Wow! Not a lot of response here. I wonder if it's because the various agencies aren't used that much or because the target audience isn't on this board.
I read an article that there are over 75 such agencies, although some are specialized for certain sports.
Here's an excerpt from an article I found. The emphasis is my own:
"Recruiting service Web sites are replete with testimonials from college coaches about the services' value in recruiting. Other college coaches concede that recruiting services are a useful if elementary tool, providing names to add to a database of players to check out. Beccaria, of Haverford, said that he used a recruiting service as a high school player, although he was not sure if it helped him get into Johns Hopkins.
Many coaches, including Beccaria's colleagues at Haverford, say that recruiting services are a waste of money. These coaches said they had never had an athlete from a recruiting service end up on their teams. They discard the e-mail messages as soon as they receive them.
"I realize some kid's parents might have paid $1,000 to have that e-mail sent," Tom Donnelly, the track coach at Haverford, said recently as he deleted a recruiting service e-mail message on his computer screen. "The sad thing is, I would have read it if the kid had sent it himself." "
In another website, I found the following:
"A recruiting service will market your son to college coaches for a fee. The fee will depend on the types of services they offer and how many of those services you use. Some services are limited to putting a player's profile on their web site and/or emailing it to coaches. Other services give you a multitude of service options such as personalized mailings to targeted college coaches, Internet profiles, individual athletic assessment and testing, highlight video or CD-ROM creation, one-on-one role play with your son, monthly information sessions and advice in financial aid negotiations. We used a recruiting service that provided multiple services in their basic fee and provided optional services for an additional fee.
Advantages
Saves you the time and effort of marketing your son
Provides a certain amount of expertise and advice to help navigate you and your son through the process
Our personal experience with Nate was that we received an overwhelming response from the recruiting service's initial mailing, primarily from NCAA Div IAA, III and NAIA schools. He must have received 200 initial contact letters!
Disadvantages
The expense
The impersonal service. Your son is one of hundreds. The information about your son can be mailed to a coach along with 100 other high school player profiles.
Their goal is not the same as yours. Their goal is to sign as many kids up for their service as they can and generate revenue. They are not really "vested" in the outcome for your son.
Lack of response/follow-up. Unfortunately, sometimes once you have paid your fee and received the the minimum agreed on service, you never hear from them again even though they may have initially represented their service to include follow-up.
We were very disappointed in the lack of personalized service, response and follow-up we received from our recruiting service. They did not update our son's profile on their web site in a timely manner. Even though we sent our representative a copy of our son's coaches contact log, he had no idea what schools were recruiting Nate. After one frustrating experience on a school visit, we asked our representative at the recruiting service to follow up with the coach. After calling the representative several times to see if he called the coach, we were told not to call him again to follow-up - he would call us when he talked to the coach. Guess what? He never did call us and we wrote the money off that we spent on the recruiting service as a lesson learned.
Our recommendation is not to use full service recruiting service unless you have loads of money to spend and/or not a spare minute at all to get involved in your son's recruiting process. "
My guess is the tennisrecruiting website is probably a good value, in that it's only $50 per year - a pittance compared to the hundreds and sometimes thousands that some of these services charge.
