Athletes, Colleges Use Computers to Find Each Other

Seven times in his career, Ryan Valadez had been chosen player of the game for Aliso Niguel’s football team, but the All-Pacific Coast League defensive lineman has been largely overlooked by college scouts, despite his 3.7 grade-point average and high scores on college entrance exams.

At 5-11, 230 pounds, Valadez is considered too small to play football at a big school, such as those in the Pacific 10 or Western Athletic conferences. His time in the 40-yard dash--five seconds--is a step slower than that desired by major college programs.

Late last fall, Valadez turned over his resume to an athletic recruiting service in Huntington Beach, which has advertised his football accomplishments on the Internet. Since then he has had 62 contacts from colleges across the country, of which 22 are serious suitors.

Prestigious schools such as Ivy League rivals Harvard and Princeton have sent him e-mail. Valadez, who was previously sought only by Chapman University and Claremont-McKenna College, now expects to make a decision this month on his educational future.

“My son has gotten a lot more interest and opportunities than he would have had had we not gone on the Internet,” Ray Valadez said. “Those schools would never have had access to us here on the West Coast.”

Wednesday is the first day high school seniors playing field hockey, football, soccer, women’s volleyball or men’s water polo can sign letters of intent with colleges. Increasingly, more athletes like Valadez are turning to alternatives such as the Internet to sell themselves to recruiters.

In turn, more college athletic recruiters and coaches are using the Internet as a cost-efficient way to find players. And new businesses are springing up to serve colleges and prospective players.

“This is definitely going to change the industry of recruiting,” said Doug Bush, vice president of Online Scouting Network, a New Jersey-based service that gives college coaches access to a Web site for prospective recruits in 26 sports. “You can see the athletic industry starting to move toward the electronic age. The concept of recruiting on the Internet will become common.”

Blue-chip players, particularly in football, are touted in specialized publications or by nationwide scouting services. Major colleges--the UCLAs, Michigans and Stanfords, for example--keep track of these publications and have larger recruiting budgets to pay for scouting trips, home visits and all-expenses-paid on-campus visits. These resources enable such programs to land the best players. UCLA, according to a spokesman, spent $150,000 on recruiting building up to Wednesday’s signing date.

But for many colleges, finding the right athlete isn’t that easy. That’s also true for athletes seeking to find the right academic and athletic fit, particularly for those in nonrevenue sports.

What makes the Internet so appealing, some say, is that a couple of clicks on a mouse can unite athletes and coaches who would otherwise never know about each other.

“Everyone knows about the stars,” said Vijay Gurbaxani, associate dean of the UC Irvine Graduate School of Management and an expert on the Internet. “But what happens at the Division II or Division III school? How do they find the high school out there that is not known for its sports that has a good quarterback?”

College tuition increased dramatically in the last decade and so did competition for scholarships. A cottage industry of providers popped up to help athletes do everything from mail letters to score higher on college entrance exams. But many full-service providers range in price from $500 to $1,500 per athlete, and there are no guarantees.

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The Internet is far less expensive. Online Scouting Network charges $69 a year for up to three sports per athlete and allows the profile to be changed up to five times without an additional charge. Every profile, which is more or less like a resume, includes a photo, grade-point average, entrance exam scores and statistics. For $129, OSN will include a 30-second video clip.

OSN has given access to more than 1,200 college and community college coaches across the country and has more than 1,000 profiles on-line. The service is being accessed between 3,000 and 3,500 times a day, Bush said.

Bush and two high-school friends got the idea to start OSN three years ago. They were watching a college football game on television, and during the game a standout player was identified as a “walk-on” who had been overlooked for a scholarship. They did some research and discovered there was a need for a service that could hook up players and colleges.

They wanted to make it affordable too. “We’re all former high school athletes,” Bush said. “Our goal was to make the cost of this for every high school athlete less than the price of a pair of basketball shoes.”

Tulsa-based SportsTrac went online in nine sports in September at a cost of $59.95 per profile. Backed by the founders of ESPN, among others, the service has profiles of 250 athletes, with plans to expand to more than 200,000 profiles in 28 sports within two years. A total of 640 coaches have free access to the service.

“We don’t see this service as going anywhere but up in popularity,” SportsTrac spokeswoman Julie Carpenter said.

The value of linking up with coaches on the Internet has not been lost on full-service providers as well. John Dempsey operates the Huntington Beach-based franchise of College Prospects of America, the service that Valadez selected. CPOA, with offices nationwide, charges between $750 and $900 for everything from mailing out resumes and videotapes to colleges to filling out college entrance applications. It went online with its home page, which is free to anyone with Internet access, last fall.

Dempsey says the Internet is a useful tool for the 100 or so profiles he handles, particularly in women’s sports and less-recognized men’s sports.

“Football [programs have] too much money,” he said. “They can afford to hire guys to come out and watch a player play in person and then recruit him. But the sports like girls’ basketball, for instance, the schools in the middle of Kansas don’t have the access to people out here, and so they are the types who would be looking at the Internet.”

Perhaps the people who will ultimately benefit the most from these services are college coaches. With a few keystrokes on their computer, they can narrow their searches for specific needs.

“A volleyball coach could ask to see the profiles of all left-handed players 6-feet tall, 180 pounds, with 1,200 SAT scores that live in California, and the search could be narrowed down to that level,” Bush said.

