Some Athletes Just a Click Away From Being ‘Discovered’

As his skills developed, Josiah Brand seemed a cinch to play college baseball. Moving through the ranks, from Little League to elite traveling teams, he emerged as someone to keep an eye on, a comer.

This year, the 18-year-old is the starting second baseman at Fallbrook High School in northern San Diego County. Last year, as a junior, he batted .372. He’s no slouch in the classroom either, sporting a 3.85 grade point average. But his father, Jeff Brand, was leaving nothing to chance when it came to college. He cruised the Internet, investigating the multitude of online services that could promote his son’s talents. He settled on College Prospects of America, forking over $1,000 so that Josiah’s stats--both athletic and academic--could be examined by any coach who cared to have a look.

Soon after Josiah’s Web page went up, complete with a recommendation from a pro scout who is a family acquaintance, what Jeff Brand described as a “small tsunami of interest” came their way. About 40 schools made contact, including a number in the Midwest and East that don’t have the budgets to recruit in Southern California. So was it worth it?

“After all the money we’ve spent on hitting coaches and speed training and even things like eye training, I think it’s a very comfortable thousand bucks to spend,” said Brand, a general contractor.

He is not alone. Thousands of parents, eager to see their children continue their athletic careers at the collegiate level--and reap the scholarships that come with it--are signing up with recruiting agencies that promise national exposure for a price.

Take, for instance, Marsalis Paige, a talented 17-year-old split end from Marion, Ark. His father, Mike Paige, felt that his son’s achievements during his senior season last year hadn’t received enough notice. So there is Marsalis on the FootballProspects.com Web site, complete with a stylish picture, his grade point average and the fact that he averaged 23.7 yards per catch last season. “If it wasn’t for the Web site, we might have been lost,” said Mike Paige. “You’ve got to promote your kid.”

While there are recruiting sites that also promote academic scholarship and the arts, the majority have athletics as their main focus. The Baseball Coaches of America Web site, for instance, lists 45 recruiting agencies that can be reached by scouts with a click of a mouse. All of them are places where coaches can at least have a first look at players who want to play at the collegiate level.

The Web sites offer varying services at wildly varying prices. Some simply offer exposure far beyond the players’ local colleges and universities. Others tout professionally edited game films, slick brochures and the promise of college placement. Some even give the athletes detailed information about who has perused their stats.

To sign on, young athletes, purchase space on the Internet site of their choice, where they then list their qualifications and perhaps add a picture and the recommendation of a coach. Then they wait to see if they’ll be noticed. For higher fees, the recruiting service will be more proactive, adding more services to the package, such as follow-up calls to coaches.

There are no figures available on how many colleges make use of these services. But to hear the recruiting people tell it, the Internet has eliminated the days when a gifted athlete could not be matched with a college program somewhere--though that somewhere may be a long way from home. As Mike Petersen, head of the Colorado-based National Athletic Scholarship Registry, put it: “It might mean that Johnny has to go to South Dakota to play baseball, but at least he’ll get to play at the next level.”

One of the oldest such services is the College Athletic Placement Service, headquartered in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Bernardo. Director Bill Serra began the business in 1971, working mostly with athletes in New Jersey, where he then lived. He said the Internet has made a dramatic difference in how his company now does business. “It’s changed things a thousand percent,” he said, recalling the days when he sent out thousands of brochures each year to attract athletes. “Now we don’t have a brochure. There’s no brochure that’s going to tell anything better than what can be found on the Web site.”

And coaches are paying attention, though not necessarily ones from the top-tiered schools with big budgets, recruiting staffs and far-reaching alumni networks. Most of those have homed in on the blue chippers they want long before the athletes have reached their senior year in high school.

But for coaches at smaller schools the services can make a difference. Bobby Elder took over as baseball coach at Wheaton College, just outside Chicago, six months ago. He immediately found himself in crisis mode, having to scramble to fill his roster. Because he didn’t yet have a recruiting network in place, and because the school’s academic standards are high, Elder searched the Internet and found several qualified players.

“It allowed us to make contact with as many kids as possible even though it was so late in the game,” he said. “And it allowed us to screen a lot of kids pretty quickly.”

