NEXT STEP MAGAZINE
Loans, Grants and Scholarships?
The financial aid that’s available for college ranges from loans to grants, scholarships to work-study. - Read Article

NEWS ON INDIVIDUAL COLLEGES

Boise State broke ground on a 10 million dollar indoor practice facility

Cal Davis is working on a new 30 million dollar stadium for football and women’s lacrosse.

The Presidents' Athletic Conference announced it will add Saint Vincent College, currently a member of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics that will become a provisional Division III member in 2006-07, as its eighth league member. Conference schools will begin scheduling contests in 16 sports (eight men's and eight women's sports) against Saint Vincent in fall 2006, and the school will begin a varsity football program in 2007.

Connecticut College recently installed a new all-weather turf surface at Lyn and David Silfen Field, home to the school's field hockey and men's and women's lacrosse teams.

Uconn football is moving into a new football center. The new facility will have 120-yard indoor practice field, an 18,000-square-foot strength and conditioning room, a 120-seat auditorium and a 4,250-square-foot locker room.

ODDS N ENDS
Part of what I do is evaluating what other people are doing and how they are trying to help parents and students. I found a new book on recruiting online the other day and the back cover had the following sentence. The xxxxx xxxxxx Guide isn’t written for the “Blue Chip” prospect. They don’t need help – One of the goals of The Making of a Student-Athlete was to provide a resource for ALL high school athletes that were involved in the recruiting process. There is a common misconception that blue chip players don’t need any help and borderline athletes need all the help. Promotions and exposure while important, is only one aspect of the recruiting process, and at the end of the day, it really comes down to what criteria you use for selection and where you think you will be comfortable. If you are a blue chip prospect getting 100 offers from 100 different schools, it’s quite clear that people know who you are! The exposure aspect of your recruiting process is less important, provided you want to attend one of those 100 schools. The real problem parents and students in this position face is how do we decide out of 100 schools and that is where we tried to help since each schools is pitching the world. Many families often don’t dig deep enough when evaluating schools and the national graduation rate for student-athletes that enrolled in their first 4-year school is 60%. Somewhere along the way, 40% of all student-athletes became unhappy with some aspect of their first college choice. It could have been cost, academics, playing time, didn’t like the coach, didn’t like the players, or other factors. But, it’s usually something about the school or coaching staff that wasn’t explored enough during the recruiting process. Why, because no one taught them how to look deeper. Over the last year we have received numerous testimonials from all different kinds of people, and some of them have come from parents whose son’s or daughters were heavily recruited and received full scholarships or a significant amount of money via an athletic scholarships. The underlying theme from these parents was that while they didn’t need help with exposure, they needed help in making the right decision and that The Making of a Student-Athlete compelled them to look pas the glitz and glamour of an athletic program and ask tough questions from the school and from themselves in order to make the best decision for them. Being heavily recruited doesn’t make you any more prepared to make a decision than not being recruited at all, all it does is give you more options to choose from, and in some cases, makes the choice harder. If you are a scholarship athlete depending on your scholarship to fund your education, your decision is actually more important than someone who is paying for school on their own, because if you become unhappy or want to leave, you may not be able to if you can’t find the same deal somewhere else. A walk-on athlete paying their way can simply walk away from their sport at any time and continue their education on their own as if nothing was different.

I think the most humorous thing I have found this month is a free web-based recruiting service that bashes other fee-based web recruiting services while having Google ads on their site that promote the very same fee-based services they are denigrating. “Don’t use high priced web services, but if you happen to click on the ad on our site promoting a fee-based service we make 9 cents!” The same company has a web banner ad for free condoms. As George Costanza would say, “Serenity now!”

Jason White the former (and talented) quarterback for the Oklahoma Sooners retired in August from professional football after signing a two-year pro contract in May. White a former heisman trophy winner went undrafted in the 2005 NFL draft but signed with Tennessee after the draft. He sighted bad knees as the reason for his retirement at the ripe old age of 22. All the more reason to have a degree to fall back on.

