So You Want To Play In College?

Getting recruited starts with personal contact.

- Kurt Dusterberg

It’s an experience many parents encounter: one of their children excels in a sport. As seasons go by, the young athlete seeks out better competition. By the first year of high school, the teen is playing showcase events for club teams in front of college coaches. Soon, there is talk of playing in college — even earning an athletic scholarship. That’s when the real adventure begins.

The task of finding the right university for a young athlete is a complex one. There are large universities with well-known athletic programs, and small colleges with modest teams. Some schools offer athletic scholarships, others do not. The process can be intimidating — even overwhelming — to parents who have never explored college athletics.

RECRUITING HELP

One option is to work with a college sports recruiting service. These companies promise to streamline the process by connecting the high school student with college coaches. Many of these services will assign an account representative to your teen who will walk him or her through creating an online profile that includes statistics, photos and links to skills videos that can either be uploaded to the athlete’s account or created by the service. The account representative will also send emails to subscriber schools and show the athlete how to use the service to send emails to the coaches on his or her own.

But parents should be cautious before committing to a service. The placement fee can be several thousand dollars, and many college athletic programs do not use them. Division I schools — NCAA schools with well-funded athletic programs — rarely recruit this way.