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June 2006 Varsityedge.com newsletter - Newsletter Homepage
I had the good fortune of being interviewed by a NY Times reporter last month. The article appears today (Sunday) on page 5 of the business section in an article entitled: A New Competitive Sport: Grooming the Child Athlete, By Jen Alsever. You need an online account to read it. ARTICLE
ARTICLES
Article on NESCAC recruiting. Read
NEWS ON INDIVIDUAL COLLEGES
The University of Delaware has dropped their binding early decision application program.
George Mason University has made the SAT and ACT test for applications optional for some applicants. The criteria are as follows.
- Student must have achieved a minimum cumulative high school grade point average of 3.5 on a 4.0 scale (grades 9-11)
- Students must have pursued a challenging academic curriculum and place in the top 20% of his or her high school class. Challenging curriculum is demonstrated, where available, by a significant number of IB and/or AP courses (or by the most challenging courses available in schools with few of these courses). To guard against grade inflation, the high school counselor must estimate class placement in the top 20% in cases where class rank is not supplied.
The NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions has placed California State University (Fresno), on four years of probation for recruiting violations and lack of institutional control. The committee also penalized a former head coach for impermissible phone calls he and his staff made to prospective student-athletes.
St. Johns, NY men’s hoops was placed on 2 years probation and will lose one scholarship for 2 years for improper payments to a former player.
The NCAA banned new Indiana coach Kelvin Sampson from calling recruits and visiting them off-campus for one year on Thursday. He is allowed to send email and text messages and his assistant coaches can call recruits and he is also allowed to receive calls. Basically, the ban means nothing. The ban is a result of Sampson and his former coaching staff making (gulp!) 577 illegal recruiting calls when he was coaching at Oklahoma.
Merrimack College (D2, Massachusetts) said it would freeze tuition for the class of 2010.
Casey Martin, the golfer that fought the PGA Tour to use a golf cart because of a severe leg problem, has been named the new golf coach at the University of Oregon.
The University of Hartford baseball team opened play on its new on-campus field March 29.
Northwestern University suspended its women’s soccer team while the school is in the process of investigating some hazing allegations from last year and placed members of the mens swim team on probation for similar events.
New Jersey Institute of Technology will make their Division I debut in men’s basketball in 2006-07.
Siena College unveiled plans for a newly renovated athletic field to include an artificial playing surface, lights and 1,000 seats worth of bleachers for use in lacrosse and field hockey. The Siena men's and women's lacrosse as well as field hockey teams hope to call the field home next season. The field also can serve as a practice facility for the men's and women's soccer teams and be used for the school's intramural programs.
The Women's Lacrosse team from the State University of New York, Potsdam enjoyed a full day of surfing and relaxing in the Florida sunshine with Florida Surf Lessons. They choose surfing with Florida Surf Lessons as their perfect way to end the week after a full 5 days of spring lacrosse training in Palm Beach.
Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., are investigating sports teams for two alleged hazing incidents. Catholic is investigating its women's lacrosse program. Quinnipiac is looking into photos allegedly taken during an "initiation party" for members of the school's baseball team
Georgia Tech lost an NCAA appeal to restore lost football scholarships for past violations but will get to keep its 1998 ACC championship. The school lost 6 football scholarships in 2006-07 and 2007-08, so the team will only have 79 football scholarships available as opposed to 85. Men’s track and field will be reduced to 3.9 scholarships and 2 scholarships for women’s track and field for 2006-07
A few local colleges made some news in the college scene. Wheaton College D3 won two games in one day and earned a shot at the national championship against Marietta and eventually lost in the final game. Franklin Pierce D2 played The University of Tampa in the D2 semi-finals and lost 11-3. Lee Cruz of Tampa hit his 25th home run of the year tying him with Tino Martinez and had his 92nd and 93rd RBI of the year breaking the Tampa record. Umass Amherst advanced to the finals of the NCAA D1 lacrosse championship but were unable to come away with the victory in the final game. Perhaps the best story was Manhattan College baseball making the NCAA tournament for the first time in 49 years and beating The University of Nebraska in their first game, which was the 6th seed in the tournament. To rub it in a little more, the game was played in Nebraska and they were the host school for that region. Manhattan eventually lost to Miami on the following day.
