seniors. 32 + 21 = 53. Let’s hope a lot of these players get drafted between now and next year, like 20 of them!

THE HIDDEN SIDE OF RECRUITING
I player I am familiar with was very interested in a small D1 school and applied Early. Unfortunately he was deferred and has to wait till the regular applicant pool comes in. The player had good grades and SAT scores, but the problem was his scores looked average when compared to other early decision applicants. Had he waited till the regular admission pool he would have probably got in easily. Now here is where the back door wheeling and dealing comes into play. The player’s summer coach who has been assisting him with recruiting has many connections at his former college of which this player was also interested in. The coach bumped into a trustee of the school at a local basketball game and said he has a kid who is really interested in the school who just got deferred by another school. The coach then calls the head coach of the college whom he knows very well and tells him that this player just got weight-listed at another school and is interested in his school and the coach says if you want him I can get him in through my friend (the trustee member). Fair? Probably not! But it isn’t always what you know, but who you know and scenario’s like this happen all the time.

NOT-SO-STRONG ACADEMICS
I have been hearing that term a lot lately. “School A is interested in our son athletically but their academics are not so strong.” There is a belief in this country that students who go to strong academic colleges will be more successful than students who go to weaker ranked academic institutions and it’s creating a huge arms race to get into the top schools at any cost. Several years ago a noted economist named Alan Krueger, Professor of Economics at Princeton University, did a study on salaries and success of college graduates from different universities and he concluded that a students success is based on an individuals inherent ability (the goals, discipline, genes, and desire within them) and that the actual school someone attends has less to do with their ultimate success. The point he was trying to make was that if you work hard and apply yourself, where you go to school will have less influence on your success. Some students get caught in the trap of believing one college will be easy academically because it is not ranked high or regarded high. In reality, all colleges will be difficult and you will be required to read the same books, take the same tests, and write the same papers regardless of what college you attend. You will also have professors who take their profession seriously and expect you to apply yourself and produce results in the classroom. Ideally, you should be looking for programs you are interested in as much as schools you are interested in. Going to a strong academic school that doesn’t offer what you are truly interested in, in the end may be less beneficial for you. While some employers like to hire students from certain schools, your ultimate success will come from what you bring to the table and how hard you work to get ahead. After you are out of school for a few years and have one or two jobs under your belt, where you went to school will have a lot less meaning than what you have accomplished at your previous positions.

SO WHOSE DECISION IS IT YET ANYWAY?
One of the constant debates I get involved in is whose decision is it when ultimately selecting a college to attend, the student’s or the parents. Many will argue that if the parent is paying they need to have a say as to what school is selected and others will argue that it should ultimately be up to the student because they are the one’s that actually have to go to the school. So let the debate begin.

Sometimes in the winter when I drive by my former high school and it’s 15 degrees out, I will see students standing outside with no coat, hat or gloves on and the question I always ask myself is, if this student can’t dress themselves properly in the winter, how are they realistically going to make a decision as to what college to attend?

So my theory is this. There are some very smart and mature students in high school that are perfectly capable of making a rational decision as to what college to attend and there are others who have no idea what they are doing and have defined no real criteria for selecting a college. Should the decision ultimately be made by the student? Probably! Should mom and dad be extremely involved and be able to express their input and desires? Absolutely! Especially since you are paying. When my Dad and I looked at the University of Miami when I was in high school, he told me he had some concerns about me attending the school because he thought there would be more distractions at that type of school, given the environment and the weather. I listened to what he said and actually agreed. Since he did a lot of work in the Miami area for his job, he also had more knowledge of the school than the average person might have.

Some parents also assume that their kids don’t need any help. In The Making of a student-athlete I tell an interesting story about a friend of mine from high school. My friend had two older brothers. One was recruited for football and the parents had no real involvement in what school he chose. Her second brother applied early decision to one school and got accepted. He too didn’t need any help. When it came time for my friend, her parents assumed that she would be all set because she was a good person and a good student capable of making her own decisions. Her application process was a nightmare and she ended up enrolling in a school she didn’t really like and came home every weekend and ultimately transferred after a year.

You can’t assume your child needs help and you can’t assume they don’t need help until you get involved in the process and see how it unfolds. Since it’s a new process to your kids, you need to be involved in some capacity to make sure they are progressing.

GPA
The funniest question I fielded this month. – What GPA do I need for a Division 1 School? The answer. One that allows you to gain acceptance to the specific schools you are applying to. There are over 300 Division 1 schools and no two will have the same requirements, not to mention that your GPA is just one small factor in whether or not you get accepted especially if you are a recruited athlete. Focus on specific schools and their requirements and never lump schools together.

NCAA NEWS

• The NCAA D2 committee has adopted several new rules.
• an institution may provide non-athletically related recruiting materials to a prospect at any time.
• To permit an institution to provide an official visit to a prospective student-athlete who presents scores from a state-administered ACT.
• To permit women’s equestrian coaches to give private lessons to prospects, as specified.
• To specify that a state-administered ACT examination may be used to meet the initial-eligibility test-score requirement.
• To permit an institution to provide an official visit to a prospective student-athlete who presents scores from a state-administered ACT.
• To permit private institutions to exempt out-of-state tuition waivers from counting as institutional financial aid.
• In women’s rugby, to establish a maximum equivalency financial aid limit of 12.

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