| OCTOBER 2009 VARSITYEDGE.COM NEWSLETTER
7 important recruiting ideas now that your back to school this fall….
1 – Educate yourself – The recruiting process is not something to be taken lightly. Many families don’t understand who is responsible and what their role is in recruiting. Others assume they will be discovered because they are a good athlete and it’s the job of college coaches to find them. The college selection process is hard enough, but when you throw in the challenge of also finding a college where you can play athletically, you are going to need a lot of knowledge on how to do that successfully. This site and The Making of a Student-Athlete were created to help you in the process and the families who are more knowledgeable about what to do and how to do it usually find more success in the process. You need to learn what your role is, what your coaches role is, what your guidance counselors role is, how college coaches find recruits, what they look for and much m ore…
2 – It’s your responsibility – my coach didn’t help me is a sentence I hear every day…... First and foremost the recruiting process is your responsibility. You need to do the research, you need to contact coaches, and ultimately you need to make the decision as to what school you attend. While your high school or club coach will play some role, it is not his or her job to sit at home and research 100 or 200 schools for you and contact college coaches. If they had to do that for every player on their team, they would have to research almost every school in the country. Most high school coaches are also teachers, and parents themselves and when they go home they have papers and tests to grade and families to take care of. Your high school coach should help you with evaluating your athletic skill as it applies to different levels of college if they are able to do so. They should also be willing to write recommendations for both college coaches as well as for your general college applications. And if and when the time comes, they should be willing to put in a call to a college coach to speak on your behalf. But the rest is up to you!
3 - Our school is small, my team isn’t good, I can’t afford to play on club or travel teams, etc… Every high school athlete has some challenges to overcome, but that is part of life. Once you learn how recruiting actually works, being from a small town, playing for a small team or not being able to travel will be challenges that are easier to overcome. Your team could be 0-18 every year but if you can impress upon a college coach that your individual skills are a good fit for their team, then they will be more than happy to recruit you and there are many ways to accomplish that.
4 – It’s going to take a lot of work. Yes, anything important usually involves some effort, but if you are not interested in your academic and athletic future, you don’t have to put the time in. 99% of us are not going to be professional athletes, so we are going to school to get an education and that should be your most important goal in the recruiting process. So for 6 months or a year, you are going to have to invest some serious time in researching colleges and contacting coaches, and less time on MySpace and Facebook.
5 – Everything you are doing is based on choices you have made. Elena Delle Donne was the top high school basketball recruits in the country last year. She accepted a full scholarship to the University of Connecticut, one of the top teams in the country. Two days into summer school last June at Uconn she made an amazing decision. She decided she didn’t want to attend Uconn and didn’t want to play college basketball. While there were many upset people who didn’t understand why she made this decision, the important lesson here is that she made a decision that was in HER best interest and she doesn’t have to justify her decision to anybody! She enrolled in the University of Delaware and is now playing volleyball where she says she hopes to be the best volleyball player she can be and she is having FUN. The bottom line is you wake up every day and you can choose what you want to do. Playing college athletics is an amazingly time consuming task and takes a lot of passion and dedication and it should be a choice you make, not because you have to, but because you want to.
6 – There are things you can’t always choose. I am sure if you were 7 feet tall or weighted 300 pounds Division 1 schools would be lining your driveway with athletic scholarships, but for most of us, we are what we are. You can complain about what you don’t have, or work with what you do have. You can work on getting a little stronger, a little better, or a little faster but everyone has limitations when it comes to our size and athletic skill so we have to work with what we have and find athletic programs where our skills will match up. You might want to play basketball for Duke or Football for USC, but only a few individuals in the entire country are good enough to play at that level. But if you have the skills and desires to play college athletics, there are over 1,200 NCAA schools and several hundred NAIA schools that might love to have you on their team. If you work hard, research a lot of colleges, contact a lot of coaches, there is a place for you to play! If you need some inspiration, here is a good story to read about Wes Welker, the New England Patriots receiver. Link
7 – Your only choice, doesn’t need to be your only choice, or your last choice. Some high school athletes make bad recruiting choices. Some enroll in schools where they think they can play when they can’t. Sometimes this happens because their ego is bigger than their game or sometimes it’s because a college coach misled them to believe they could play there. Others choose certain schools, well, because those were the only choices available at the time. Fist, I always encourage recruits to never burn any bridges in the recruiting process and to treat every, and all coaches with respect during the process. It is a statistical fact that 40% of all NCAA athletes do not graduate from the college they first enrolled in within 6 years of enrollment (PLEASE STOP AND THINK ABOUT THAT STATISTIC FOR A FEW SECONDS). Much of this is due to their recruiting process or lack there of, and choosing a school where they were not a good fit. If you have your heart set on being an NCAA athlete at a high level, and the opportunities simply aren’t there, you have a few options…
Transferring. While transferring isn’t the easiest thing in the world, its better than being at a school you cannot play at athletically or don’t like. This is why you can’t burn any bridges during the recruiting process. Its quite possible that in 6 months or a year you might have to place a call to a college coach that recruited you in high school to see if they might still be interested in having you on their team.