COACHING CHANGES
Bob Boldon is new assistant basketball coach at Minnesota
Scott Wiercinski is new soccer coach at Chicago
Melanie Halker is new assistant basketball coach at Dayton
Peter Thompson is new swimming coach at Rochester
Greg Smith is new assistant volleyball coach at Notre Dame
Peter Hughes is leaving Boston College to take the head baseball job at Virginia Tech a rival ACC school.
ODD’S N ENDS
For all the emphasis placed on going to the best schools with the best names, according to collegegrad.com, the college one attended ranked dead last on the list of factors employers looked for in a candidate. Major ranked first so I am already a little skeptical and computer skills and personal appearance ranked low, making me more skeptical.
Be careful what you read. I was reading an article in the Boston Globe last week and it said a certain athlete had received a scholarship to Hamilton College. While that athlete may have received some financial aid or grants, Hamilton is a D3 college and D3 colleges do not award athletic scholarships but the way it was written could lead one to assume that the scholarship was athletic-based because the article was about athletics.
The NCAA is about to release a list of high schools and prep schools that are suspected of having lax academic standards and making transcripts from those schools unacceptable for NCAA eligibility.
Perusing a message board in May, I found a young man holding out for an offer from the school he really wanted to attend. It is the end of May and the young man is graduating in a month and college classes start in 3 months. If the college hasn’t made you an offer by now, it’s safe to say they won’t be making an offer. Time to move on and refocus your efforts.
The state of Connecticut has adopted a new rule in high school football that will suspend HS coaches whose team wins by more than 50 points.
Now that text messaging is becoming a main-stream recruiting tool for many college coaches, here are some basics. A college coach cannot send you a text message till you are a junior. Unlike phone calls, when you are junior, a coach can send you as many text messages at any time he/she wants to as there are currently no restrictions. As text messaging soon gets out of control, the NCAA will inevitably jump in and impose some sort of rules and restrictions.
Baylor University must have a fairly good baseball program, they had 9 players drafted in the major league draft, but I can do one better, Cal State Fullerton had 14 players drafted.
New Jersey became the first state to have mandatory steroid testing for high school athletes. Athletes who qualify for team or individual championships me be randomly tested. Any positive test will mean a one-year loss of eligibility.
In high school our baseball team had a play called “you claude”. It was usually run when we had a runner on 2nd and third or maybe first and third. The play called for the runner from second to take off for third after a pitch and act confused and sometimes fall down and try to scamper back to the base with the goal of getting the other teams catcher to fire the ball down to second while the runner from third tries to score. My high school had the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth inning last week in the state tournament and ran that play. Yada, yada, yada, their season is now over….
SIZE MATTERS NOT
May brought the retirement of Doug Flutie from the National Football League. Flutie began his career at Boston College (the only school to recruit him) where the coach decided to give him a shot playing quarterback despite being only 5’9”. Flutie did ok at BC as he eventually broke the NCAA passing yardage record, won the Heisman Trophy, and engineered one of the biggest upsets and greatest finishes in NCAA football history when he completed a 60-yard TD pass the day after Thanksgiving to beat the University of Miami with no time left on the clock in a nationally televised game. Flutie went on to the USFL, the CFL and eventually the NFL where he had a “brief” 21-year career. What I like best about Flutie is that he is a better person than he is an athlete.
HAZING
With the recent hazing allegations against several universities flying around the media, now might be a good time to address that a bit. Hazing by athletic teams (and many other groups in society) has been going on forever and hazing is not increasing in college. What is increasing is people’s possession of digital camera’s, cell phones with camera’s and video and people’s desire to share their life with millions of other people on sites like myspace.com.
