ARTICLES OF INTEREST
This is a funny article about high school athletic recruiting videos - Read Article

This is a good article on attending summer college camps. Many families inquire about the effectiveness of college camps for recruiting purposes and I wanted to cover that topic for a bit. - Read Article - You can read my article here as well. Summer Camps

I love articles like this one. Talk about a kid with a plan - Read Article

PLEASE NOTE: Some articles are taken off-line by various media outlets especially some of the online newspaper sites.

NEXT STEP MAGAZINE
Gap Year—Are you ready to take a break?
If you need a break from school before starting college, start planning now for a "gap year" after graduation
By Phyllis M. Hanlon - Read Article

ODDS N ENDS
From the don't give up category. Olin Browne a professional golfer was at a sectional qualifier for a spot in the US Open. After shooting a first round 73 he sought out an official and asked how to withdraw from round two. It's a good thing he didn't. Browne went out in round two and shot a 59 and qualified. Half of life is simply showing up and there is always another day! AFter Day 1 of the US Open, guess who was tied for the lead? Of course you know the answer by now!

A Boston College basketball player was recently arrested for trying to use a counterfeit 20-dollar bill. Here is a quote from BC Coach Al Skinner - "I could have a counterfeit bill and wouldn't know it," he said. "If he's guilty, he's got way more problems than a basketball scholarship." 6 Days later another freshman player was arrested for smoking marijuana in the woods on campus and then immediately suspended from the university through the fall and possibly forever.

A top singles tennis player from Massachusetts was disqualified from the state finals after his opponent realized that his coach was not present. Turns out the boys head coach told him that he would not be able to attend the match and that he would send the assistant who never showed. MIAA rules state that a coach must be present in case of injury. Several parents offered to sit in as coaches as this was not a team event but a singles match that had been rescheduled at a private tennis club. What life lesson is learned by this ruling and is anyone better for it?

Non-athletic advice of the month - Whatever you do when you arrive at college freshman year, when you see the credit card table with the free hats, water bottles and T-shirts, run for your life! If you really need a credit card, you can’t afford it and unbeknown to many people is that colleges make money every time you use your credit card because companies pay them commissions. That’s why schools are so eager to have those companies on campus pushing cards. The more you spend, the more they make.

I was reading an article about a player who received a bunch of letters from different college coaches, and how the player was surprised that the schools didn’t follow up with him after they sent the letters. The letters are meant for you to follow up with them. It isn’t a one-way street. Coaches send out a few thousand and hope 20 or 30 kids contact them because of the letters. If they get one recruit that way, it’s worth it.

The NCAA recently adjusted several graduation rate scores for NCAA schools and 20 teams that had initially passed the requirements were moved to the not passed list! Football is the leader with 61 teams that have not earned a passing graduation rate score as of yet.

Just how does one become interested in becoming a men’s lacrosse goalie?

There is no end to what some people will do for money. I came across a recruiting company developing the following program to sell to counselors - We have not forgotten the Guidance Counselor either. The groundwork has already been laid for a program which will assist the high school guidance counselor insure that all student-athletes are working towards initial eligibility…….A program????? Here is the program. - Go to www.ncaaclearinghouse.net, look up the list of approved core courses that the NCAA will accept from your high school, register for those courses, and work hard to ensure a passing grade until you have completed the 14 core courses necessary for NCAA D1 and D2 eligibility. I am not sure what else you need to do as the Clearinghouse and the NCAA clearly spell out what classes you need to pass and what grades and test scores you need to have to be eligible. If you are failing courses or taking all cooking classes, you are not working towards eligibility and you don’t need a booklet or guide to know that’s not a good thing! If you are a counselor you simply need to match up the acceptable courses on the NCAA clearinghouse site with the courses your students want to take.

ADMISSION CHANCES
We often speak about how you can use athletics to gain an advantage over regular applicants to schools. It is still possible to do this, but there is a growing trend (at least here in New England) that schools are placing less emphasis on athletic talent and more emphasis on academic talent than ever before.

