Business Of Hs Football

A top high school football player gets in his car after a long day of practice. Its 6 P.M. and before he starts the car up he checks his cell phone, 20 missed calls. Many of these aren't from friends or family, rather the numbers on the screen belong to college football coaches and high school recruiting "experts". The calls will continue until around 12 that night, and the same will happen every day, until the athlete signs on the dotted line. This is how high school football has become a business, and another example of the spreading commercialism through sports.

Imagine being a high school athlete and waking up early for school, lifting weights and practicing after, and then spending the next five hours of your day answering phone calls, text messages, instant messages, and e-mails from recruiting reporters and college coaches. That is what it is like for most of the nations top football players. The attention usually is welcomed, at least in the beginning. But after months of incessant interviews and questioning, it begins to get old, and stressful. February 2 is designated as National Signing Day for incoming college football player, and as it approaches the pressure put on prospective student athletes increases exponentially. This is because there decisions influence the pockets of many people.

I was one of these athletes, recruited by over 100 Division 1-A schools, receiving over 60 scholarships. My recruiting process began as a sophomore in high school and ended February 2, 2005, on national signing day when I signed with the Louisville Cardinals on national television. I picked Louisville over Notre Dame, Florida, Miami, and U.S.C. The process include collaboration with close friends and team mates who accepted scholarships to schools such as Florida State, U.S.C., Wisconsin, Michigan State, Miami, and other major division 1 powerhouses. My experience and those of these other players is the main basis for my opinion along with the influence of many experienced people in the field of college, highschool, and professional sports.

An athlete's choice of schools directly affects college coaches. This is because coaches depend on players to win games, and depend on winning games to keep their jobs. Subsequently a college coach's job is dependent on his ability to sign high quality player. Bill Conley, a former recruiting coordinator for football at Ohio State University, states, Recruiting is the most important job a college coach has. The X's and O's are pretty much the same around the country, but if your X's and O's are bigger, faster and stronger, you have a better chance of being successful (Finley, 2003).

Since college coaches depend on signing high school athletes to win games, it has become increasingly important for them to get the best ones. This leads to a "at any price" attitude for many coaches. There is a lot of dishonesty or half truths that present in many coaches recruiting pitches. This includes but is not limited to promises of playing time, recognition, prestige, and other factors that are not always kept. An example of this is when I was recruited by Rutgers University, I was promised a starting spot at left tackle as a freshman, I later found out that the same promise was made to another player in my recruiting class, as well as players already at the school from the previous three classes. These types of situations make it very hard to make a decision based on facts, because so many are distorted to potential prospects. Many coaches become more salesmen than coach when it comes to recruiting.

But coaches are really just doing there jobs. As much pressure as they put on high school kids, right or wrong, is only what is in their job description. The people that really exploit high school athletes are the so called recruiting gurus or reporters and recruiting services.

Recruiting services offer to help market athletes to colleges in exchange for a fee. An example of this would be National Recruiting Network, nationalrecruits.com, which charges a fee of $15 a month. The athlete pays the money and the service creates a profile for him including his statistics, physical attributes, height, weight, forty-yard dash time, etc., and possibly high-light clips or video. These services claim that they can greatly increase a prospective student athlete's chances of receiving a coveted scholarship.

The problem is that these services are mostly ignored by college coaches. University of Maryland football coach James Franklin responded to the question posed to him in a Baltimore Sun Question and answer article, "Do you pay much attention to a recruit's ranking and stars, or do you have your own system for assessing their talent level?" To this he responded, "...we don't look at those in terms of who we recruit. What we do is we get film and transcripts on guys that we like and check them out....We do hire some recruiting services to get us some raw names." (Sunspot Staff, 2004). The services Franklin is talking about would not be the "pay to get recruited services" mentioned above, rather they are the services that go out and scout high school

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