Introductory Course Has Believers, Critics : Recruiting: Skepticism surrounds the booming business of matching high school athletes with college athletic programs.

They line the walls of Jeff Duva’s Woodland Hills office like so many trophies, dozens of framed resumes.

Each contains a picture of a young athlete in the upper right corner. The name of a college has been inked over the page in block letters.

These are Duva’s success stories.

Duva’s business, National College Recruiting Assn., helps high school athletes get into college athletic programs by compiling profiles of his clients and mailing them to hundreds of college programs.

The theory is that it helps the high school athlete market himself for college coaches, increasing his chances of being recruited and, ultimately, of receiving an athletic scholarship.

NCRA is one company in a growing industry capitalizing on the race for athletic scholarship money. Most of these companies operate similarly, mailing profiles to college programs that match the client’s athletic and academic ability and geographic preference.

Reactions from students who have used the services are mostly positive, many saying that they received correspondence from many schools. Some college coaches, however, are skeptical, saying that they seldom recruit anyone from the profiles they receive and that students could accomplish the same thing on their own for less money.

Duva, who also owns Bluechip magazine, a publication about the nation’s top prep athletes, has 10 full-time employees in his Woodland Hills office and has sold more than 40 NCRA franchises across the country.

His main office alone sends out profiles on 150 to 300 high school athletes a month.

“Eight out of 10 kids in our program will get scholarships or financial aid or priority walk-ons,” Duva said. “One hundred percent of the kids get correspondence from colleges. They will be put into the recruiting cycle.”

Such attention is not cheap. Most services charge $465 to $900. But Duva said students should consider all they are getting: a chance to land their names on the desks of hundreds of college coaches.

“Because we do it in volume and we automate it, we can do it for much, much less than a parent or coach could,” he said. “They would spend thousands of dollars.”

Clearly, using the service probably won’t get you a football scholarship at Nebraska. Most NCAA Division I programs spend thousands of dollars each year to attract top prospects--UCLA spends $200,000 on recruiting each year for football alone--and coaches in these programs usually know years in advance which athletes they are interested in recruiting.

The services are geared to help athletes not of blue-chip caliber establish correspondence with smaller NCAA Division II and III programs, NAIA and out-of-state schools that don’t have large recruiting budgets. There is no guarantee of receiving a scholarship.

David Jacobs was overshadowed by a star teammate on the Calabasas High baseball team and was not getting much attention from college recruiters. After signing with NCRA, he received letters of inquiry from many schools. Eventually, he chose to attend Cornell, which does not give athletic scholarships.

Even so, Jacobs’ father, Jake, said that NCRA opened the door for his son at Cornell and called the service “probably the best investment we have made in a long time with regard to his future.”

Mark Mignone was another typical recruiting service client. A good golfer and average student at Mission Viejo Trabuco Hills High, he had no college recruiters pounding on his door. In the fall of his senior year, Mignone signed with College Bound Student Athletes, a Wisconsin company.

After CBSA had sent out profiles on Mignone’s behalf, he received about 200 questionnaires from college coaches and eventually got more than a dozen scholarship offers. He accepted a full scholarship, worth more than $12,000 a year, to Seton Hall.

Mignone’s father, Robert, who paid the $600 bill for CBSA, could not have been more pleased.

“We thought it was excellent,” he said. “They delivered exactly what they promised.”

But Chris Shot, president of Scout Team, an Atlanta recruiting service, said that with some companies, clients often are misled about what the services can do.

“A lot of people have the misconception that working through our company gets you a scholarship,” Shot said. “I think the reason people have that misunderstanding is because a lot of companies use that in their marketing.”

John Ritchie, the West Coast regional director of CBSA, said he goes to great lengths to explain to clients exactly what they are buying.

“We help represent high school student-athletes in getting national exposure to colleges across the country,” he said. “What we try to do is direct the student to the colleges that they will most likely be able to get into.”

Evaluating an athlete’s potential, however, is often left to the high school coach and even the athlete himself, hardly unbiased judges.

“One of the things that we don’t want to jeopardize in mailing out information is our credibility. . . . So we need to be somewhat selective in who we work with,” Ritchie said. “We want to make sure that the student-athletes we work with have the potential to play in college.”

Even so, services rarely turn down a client’s check.

Hundreds of profiles from recruiting services have crossed Coach Tom Marshall’s desk in the men’s basketball office at Cal Poly Pomona. Most were about athletes who would not make his team.