Post graduate year. A PG year will give you another year to work on your academics, work on your skills, work on growing into your body a bit more, and time to research and contact more coaches.
Junior College – Junior college will give you the same things that a PG year will with the only downside being that you will be using a year of college eligibility. Please be cautious here, many junior colleges are training grounds for D1 athletes that are taking a year to mature and get more recognition so you need to research JC programs very diligently to see what type of players they are recruiting and how good their program is.
NAIA – The NAIA has over 300 colleges. Many of them are smaller colleges in the Midwest and West but they all offer athletic opportunities and scholarship money as well. They are often overlooked by many athletes because you won’t see these schools competing on TV every Saturday like you do NCAA schools. Recruiting rules and acceptance to these schools is often less complicated than NCAA schools and they offer a legitimate chance for you to play college athletics and get a quality education. The transfer rules are also favorable.
NEWS AND NOTES
In January, the NCAA lowered the school year a basketball player can be considered a prospect from ninth grade to seventh. Really, is this the organization that is in charge of amateur athletes at the college level??
What happens when a 28 year old graduate of a particular school goes onto facebook and posts a message to a football recruit that he should attend the school he graduated with. Well, according to the NCAA, that is a recruiting violation, because the NCAA considers that type of person a “representative” of the schools athletic interests. According to rules created in 2006 and updated each of the past two years, "any communication via message boards, chat rooms, walls, comments, blogs, IM, etc. is not permissible." Phone, e-mail and faxing are the only acceptable forms of direct communication with recruits, with restrictions placed on how many times a school representative can initiate the contact.
Was that a football recruit on national TV flipping a coin to decide between West Virginia and Rutgers? It sure was. Pretty much sums up everything that is wrong with big-time college football and players that make decisions like that. If I was the coach of the winning flip school, I wouldn’t want a player in my program that isn’t capable of making a rational and informative decision about his future. FYI, it was tails and it was Rutgers.
ESPN reported that one NFL official said Marcus Blount went from possibly a second round pick in next years NFL draft to undraftable after his “display” against Boise State to open the college football season. We often don’t realize it, but there are so many small things in our life we have complete control over that often have huge implications.
NEWS ON INDIVIDUAL COLLEGES
Rogers State University (Oklahoma) has won nearly 70 percent of its games in all sports since adding athletics in 2006, so the Hillcats will play even more games. The school is adding men’s and women’s golf programs.
YORK (Nebraska) - York College is re-instituting track and cross country for men and women in their 2009 fall athletics schedule.
This just in, Harvard University received 29,000 applications last year for only 1,700 spots
The Georgia State (Atlanta) Panthers have launched a football program but won’t begin play until 2010. Georgia Stated has been a Division I school for 45 years. They will compete in the Football Championship Subdivision in the Colonial Athletic Association. Former Georgia Tech coach, NFL alum and ESPN analyst Bill Curry will coach the team
Trivia question: Name the four private universities that receive the most applications in the country? New York University, the University of Southern California, Boston University and Northeastern University which received 36,000 applications last year.
Washington State University has a brand new golf course and a pretty nice one to boot! LINK
The University of Maine announced that it will cut the men's soccer and women's volleyball programs. Soccer had 26 players and 7.5 scholarships, and volleyball had 15 players and 12 scholarships.
Men’s golf, outdoor track and women’s volleyball were cut at Quinipiac (Connecticut). The girl’s volleyball team is suing the school.
The Brandeis University golf team was told in January that their sport was going to be cut. They asked what their budget was and were told 22,000 dollars year and that if they wanted to save the program they had 2 months to raise the money.
The Northern Iowa baseball program is being cut due to budget reasons.
ARTICLES
Article about how the economy is affecting the recruiting practices of college coaches. Read
Does your family earn less than $100,000 – if so you can go to Stanford University for free. Read
Article about standing out in a crowd during the admissions process when all applicants have good grades and test scores. Read | | October 2009
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