CHAPTER 15 RECRUITING SERVICES
ATHLETES
WANTED
CHRIS KRAUSE High School Edition
C H A P T E R 15
RECRUITING SERVICES Given the restrictions placed by the NCAA, the limited recruiting calendar, the competition to land top talent, and budgetary constraints, college programs have increasingly become dependant on trusted and reliable services to help them save valuable time and money to help streamline the recruiting process. Emerging technology has been a critical tool for expediting the entire process. With more programs, more teams, and more student-athletes, programs need to find ways to distill the nation’s 7.3 million high school athletes into a manageable pool, and scouting and recruiting services can help accomplish this. Most Division I and II football and basketball programs, and an increasing number of non-revenue sports, subscribe and use dozens of services, and spend thousands of dollars to save much more in time and money. These services allow coaching staffs to identify talented athletes easier and earlier than ever. SCOUTING SERVICES What is the difference between a scouting service and a recruiting service? The lingo can be confusing, but the general differences stem from where they are funded and for whom they work. In most cases, scouting services
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work for the college coaches in the revenue sports of men’s basketball and men’s football. These services sell lists to coaches of the top athletes by state, region, and country. Other sports, like women’s basketball, volleyball, baseball, and softball, use scouting services to a lesser degree. These lists often begin the process for college prospects. After being identified by a national or regional scouting service, students’ names are added to a list, which is then purchased by a coach, who disseminates marketing material to the entire mailing list in hopes of accumulating information from interested students. These services start creating prospect lists from students as young as seventh or eighth grade. Some scouting services include:
• Collegiate Sports Data (football) • Randy Taylor Recruiting (football) • The Forbes Report (football) • NCSA (all sports) • Bob Gibbons All Star Report (basketball) • Tom Lemming’s Prep Football Report • Rich Kern Recruiting Registry (volleyball) • Sunshine Preps (Florida football players) • Chicago Hoops (Chicago basketball players) • Texas Video (Texas football) RECRUITING SERVICES Recruiting services, on the other hand, generally work on the family’s behalf to promote a student-athlete. The athlete or the athlete’s family pays
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the recruiting services to promote the athlete. Started over twenty years ago, many of the services have served as helpful resources for parents and coaches at all levels. They have proven to be extremely helpful at Division I, II, III, NAIA, and non-revenue levels, especially when coaches have small recruiting budgets and would otherwise be unable to expand their searches beyond local areas. Recruiting services range from free services whereby a student-athlete simply lists his name on a web-based database to customized services that individually promote the student-athlete. Some charge $20 for a studentathlete to search a database of coaches and be listed on a website; others charge for state-of-the-art technology that matches talent with coaching staffs through permission-based email databases. Others produce enhanced recruiting videos that spot-shadow and professionally sequence performances. Others simply send thousands of coaches information about thousands of students, hoping to get the students on recruiting lists. Then come the services that provide one-on-one coaching of studentathletes and recruitment education. These services, albeit more expensive, systematically match student-athletes with programs. Such services generally have stronger relationships with coaches because they do not accept student-athletes who do not meet minimum standards. Some of the best services have a greater than 90 percent success rate. When considering a recruiting service, athletes should ask nine critical questions: 1. Does the organization recruit only legitimate prospects, or will it accept any student-athlete, regardless of his qualifications? Put yourself in a college coach’s shoes—would you rather work with a recruiting service with a proven track record of sending only verified scouting reports, or a recruiting service that wasted your time by sending you unrealistic, unsolicited prospects?
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If the organization sends only legitimate prospects, continue with Question #2. If the latter, find another recruiting service. 2. What type of delivery and confirmation method does the organization use to let student-athletes know what college coaches actually looked at them? Look for a service that uses permission-based email addresses and has a system to confirm whether colleges look at a student-athlete’s scouting report or video. In this way, athletes can quickly focus on those colleges that have looked at them. 3. Does the service use recruiting guidelines and power rankings to best determine realistic levels of play for each specific athlete? By evaluating a school’s recruiting guidelines and an athlete’s profile, a recruiting service can systematically determine the most realistic fit—both academically and athletically—for both the program and the student. 4. Does the service use an actual scout to evaluate the prospect? College coaches rely on services with a history of providing informed evaluations, transcripts, and videos. Scouts who take a personal approach to a student-athlete’s success will provide a coach with references from the high school coach, as well as club and combine coaches. This takes the burden off the college coach. 5. What is the service’s success rate, and how many students has the service helped receive scholarships? 6. Does the service edit highlight, game, or skills video with the help of scouts or coaches? If the service uses scouts and coaches to edit the videos, the student will be shed in the best possible light. And a service that takes advantage of spot
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shadow for early identification and stream capabilities will allow the student-athlete to “pop” while being evaluated. 7. Does the service have a staff large enough to handle personal requests and updates throughout the process? The best services will have recruiting coaches and member service departments that offer coaching and mentoring throughout the entire process. 8. Does the service teach the student-athlete how exactly to follow up with the college coaches and develop a plan of action for the student to follow step-by-step until successfully committed and enrolled at the best-fit college? 9. Is it worth using a service? If all of the above questions can be answered with a yes, the recruiting service is probably well worth the cost. After all, a family or athlete who goes through this process alone will likely spend:
• $400 to $4,000 on creating a quality highlight or skills video.
• $300 to $1,500 on a personal website for the athlete. • $2.50/mailing to college coach, if you are including a highlight or skills video ($250 for just one hundred schools).
• At least $1,500 and over two hundred hours of work! Recruiting services are becoming more and more critical as families understand that they must be proactive in the recruiting process, and they must begin early. Recruiting services can assist in many, if not all, of the five phases of the recruiting process.