Bumped into a friend of mine that went to my high school. He was the star football player and received a Division 1 scholarship to play at Rutgers and ultimately transferred to Boston College where he saw limited playing time but played for 3 more years. He said, “boy do my knees hurt. I am glad I stopped playing after college and I am hoping my son has no interest in football when he gets older!”

8 Months ago Jason Gore almost quit playing professional golf after a few failed stints on the PGA tour and bouncing around several mini-tours and his days consisted of whether or not he was going to be able to make his next mortgage payment. In June he found himself in the final group of the US Open then proceeded to win 3 straight Nationwide Tour events earning full status on the PGA tour for 2006. In September he won his first PGA tournament on a sponsors exemption. This leads me to an old quote I love reading from some guy who invented the light bulb. Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. - Thomas Edison

TRENDS
I have been seeing a few trends lately with companies that are vying for parents attention (and money). The MAIN one is the use of participation numbers as a means to scare a parent into purchasing some type of service. It will go something like this. There are roughly 450,000 high school baseball players in the country and roughly 130,000 seniors. There are roughly 25,000 NCAA baseball players at three divisions, which means there are roughly 6,500 freshman baseball players. Your odds of playing college baseball at the NCAA level are about 5%. There are a few pieces of information missing from this equation however. One, despite the fact that there are 130,000 senior baseball players, only a small percentage of those players will have the skills necessary to play at the college level. Take a look at your team and ask yourself how many of the seniors could really play in college? Two, not all of those 130,000 seniors will have the desire to play in college. There is a common misconception out there that if you play high school athletics you must want to play college athletics and there are thousands of high school athletes who simply play in high school for fun and really don’t want to continue their athletic career after college. There are also athletes who play multiple sports and many of those 130,000 might be soccer, hockey, football, or basketball players who are going on to play that sport in college instead of baseball. So while the number may be 130,000, it’s nowhere near 130,000 that have the skill and that are interested. Yes, it is true, there are more players than available spots and many things have to go right in order for you to find a place to play in college, but don’t let odds scare you into purchasing something or doing something because someone is trying to scare you into thinking the odds are nearly impossible. If you have the skills and desires there is a place for you to play provided you take some action.

Concentrate on getting coaches the basic information they need on you and then work to communicate with them personally and build some type of rapport. If a college coach cannot see you play personally, they will need some compelling video and a few conversations with someone knowledgeable and reputable that knows you and has seen you play (no, not your parents!). Most of the stats stuff in between is fluff! When you fill out the online recruit information form on a college website, you tell the coach a few things about you. One you tell them that you found their program on your own, and two you tell them that you are interested in their program. You can always follow-up later with a letter and phone call and mention that you submitted the online recruit form on the website. It’s important to follow up to make sure the coach received your information.

PLAYING FRESHMAN YEAR
I was on a message board last month reading some recruiting topics and one parent wrote in complaining that D3 schools don’t red-shirt and so many kids waste their freshman year sitting on the bench and getting maybe 5 or 10 at-bats for the entire season – Well, it’s clear that this person doesn’t understand the role of college and why you go. The point of college is not to get more at-bat’s freshman year (or any year for that matter). The point of college is learn new things, grow as an individual, learn to balance your time, learn to work with people, make new friends, learn what you like to do and are good at, and hopefully leave in four years a better person than when you entered school as a freshman. People who go to college looking simply for playing time (especially at the D3 level) are missing the bigger picture. Yes, it would be great to play freshman year, but did you play Varsity your freshman year in high school? My guess is no.