“You have to be realistic about what your abilities are and what your chances are of getting into a university that is going to give you a full scholarship,” he said. “You have to check your ego at the door.”

Many college coaches suggested that in most cases, students could accomplish the same thing as the services simply by doing a little research and writing some letters.

A case in point is Mike Good, former quarterback at Los Alamitos High. He signed with CBSA in spring of his junior year after three years of playing back-up to Tim Carey, now a reserve at Stanford.

Good then had an excellent senior year, passing for a school-record 403 yards and four touchdowns in leading Los Alamitos to victory in the Southern Section Division II championship game. He contacted Northern Arizona Coach Steve Axman on his own, clipping the prep quarterback statistics out of the local newspaper and faxing them to the Lumberjacks’ football office.

“Within five minutes, he had the coach on the phone to him,” said Good’s mother, Suzi.

A few months later, Good accepted a scholarship to the school.

But even though Good’s outstanding senior year and his own initiative landed him the scholarship, Suzi Good said that the money spent on CBSA was not wasted.

“I would have to say that the experience with CBSA gave us some ideas,” she said. “You cannot expect the schools to come after you. There are so many wonderful athletes out there that, if you don’t market your child in one way or another, you will miss out.

“The one thing I would have done differently is giving (CBSA) more direction as far as what colleges we wanted them to contact.”

A common complaint about the services from both parents and coaches is that their computer matching is not specific enough.

Most services match on the client’s geographic preference, academics and self-described athletic level. Depending on the sport the athlete plays, the computer can come up with hundreds of colleges that match a client’s specifications. And because almost every college that receives correspondence from a high school athlete--whether it be a hand-written letter or a professional resume--responds by sending the athlete a questionnaire, the athlete might receive bundles of letters from schools he is not interested in attending.

Chad Reese, who played basketball at Hoover High, was contacted by many schools after NCRA sent out his profile. But most of the schools that showed interest in him athletically did not offer the academic environment he wanted.

“A lot of schools said, ‘Come out and walk on and then we’ll give you a scholarship the next year,’ ” Reese said. “But I wanted to get somewhere that has a very good academic reputation.”

He wrote to several universities on his own and ultimately decided to forgo a possible athletic scholarship at one of the smaller schools that had contacted him because of his NCRA profile. He chose to pay his way at UC San Diego.

Among coaches, the attitudes about the services are mixed. Most said they keep the resumes on file but rarely end up recruiting an athlete solely because of them.

“In the 10 years that I have been here, no one from (the service) has ever come to our school,” said Mary Ann Kluge, women’s basketball coach at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. “We have never landed a recruit that way. Most of the athletes that subscribe to those kinds of services are looking for a great deal of their college tuition to be paid for.”

Greg Ryan, track coach at Cal State Los Angeles, said any good coach uses a more hands-on approach to recruiting.

“You can go to the Arcadia Invitational and see about 18 hours of races and . . . you can see about every kid you have to see,” he said. “Maybe it’s different in the heartland. Maybe in Arkansas, they all just sit by the mailbox to recruit.

“I often wondered how many of these kids (who use recruiting services) get contacted. They put a picture on it, so it’s nice to see what the kids look like, and that’s the extent of their usefulness. They are just not very helpful.”

Often, some coaches say, the resumes lack important information.

“Some of those forms never even put the (grades) down if they are not very good,” Ryan said.

Further, coaches say the profiles, which are often mailed in bulk to the school’s athletic director, are not personal enough.

Kay Don, athletic director at Cal State Dominguez Hills, said she would prefer to receive a personal letter from an athlete who has taken the time to narrow his choices to a few schools.

“It is the personal touch that usually makes the difference,” Don said. “If you get something that says, ‘Dear Coach’ or ‘Dear Athletic Director,’ you have a tendency to not look at that as (closely) as you would something that had your name on it, and the reason for that is that you don’t know if they are really interested in your school. If you are going to spend a couple of hundred dollars recruiting someone, you want to recruit someone who is really interested in your school.”

That goes for coaches at NCAA Division I schools as well.

Michael Sondheimer, UCLA associate athletic director in charge of recruiting, sifts through hundreds of pieces of correspondence a day from potential recruits. His advice to high school athletes is always the same.

“My recommendation to potential recruits in any sport is that they invest $2.90 in postage stamps and an hour of computer time to print 10 letters and send out 10 letters to 10 realistic colleges based on their level of ability,” he said. “That will give them a realistic opportunity of being seen for a scholarship.”