To articulate this, a friend of mine played golf with a D3 baseball coach from Massachusetts in May and was talking about recruiting. The coach said that admissions only gave him two kids on his list this year and both kids had a 1350 SAT. The two kids had been accepted to Harvard and Penn already as well and admissions at this school felt they were doing the coach a “favor” by letting these two kids in. If you want to attend school in New England at some of the smaller private schools located here, you better come out with all guns blazing and enough academic and athletic talent to knock the socks off admissions. You also might want to consider having a part-time job, working in a soup kitchen, volunteering at church, and being a world-class pianist as well! There are no guarantees around here and many schools are turning away the best and brightest students that apply. While athletics can be your “hook” in this day and age, athletic skill simply isn’t going to be enough as many of these elite private schools are requiring athletes to be extremely close (if not as good) academically to non-athletes that are applying. While your athletic skill can open some doors, there are many other factors to consider.

TIME COMMITMENT
A college student I was speaking to recently said they chose D3 athletics because they didn’t want athletics in college to rule their life. I thought that was a good decision on her part, but I asked her a few more questions. I started asking her about practice requirements, time commitments, and number of games played etc. turns outs she plays and practices as much as I did in college when I was at a D1 university. In fact, I started looking at the schedules of some D3 teams and found they had as many games scheduled as many other D1 colleges. I think there is a common misconception that all D1 teams are run like pro organizations and all D3 teams practice a few days a week and sometimes play games. First off, the NCAA mandates how often and how much you can practice, so a more intense D1 program cannot really practice any more than a small program (without getting in trouble). The big difference usually comes in travel as many large programs fly a thousand miles to play one game. If you think playing D3 athletics will be an easy way out, I would caution you that this might not be the case. All programs are different and most D3 coaches I have met take their athletic program very seriously. You will find instances of some programs having less rigorous game and practice schedules as compared to other programs, but you need to research this on an individual school/program basis and not simply assume that all D1 programs run boot camps and all D3 programs high school level programs. In the end most D1 teams will play more games, but the practice requirements will be pretty similar. One of the things we tell people is that sports that play more games will have more time commitments. Think about it, a football player plays one game a week on Saturday. If it’s away they may leave Friday. If it’s home they won’t leave at all. During baseball season in college, we usually had Monday off, played 2 to 3 games during the week, and played 2 games on Saturday and one game on Sunday. While the football team is practicing for 3 hours a day, I was on a bus at noon driving an hour and a half to a game, and getting back at 9PM at night. That’s a 9-hour day followed by some 6-hour days for home games. This doesn’t compare to a 3-hour day of practice if you are talking about time commitment. So you simply cannot look at division and assume your time commitments won’t be as great. It’s really about an individual sport and program you are involved in at a particular school. Some schools happen to play all their games an hour from campus and others have to travel 500 miles to play one game.

NEWS ON INDIVIDUAL COLLEGES
The NCAA has banned MacMurray College (D3) men’s tennis program from outside competition for two years for providing impermissible financial aid to international student-athletes. The NCAA found that over 4 years the coach arranged $160,000 worth of payments and scholarships to 10 students.

Congradulations to Marist, Harvard, Rhode Island and Quinnipiac baseball for making it the NCAA bracket of 64. Size, weather, and the lack of national exposure for your baseball program was certainly against you. Harvard lost their first game to Call Fullerton 19-0 and Quinipiac lost a game 35-8 to Miami of Ohio. Like I often say, “there are Division 1 schools and then there are Division 1 schools.” Knowing the difference is pretty important.

Congradulations to Northwestern women’s lacrosse for winning the NCAA championship. The program has only been a varsity program since 2002. Now that’s progress!

Holy Cross, Worcester MA (D1) is making the SAT/ACT test optional for applicants for the class of 2006. They join several Massachusetts colleges that have an SAT optional admissions policy including Mount Holyoke, Mount Ida, and Wheaton College. This is a big step for a school like this.

The Rollins College women won their third straight NCAA title……by 35 strokes!

Looking for a fledging lacrosse program. The Umass Men’s team knocked off Syracuse before losing to John’s Hopkins in the quarter final. The Stonehill women captured their second NCAA D2 title in 3 years! I will cover some additional lacrosse topics in the next two months, but with the popularity of lacrosse at the high school level now, it is creating more parity a the college level.

