I still hear horror stories about how a high school coach has tried to ruin a high school athlete’s athletic career. Believe it or not, there are high school coaches that will not do anything to help their own players get recruited for college. There are situations where high school coaches have put out misleading information about one of their own athletes to college recruiters with the intent to destroy the student athlete’s chances of being recruited at all. It’s sad to think that this kind of thing is still goes on and my writing this article about it I can’t believe it’s still happening. High school players have been messed over so much for years at the hands of high school coaches.
Here are some things that I have heard and/or had to fix during my years in the business of college recruiting:
High school coaches have held back recruiting letters that come to the schools for a certain player from a college program. What I mean is that the player or players have no idea that a college program has an interest in them because that player did not get the recruiting letters. Sad, but true and many high school coaches feel that they are helping the players by holding back these recruiting letters.
What I did with my recruiting service to fix this problem was to provide the student athlete’s home address and phone number in any information that was sent to a college program. That way, the college coaches who were doing the recruiting could just mail letters right to the student athlete’s home without going through the high school.
A very good high school basketball player from Ohio some years ago was told by the school administrators not to take the SAT test!
Now we all know that without this test score, there is no way the student athlete or any athlete could get into college. Their goal was to make sure that the student athlete did not get into college. To this day, I still don’t understand why that high school would do that. But what I did was call the school on that person’s behalf and, with the okay from his parents, find out what the hell was the problem! I mean this high school basketball player was 6’9 and no one was recruiting him because he had no test scores! The school administrators said that they did not think he wanted to go to college! They must have been blind! I guess they did not see a 6’9 basketball player who had talent to play in a college program! Well, I got the school straightened out and got this very good basketball player into college and now he’s playing basketball overseas.
When I was an up and coming high school basketball player, the team that I played on had many good players but the coach, at that time, did very little with recruiting. I shouldn’t even call him a coach because of what he didn’t do with recruiting!
Now the summer before my senior year in high school the same players that were on my high school team won the summer league championships. We beat the same teams and players that we faced the season before and that we would face my senior season. Why did we do so well? It was the coaching. We had a different coach that summer that cared about the players on the team and we wanted this man to coach us during the high school basketball season during our senior year.
Sad to say that it did not happen and we had another losing season and the coach who had coached this team for 3 seasons, quit at seasons end. Because of the pressure from many parents, he did nothing to build a basketball team and he did even less when it came to recruiting.
The many millions of high football players out there who have dreams of playing in college have had those same dreams crushed when the coach either quits or is fired at seasons end. What happens to the players who need their coach to help them get recruited for college? Who helps these players? In most situations, these football players are left with no help and sometimes these student athletes ends up either not going to college, junior college or they go to college but not to play football and sometimes their football career ends. Football season begins at the start of the school year and is over by December so there are many things still to do when it comes to recruiting but if there is no coach, the players are screwed.
Now for years and years high school student athletes have been messed over by a lot of high school coaches and the word has gotten around for years of what high school coaches have done to a lot of talented high school student athletes for years and years. Parents are now taking matters into their own hands. In today’s time with the power of the internet and college recruiting services. Parents now have options that were not available to them many years ago. They are not totally leaving it up to the high school coaches to help their kids get recruited for college.
These parents are using many other resources in order to help their kids achieve greater opportunities in the world of college recruiting. With the explosion of the Internet, more and more parents can do their own recruiting. These days, there is more access to a lot of information on recruiting. You can now email college programs, make phones and record and distribute your own DVD’s. Technology has allowed many parents to do more than ever. I think the days of totally leaving it up to high school coaches to help students get recruited for college is over. Well, not totally. Keep in mind, to do your own college recruiting is time consuming and does bring certain challenges. Therefore, the need for college recruiting services is key-if you can find the right one.
In my years as a college recruiter I have seen and herd it all.
© 2007 Al Woods