Hazing can range from relatively harmless activities like dressing up in funny clothes and dancing around and scavenger hunts to drinking dangerous amounts of alcohol and doing some questionable things with your body. I would imagine almost every athletic team at every college in the country has some form of “team bonding” event during the season for new players. Most events are harmless but every once in a while something bad happens and it ends up on ESPN. I can’t tell you what you should and shouldn’t do when you get to college and are confronted with your team bonding activity, but I will say this. Most of the players getting initiated feel compelled to participate because they think the other players on the team won’t like or respect them if they choose not to. Without going into detail, I passed on a few activities in college and my attitude was simply this, “If I have to do that to be friends with this person or respected by this person, then I don’t want that person as my friend.” What you do or don’t do will be soon forgotten anyway. So my advice is this, if it’s harmless laugh and have fun with your team. If you think something bad will result, you have every right to question your participation.
DON’T DO THIS
Sometimes I wonder if recruiting dirt finds me or if I find recruiting dirt. This weekend I was talking to a summer coach about a problematic player he kind of had to put on his team. I asked him what made the player “problematic”. He said, “well, the player was a freshman in college this year at [a small D1 school], and not only was he complaining to the coach that he wasn’t playing more, but his father was calling the coach and complaining as well. Then, at the end of the year the player went into the coaches office and told him he was interested in “looking around” at other schools. The coach got pissed and offered the player his release right then and there. The player freaked out and said, ‘no, no, I am not sure, I just want to look’. Coach said, “sorry, I am giving you your release.” Now the father had to call back again and grovel with the coach to take his son back on the team for another year.”
There are two morals to this story. One, coaches always try to put the best team on the field and if your son or daughter is not playing there are only two reasons; they haven’t displayed enough talent to warrant their play yet or other people are working harder and are more deserving. The last thing a college coach needs is you calling and telling them how to do their job. The second moral of the story is that while you can express your desire for more playing time with a dialogue with the coach, (the player that is). Don’t ever tell a coach that you are interested in “looking around.” There is no good that can come out of that.
These are excerpts from a September 2005 article in the NY Times.
In Recruiting, a Big Push From Small Colleges, Too
By BILL PENNINGTON
Published: September 11, 2005
- "Of 1,000 I've contacted, about half will reply," Bergin said. "About half that reply will be academically qualified. About half of them will be truly interested in Haverford. About half of them will be actually good enough to play volleyball for us. About half of that group will apply for admission. About half of them will get accepted. And about half of them will decide to come here.
- Another relic of college recruiting's past is the significance of a high school player's senior season. Beccaria and the other Haverford teams' coaches complete their serious evaluations by the summer after a player's junior season. This year, most of the Haverford coaches had identified their top 20 players by Aug. 15. With the push to get applications in for early decision on Nov. 15, or by the regular decision deadline of Jan. 15, an athlete's senior season can be almost irrelevant.
- Beccaria and his coaching colleagues rarely scout individual high school games. The image of a weary, grizzled coach driving from one dusty high school ballpark to another is a nostalgic artifact.
- "There are the girls who say, 'Well, I'm a Division I talent,' " Bergin said. "And I think, 'Forget it.' I don't need the attitude. I've got to spend four years with these girls. I cross girls off my list all the time because I think they'll be high maintenance."
- Bergin, whose three-year record at Haverford is 59-33, cautiously considers the 15 to 20 e-mail messages or mailings she receives from recruiting services every week. Recruiting services are private enterprises that charge a fee to mass-market a high school athlete to various colleges. They have become increasingly popular, even in the more obscure sports. Bergin finds the services useful, but she thinks parents are spending too much money on them. "You just laugh at some of the professional videos I get with their Hollywood special effects," she said. "It's so unnecessary. Just give me a few skills highlights, and then I want to see a simple game tape. I've seen enough girls hitting balls as 'Eye of the Tiger' plays in the background to last a lifetime."
- He does not do mass mailings trolling for recruits. A three-year starter at Duke and a former assistant coach at Brown, Virginia and Penn, Murphy relies on his contacts and his own eye. In June, at a camp at the Brunswick School in Greenwich, Conn., Murphy surveyed 150 players over six hours of play. He wrote down the name of one player.
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