Last Chance for Glory : Despite Long Odds and an Abundance of Competition, Football Players Chase Their Dream Job at Scout Camp

Rocen Keeton is looking for a job. Not your regular 9-to-5 job. He’s looking for a job in which you work only once a week for six months, then get six months of vacation.

Keeton, a former football standout at Serra High and UCLA, wants a job in the NFL or, if that fails, in the Canadian or Arena leagues.

Keeton, who played outside linebacker for Orlando in the World League in 1992, was one of nearly 200 players who paid $95 to attend the Scout Camp at El Camino College last month. The players were timed in the 40-yard dash and shuttle run, and tested in the bench-press and vertical jump. Each player was weighed, measured and evaluated in one-on-one drills.

Banning High graduate McCann Utu and former Gardena standout Brian Brown were other local players who attended the daylong combine, which is the authorized scouting service to the Canadian and Arena leagues.

Founded in 1989, the Scout Camp is open to players who were not selected in the NFL draft and have completed their collegiate eligibility. Nine camps were held this year, two after the NFL draft in April.

Daniel Schorr, director of operations for the Scout Camp, said an important aspect of the camp is a seminar that details the probabilities of succeeding in pro football. The seminar covers the number of pro jobs available, salary ranges for free-agent players and jobs available to college graduates.

“We see our role as providing information to the athlete to help him better understand whether he can play at the professional level or whether he should begin his second career at an early age,” Schorr said. “Our clients are not the teams, but the players.”

Although some NFL scouts attend the camp, Schorr doesn’t claim that Scout Camp provides a pipeline to an NFL tryout. He said that about 10% of Scout Camp attendees will get an offer to participate in a pro training camp, primarily in the Canadian or Arena leagues.

Gene Nudo, director of football operations for the Arena league, endorses Scout Camp.

“(Scout Camp) is the only independent, outside source we utilize to evaluate talent,” Nudo said. “The camp has a lot of credibility and is very well run.”

Agent Leigh Steinberg, who represents quarterback Drew Bledsoe, the No. 1 selection in the NFL draft by the New England Patriots, sees a need for the type of evaluative service Scout Camp offers.

“The roster sizes in the NFL are the smallest ever,” Steinberg said. “Add to that the (new) problems with the salary cap and the fact that there is no real minor league, (and you can see that) pro football is a very difficult sport to break into.”

Steinberg has sympathy for the undrafted player or the athlete who is cut from a training camp and finds that a pro career is unrealistic.

“When a player is cut, he’s cast adrift without any instructive feedback,” Steinberg said. “Although he has an intense desire to keep going, he has no real framework to assess his future pro chances. Camps can be very beneficial to help an athlete get on with his life. The hardest thing for any athlete to do is to retire from the sport.”

Steinberg, whose lengthy list of clients includes Dallas Cowboy quarterback Troy Aikman, remembers his early experiences representing free agents. Some players, stars in college, would blame the agent for their own lack of professional success.

“Some of my unhappiest experiences, and my most difficult representations, were with undrafted players,” Steinberg said. “Many of the players felt resentment, bitter, angry, slighted or mistreated. If a camp only shows the players the odds of making it, it’s worth it.”

Keeton, 24, was released from the New York Jets’ training camp in 1991. He said he got his money’s worth at Scout Camp.

“It’s good to get another chance,” said Keeton, who is working toward a bachelor’s degree in history at UCLA. “They told me that I did real well in the drills. It was a nice experience.”

Keeton scored high in the testing, Schorr said. The only question was his speed. Keeton’s times in the 40-yard dash of 4.9 and 4.76 seconds might not be considered fast enough for the Canadian League’s larger playing surface.

“He ran a great shuttle (drill),” Schorr said. “We had him rated as the No. 3 linebacker at the camp.”

Brown, a running back who played at UCLA after earning All-City Section honors at Gardena, didn’t complete his testing because of an injury, Schorr said. Utu, a defensive back who played collegiately at Arizona, also left El Camino before completing his workout.

Utu, a 1987 Banning graduate, was unhappy with his Scout Camp experience.

“There were too many guys out there,” Utu said. “I felt cheated. I’ve been training my (rear) off all year, and now it looks like I’ll have to wait until next year. All I got out of the camp was a $95 T-shirt.”

Stephen Austin, founder of the camp, realizes that some players will leave the combine disappointed. But he points out that part of the function of Scout Camp is to help the athlete look realistically at the future.

“My agenda is to provide a system where a player can spend $95 one time and find out unequivocally whether he is ever going to get paid to play football,” Austin said. “Sooner or later it’s time to turn to another vocation. When a football (career) is over, it’s really over.”

Most of the combine participants were in their mid-20s. Nearly all had played college football. Dave Bzovi, however, came to El Camino from a different background. Bzovi, a 29-year-old punting prospect, never played college football. He flew from Ohio to attend the camp.

Bzovi, who attended the University of Toledo on a track scholarship, estimated that he spent more than $500 to attend the camp. He said the trip was worthwhile.

“It was a great message,” Bzovi said. “They tell you to make sure you get your degree, what the odds are of signing a contract and what the average salary of a first-round draft pick is (in comparison) to a free-agent contract. It really opened my eyes. I now know what it takes to have someone show interest in me. It doesn’t have anything to do with age if you can kick the ball 40 yards with a hang-time of 4.7 or 5.0 (seconds).”

Steve Webster, a running back for USC in the late 1980s, had a different opinion of Scout Camp. Webster, who now lives in Atlanta, attended a camp at Georgia Tech University. He was not impressed.

“The camp is a rip-off,” said Webster, 26. “There were only three scouts there and we weren’t even introduced to them. We didn’t have an opportunity to ask the scouts what they were looking for. There were 180 guys there and all they did was take the $95 and tell us how we would (probably) not get the opportunity to play pro ball. Why don’t they tell us that our chance is slim and none before we pay our $95?”

Said Schorr: “We could have 20 scouts out looking at the kids and the kids would say it’s not enough. I always ask the kids, ‘Wouldn’t you work out if just the Raiders or just the Cowboys wanted you to?’ ”