Or take Jim Cappello, the women’s soccer coach at tiny Warner Southern College, a Christian school located in central Florida. He took over the soccer program three years ago and realized that he too had a recruiting problem. He combed the Internet for prospects, sending out hundreds of e-mails to students who had subscribed to various recruiting services. This year, six of Cappello’s 34 players were found via the Internet. His team went from 0-18 the first year to a 10-9-1 record the second, good enough to make the league semifinals. “Some of the higher-end players from outside the state were basically recruited by e-mails,” said Cappello. “I was able to give recruits the e-mail addresses of current players so they could tell them what it’s like to live at the school. To me, that was the most important recruiting tool.”

The costs of online recruiting services range from less than $100 to more than $2,000. But Tracy Jackson of College Prospects of America, one of the country’s largest, said no one is going to get rich in the business, given the limited amount of top talent and the need to keep costs affordable. College Prospects charges between $950 and $1,550 per athlete and Jackson said the company works with “several thousand” students a year. He said roughly 90% of the students who sign up get “offers to go somewhere,” though it might not be a college the athlete wants to attend.

At Football Prospects, owner Bryan Shumock charges a one-time fee of $99, which gets a player’s picture and statistics on his site and includes him in printed directories that go to 500 football programs around the country. Extra services--such as more prominent display in the directory--up the price to about $250. But Shumock, a pilot for American Airlines, says his one-person venture doesn’t earn enough for him to quit flying. He said he’d been more successful than others because of his bare-bones approach to the service, which he runs out of his Bethlehem, Pa., home. “What gets a lot of people [running recruiting services] in trouble is that they try to do too much,” he said. “This kind of business can’t pay for 20 salaries and a big office.”

The fee Shumock charged seemed like money well spent to Jesse Jones, a 297-pound, 18-year-old high school lineman from York, Pa. He said he learned almost immediately that his aspirations of playing for a big-time program were unrealistic. “You come to a realization after going through this process that you have to be really big and a top student athlete,” he said. But that doesn’t mean he won’t be playing college ball. He can reel off a number of smaller schools that have expressed interest in him since Football Prospects posted him on its Web site.

Recruiters caution that one of the common mistakes parents make is overestimating the athletic skills of their children, then spending thousands in the hopeless pursuit of a college scholarship. The sites are littered with athletic resumes that would underwhelm most college recruiters.

Jackson, of College Prospects, said that after 16 years in the recruiting business, his rule of thumb is that only one in 10 high school athletes has the ability to play in college. He said his organization won’t even take an athlete unless they are recommended by both the prospect’s high school coach and one of his company’s own evaluators.

On the flip side of the coin, he said, are the athletes who could play in college but won’t because they don’t know how to market themselves. That, he and others said, is largely the fault of parents who think recruiters are supposed to arrive at their doorsteps with college offers. “Most parents just sit and sit, and when their son or daughter doesn’t get a bite, they shrug their shoulders and say it’s too bad but their children’s athletic careers are over,” said Petersen of the national sports registry.

Though the Internet can be of benefit both in identifying and weeding out candidates, coaches overwhelmingly believe that they must see the potential athletes in person, to get--as one coach put it--”into the kid’s insides.”

“I think most college coaches would agree that the best way to evaluate talent is to go out and watch it,” said Mark O’Brien, the head baseball coach at the private, Jesuit-run Santa Clara University. “However, you can find out a tremendous amount of information about a prospective athlete on the Internet. We look at it all the time.”

As for Jesse Jones and Marsalis Paige, both will attend colleges that discovered them on the Internet and both will have substantial aid packages. Jesse will attend Kentucky State University in Frankfort, Ky., and Marsalis will play college ball at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Conn. And Josiah Brand, despite the interest expressed by so many colleges and universities, chose one that did not recruit him.

Josiah discovered the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the country’s top business schools. Because of his interest in the subject, he called the Penn baseball coach and asked about playing for him. He was accepted and awarded a hefty financial aid package soon thereafter.

Josiah’s high school baseball coach, Jay Craven, said being contacted by so many schools made Josiah realize what might be possible. “Penn is a perfect place for Joe,” he said. “Baseball will be a part of the overall process for him.”