You can look at playing time or lack-there-of as a waste or as a learning experience, I hope I don’t need to tell you which one it should be. If you are at a D3 college, your prospects of a pro career are probably pretty slim and you will be best served by applying some of your energy to other aspects of school. In 4 years when you graduate and try to get a job, companies are not going to ask how many at-bats you got freshman year? They are going to ask what you learned from playing college athletics for 4 years and how those skills can be applied to this job. Sitting on the bench sucks, believe me I know because I did it. It’s nothing personal and the coach is just trying to put the best team on the field, despite the fact you may disagree with his or her choices. Unfortunately everyone cannot start every year, so you have two choices. Find the crappiest team in the country and hope you can start for them freshman year, or bite your lip for a while, work on your game and if you are good enough, your time will come. It might be in year one; it might be in year three. It’s an excellent life lesson. But if you view sitting on the bench as a waste, it certainly will be.

SETTING GOALS
My former summer coach who helped me a lot with not only my baseball recruiting but life, was a talented athlete himself in high school. While he played football and basketball he excelled most at baseball. He played in the Cape Cod league for two years and played at Holy Cross where he was an All-American his senior year and eventually enshrined in the Holy Cross Hall of Fame. After he graduated college he was drafted by the Oakland A’s and you know what came next. Well actually, he declined the offer from the A’s and went to Law School! You might think he was crazy or didn’t really love the game of baseball, but that was no the case at all. In the 70’s when he was drafted, player salaries weren’t what they are today and not signing was actually an easy decision for him. Why? Because he had some goals and a plan and he realized that playing baseball probably in the long run wasn’t going help him accomplish his long-term goals in life. At that time in his life he saw the bigger picture, which is often difficult for many people to do, especially a 22 year old kid just drafted by a major league team. Today he is one of the top corporate lawyers at his firm but still stays close to the game he still loves by coaching an amateur team for the last 15 years in his hometown and he has no regrets.

YOU NEVER KNOW
In September I was reading a story about a family who attended a junior day (baseball) to a Pac10 School. After that they never heard from the school again, no letters or phone calls. The player decided to attend their 2-day prospect camp. After the camp the player sent some emails but still never heard back from the coaching staff. At the end of August the player called the coach and asked if he could meet him to get some feedback about his skills as they related to the prospect camp he attended. After meeting with the coaching staff for 20 minutes, the player got an official invite in September. After the 2-day visit the player was extended an athletic scholarship offer and gave his verbal for the fall of 2006. It would have been easy for this young man to assume their was no opportunities available at this school, but he placed one follow-up call to the college coach and happened to make a pretty good impression which turned into an official visit, which turned into a scholarship opportunity. Before you move on to other schools, try to exhaust all your opportunities and make sure the coaching staff is truly not interested in you and don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and communicate with coaches. Had he kept sending emails, it’s likely nothing would have happened.

GOT CAMP
Last year Providence College lacrosse coach Chris Burdick signed 11 players to National Letter of Intent’s, here are some of the comments about 8 of the players from the press release following the signings…

• Was selected as a Blue Chip 225 Lacrosse All-Star in 2004 and a Top Gun Prep-School Camp All-Star in 2003. "We were very impressed with Bobby at the Friar Elite Camp this summer," Burdick said.

• "He has good skill and quickness, and he impressed our coaches at Friar Elite Camp with his commitment to detail and ability to learn at an advanced pace."

• Was a Team Georgia representative at Champ Camp.

• Led the way to the Hotbeds Lacrosse Camp Championship this past summer in Delaware.

• Had a strong showing at the Top 205 Lacrosse Camp.

• A very successful camp circuit saw Watkins named All-Star at the All-American, Dixie Top 150, and Run and Shoot Lacrosse Camps

• He was an All-Star at both New England Premiere Showcase and the Peak 200 Lacrosse Camp.

• "I was able to coach Chris at the Top 205 camp this summer and found that he could run with the best of them,"

HOME

RECRUITING GUIDE book synopsis contents index authors back cover ordering who can benefit common questions excerpts testimonials

APPLICATIONS college applications visiting schools financial aid

RECRUITING INFO college recruiting ncaa rules life as college athlete recruiting guide

RESOURCES interviews news newsletter mailbag links did you know? sports nutrition articles

ABOUT US about book media center partners contact donate