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All six of the four-year colleges in Orange County--Chapman, Concordia, Southern California College, Pacific Christian, Cal State Fullerton and UC Irvine--have home pages on the Internet. Four offer links to sports schedules, results and athletic news. Fullerton also broadcasts select basketball and baseball games on the Internet. SCC expects to have its link for athletics completed by the fall, a school spokesman said.

Concordia has been the most aggressive in using the Internet to make contact with prospective recruits. Concordia went online with its home page last fall, according to Web master Cheryl Stejskal, and an increasing number of contacts are coming from students seeking athletic information. Concordia received 3,000 hits in January alone, she said.

“We are a small school in Irvine and the Internet gives us a worldwide audience,” Stejskal said. “This has a lot of value for students who would end up going other places because maybe they wouldn’t have known about us before. Next fall, I suspect we’ll see some athletes here because of this.”

Concordia softball Coach Lynette Privatsky says she surfs the Internet, has received e-mail from prospective players and expects to put her first Internet recruit on the field by 1998.

“I think the Internet is a valuable tool. You can go into these services and put in what you are looking for, like grade-point average, and it gives you the specifics,” Privatsky said.

Privatsky hopes to develop an attractive softball home page including action pictures, newsletters, statistics, game scores, standings and directions to game sites.

Although only 12% of the nation’s homes are connected to the Internet, Privatsky says it offers a way family members can keep track of one another, particularly those attending colleges far from home. Conversely, a good-looking home page that is easily accessible can be an impressive recruiting tool for parents.

“I want them to be able to get on and see news about what their daughters are doing,” she said. “Most families now with kids in college have some type of Internet service. They can get on and pull up stats and news about their kids.”

E-mail, perhaps, may turn out to be the most important and useful item provided by athletic links. Not only is e-mail free, it is a direct method for athletes to contact specific coaches without having to pick up the phone or go through a secretary. Any high school athlete with a computer and a modem can do it. Most college home pages list e-mail addresses of the entire coaching staff.

In January, NCAA Division II schools voted to classify e-mail as “general correspondence,” according to Steve Mallonee, the NCAA’s director of legislative services. Division I schools cast a similar vote two years ago. That means e-mail is treated just like a letter. Coaches are not restricted as to the number of times or the times of the year in which they can send e-mail to prospective athletes. Previously, e-mail was treated like a phone call. Coaches are restricted to one call each week to a prospective recruit during the recruiting period.

Mallonee said the NCAA treats Internet services just like scouting services that publish their information. Services providing information over the Internet to NCAA schools must also have the capacity to make hard copies available at no cost to schools that do not have access to the Internet.

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How far universities are willing to go in using the Internet to find prospective athletes remains a question, according to UC Irvine Athletic Director Dan Guerrero.

“From our standpoint, since most of our recruiting is done in California, there would be a limited usage of these national services,” he said.

Purists note that football is a traditional sport that might buck the Internet trend for years. After all, there is nothing better than a face-to-face meeting and a handshake to seal a commitment from a recruit, they say.

Though the football team at Chapman has had about 10 requests over the Internet from prospective players, Athletic Director Dave Currey, a former Division I football coach at Long Beach State and Cincinnati, says he’s not ready to jump online just yet.

“It’s very impersonal. You don’t get to shake hands,” he said. “You don’t get to walk a prospective recruit around campus and show him what you have. We are not allowed to leave campus to recruit, but we can make phone calls and we believe that the telephone is still our greatest resource.”

Internet supporters admit technology is often a cold device and they suggest that its use in recruiting might just be a jumping-off point.

“I looked at it as just another way to get my daughter some exposure,” said OSN subscriber Terry Mackprang of Huntington Beach. His daughter, Emily, is a volleyball player at Rosary High. “We’ve had nothing so far from it, but it seems to me that volleyball has limited resources and volleyball coaches seemed to be plugged into the Internet.”

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Other Orange County athletes who have gone online say they have been happy with the results.

Anthony Iacopetti, a senior swimmer at Huntington Beach who has turned in times that rank among the top 25 in the nation in the 200-meter individual medley, went largely unnoticed by colleges until he recently went to OSN.

“We were trying to write as many letters as we could to schools to get my name out there, and then my mom found out about this,” he said. “It’s another opportunity to get my name out to schools. Some of the smaller schools have noticed me from that and I’ve gotten letters from schools I haven’t really heard of.”

Distance swimmer Matt Martin of Santa Margarita has also posted national times in several events. He went online with OSN and got a couple of immediate responses.

“I believe this will be a good thing if college coaches actually use it,” said Gail Martin, Matt’s mother. “The profile can be changed quickly and is faster than mailing it out to a coach. Most colleges, if they are interested in you, will send you a questionnaire to fill out. What you have online is like a questionnaire.”

Ray Valadez says interest in his son “mushroomed” soon after he went online. Ryan Valadez is one of about three dozen or so football players whose names and profiles are available through the home page at College Prospects of America.

While the number of athletes using online services is tiny now, the Internet might someday be the only place that wannabe college athletes can hang out their shingle, according to UC Irvine’s Gurbaxani.

He called the potential of Internet recruiting “enormous” and drew a parallel with one Orange County business that hired a headhunter at substantial cost to help it fill a top executive post. After a fruitless and costly search the company posted the listing on the Internet and found a suitable person for the job at about a third of the cost of the headhunter’s fee.

There is reason to believe, Gurbaxani said, that someday that same scenario will fit every prospective high school recruit and college athletic program in the nation.