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1. Evaluating the athlete. By obtaining an objective third-party evaluation from a reputable recruiting service, a studentathlete can build from an honest evaluation and realistically assess potential. 2. Résumé, profile, and website. A service can help organize and verify an athlete’s information into a presentable and organized profile or website to be used to promote efficiently and easily. A scouting or recruiting service can also add reliability to a student by verifying his information. 3. Highlight, game, or skills video. Services often make use of former coaches to enhance a student-athlete’s video through spot-shadowing and play-sequencing. Highlight and skills videos are then turned into streaming video. Some services can even report back to the student-athlete when a coach watches the video! 4. Contact with college coaches. Since student-athletes who send personal letters are most successful, some recruiting services have started helping athletes expedite this process to make sure the athletes are connecting with the right coaches. Recruiting services that use “permission-based email” can be invaluable if multiple updates need to be sent to the coaching community. Reputable recruiting services have databases that contain the entire nation’s list of coaching staff for each individual sport and coach. Rather than finding a general athletic department email online, student-athletes who use reputable recruiting services can be sure that their information is sent directly to the relevant coaches. Because the emails are permission-based, spam filters will not file them in the “junk” folder, and the service can give
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valuable feedback to the student-athletes, letting them know which coaches watched the videos and when. This can eliminate hundreds of hours of follow-up time, allowing the student-athlete instead to follow up at the appropriate time, confidently calling on coaches they know have accessed their information and video. 5. Guidance, coaching, and tracking. A reputable recruiting service usually charges a one-time fee and offers ongoing guidance, education, maintenance, tracking, and coaching. When started early enough, the cost of a full-service recruiting organization can be as low as $200 per year, which can yield more than one hundred times the return on investment! What Is Your Time Worth? Assume that Mom and Dad are helping their son find a football program where he can play collegiate athletics. Consider the amount of time this will take if the athlete wants to connect with just 25 percent of the college programs that offer football. First, a family would spend time looking at college websites to research the coaching staff, find email addresses, and create personal letters to coaches and recruiting staff. Then consider the amount of time necessary to fill out online questionnaires and send DVDs. If they spent just fifteen to thirty minutes per school and wanted information on just one-quarter of the eight hundred available programs, a family would spend fifty to one hundred hours on these activities alone. If their time is worth just $7.25 per hour (minimum wage), the cost is $362 to $725.
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Now consider how much time parents will spend helping their child update schools about his progress. At ten minutes per school, they would spend thirty-three hours updating two hundred schools, or $240. If Mom and Dad helped update the schools three times, this would cost $720 in time (again, calculated as though their time is worth minimum wage). Then consider the cost of sending the DVD to interested programs. If replicating the DVD, stuffing packages, and driving to the post office takes just ten minutes per school, and the DVD is sent to just one-eighth of the schools, Mom and Dad will spend another seventeen hours. This adds approximately $120 to the bill. Ignoring all other costs (such as postage, developing a video, toll telephone calls, and creating and maintaining a website), the total cost is between $1,480 and $1,845! This doesn’t even consider the time spent following up, creating plans, and maintaining records! On the other hand, a recruiting service costs between $500 and $5,000, and top recruiting services will handle all of the above for the athlete, not to mention save the time and effort in creating a marketing strategy. If the service also provides education, an athlete will learn about the process, as well as how to talk to coaches. The savings families receive from knowing how to negotiate their child’s scholarship and appeal the financial aid package is worth five times the cost of any service! Remember that a student-athlete has only a small window of opportunity to be recruited. A student cannot start too early or have too many opportunities to become branded a collegiate student-athlete for life!
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« « Fa s t Fac t « « The National Collegiate Scouting Association (NCSA)— which places more than 90 percent of its member studentathletes with college programs—reports that its high school student-athletes win on average $15,500 a year in scholarships, grants, and financial aid to play sports. Its student-athletes who attend public schools win on average $12,850 in scholarships, grants, and aid, while those who attend private colleges receive on average $21,266.
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Key Points 1.
Scouting services work for college coaches, most often in basketball and football. These services sell lists to coaches of the top athletes by state, region, and country. Depending on how prestigious the scouting list, membership is dictated by the student’s level of ability. A student cannot buy his way onto a list.
2.
Recruiting services work on the student-athlete’s behalf to promote the student to a college coach. Recruiting services range in level of sophistication and prestige. Some will accept any student, which means coaches will most likely ignore their attempts to promote a student. Others offer systematic matches and promote a student to a coach only if the student is qualified. These recruiting services generally have more success and better relationships with coaches.
3.
Athletes and their families should ask nine critical questions when considering a recruiting service:
• Does the organization recruit only legitimate prospects, or will it accept any student-athlete, regardless of qualifications?
• What type of delivery and confirmation method does the organization use to let student-athletes know what college coaches actually looked at them?
• Does the service use recruiting guidelines and power rankings to best determine realistic levels of play for each specific athlete?
• Does the service use an actual scout to evaluate the prospect? • What is the service’s success rate, and how many students has the service helped receive scholarships?
• Does the service edit highlight, game, and skills video with the help of scouts or coaches?
• Does the service have a staff large enough to handle personal requests and updates throughout the process?
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• Does the service teach the student-athlete how exactly to follow up with the college coaches and develop a plan of action for the student to follow step-by-step until successfully committed and enrolled at the best-fit college?
• Is it worth using a service? 4.
A reputable recruiting service can help with all five layers of marketing a student-athlete:
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Evaluating the athlete Résumé, profile, and website Highlight or skills video Contacts with college coaches Guidance, coaching, and tracking