DECIDING ON MAJORS
We talked about this a few months ago but I wanted to address it again. One source of contention for high school students is deciding on a major and I want you to know you don’t have to pick a major in high school. However, it’s important to understand what you like and don’t like, and what you might like and might not like. It is also important to know how committed you are. Entering a biology or an engineering program in college will be much more rigorous than studying English or Business Management, so while one important part of college is selecting an area of interest, the other important part of that is determining how committed you are to that area of interest. A friend of a friend I know just spent 4 years getting her psychology degree at night while she worked in the day. She already went to college years ago so this was her second time back. Her classes were long and hard but she kept at it. She finally got her degree after 4 years of night school and studying on weekends and her concentration was on child psychology. After working several weeks in her field with kids, something really interesting happened. She quickly realized that not only did she not want to work with kids; she didn’t want to be a psychologist at all.

While it was hard to predict how she would feel, it brings me back to the story of Matt Nuzzi that we often tell. Matt had possible aspirations to be a physical therapist so his dad got him into a therapy clinic in order to observe and interact with some people that did physical therapy for a living. After a few weeks of this, Matt realized that physical therapy wasn’t’ the career for him, and he decided he wanted to major in business. After making this decision, he was able to cross off all the schools on his list of possible schools to attend that didn’t offer a business major, and slowly he narrowed down his choices. Not every student has the ability to do this, but I have to believe if there is something you are remotely interested in, there is someone who knows someone who does that for a living that would be more than happy to sit down with you and talk more about what they do. Had my friends friend spent some time in a child psychology clinic before enrolling in school for 4 years, perhaps she would have realized that it wasn’t the career for her and she could have saved herself the trouble of going to school for 4 years getting a degree in a field she didn’t want to be in. It was a learning experience for sure, but a long and expensive one that could have possibly been avoided.

Many coaches you meet with will ask you what you are interested in studying and some coaches will be turned off if you say “I have no idea.” – If you really have no idea, I would suggest you lie to them and say something like – “There are a few areas of interest I have [insert at least two of them here] and after a year I think I will be able to decide which major I would like to pursue more. It would also be a good idea to make sure the school you are meeting with when you say this actually offers the programs you mentioned. Remember, nothing is set in stone but coaches want to know that you have given your academic career some thought.

KEEPING UP WITH COACHES
There will be times when you think coaches will not be interested in you but it’s important to understand that it usually isn’t personal. And, as we have stated time and time again, it’s extremely important to treat all coaches you come in contact with, with as much respect as you can humanly muster (and a little more), as you never know what events may change their recruiting needs. Last month I read two stories that highlight this fact. In May 3 players from the University of North Carolina basketball team declared themselves eligible for the NBA draft, one of them being freshman Marvin Williams who didn’t even start for the team. Later I learned that 2 players on the Boston College men’s basketball team decided to transfer because they weren’t getting the playing time they expected. Next year, they won’t get much playing time either as they sit out a year as a transfer student if they go to another Division 1 school. BC is returning 4 starters next year and only 6 players, so now coach Skinner has to recruit about 7-8 players, where many coaches might only have to recruit 2 or 3 players. He may have to recruit even more if you read the odds n ends! Most coaches recruit on need and Coach Skinner’s “NEEDS” have changed overnight. In this case, there are players he may be now interested in re-recruiting that he didn’t have room for a few months ago.

THE CHANGING LANDSAPE OF COLLEGE ATHLETICS
In March the New York Times ran an interesting article about a retiring college basketball coach. The article talked about how recruiting in the 70’s was open auditions at schools where a 150 kids would show up and simply try-out and it was easier for coaches and for kids. The article went on to discuss how that activity has been replaced by having to attend 30 AAU events and showcases each summer, by having to buy recruiting guides for 300 dollars only to find out the guides don’t have a key piece of information like year of graduation on the players. Then once you got in contact with a kid, you had to have someone sitting at a computer 24 hours a day in case the recruit wants to instant message with you at 1AM. In a nutshell the article was about how it was time to leave the game, because recruiting (a big piece of the puzzle) had gotten totally out of control and become one big commercial enterprise. This is something I have heard from a lot of coaches in the past few years, how the system of recruiting is hard on families and often hard on themselves. Some coaches have said they could go to a showcase or some tournament every day of the week for an entire year if they wanted to. Part of the problem is they can’t, but the kids still have to go because they are trying to “be discovered”. This has turned recruiting and “being discovered” into a 365 day a year endeavor that has 13 year old baseball players playing 120 games a year of travel ball because if they don’t someone else will get their scholarship in 4 years. It has kids attending 10 showcases and 7 college camps in a summer because if they don’t someone else might get noticed.


 
 
 
 
 

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