Are the Recruiting Companies Worth It?

[MIGHTY MANFRED THE WONDER]

Lets get it right out in the open and make this thread really worth while- Maybe some good information, and past experiances-

College recruiting help- Get you athletic scolarships
There has to be, what? A couple dozen of these outfits blowing smoke up your skirts about what they will do for you, can do for you and make happen..
They are not in it because of some love for you, Its MONEY and there must be a lot of it laying around to pick up.

When you are talking MINOR SPORTS, just how much are they helpful compared to you buckling down, being realistic, and doing it yourself?

What are the rates? Maybe we can compare contrast outfits here?

 

[MLoutch]

Based on my personal experiance NO these firms are NOT worth it.

I was recruited and played D1 Tennis, My son D1 Football (full ride) and my daughter just verbally comitted to play D1 Lacrosse (had the option to play D1 tennis but her 1st love Lacrosse) so we have gone thru the process in both revenue and non revenue sports and seen both sides.

For our daughter since Lacrosse and Tennis are non revenue we looked at some of the recruiting firms and in truth they don't do anything you can't do yourself. Almost every school even lists their recruiting timeline (as does the NCAA) and that pretty much gives you a step by step guide on how to approach it. My daughters final list of offers came from schools like Hopkins, U of Denver, Cal - Berkeley, Cal - Davis, George Washington, Boston U, Villanova and from our talks with those coaches none use the recruiting firms.

We know some kids who paid the fees that range from $300 to $2000!!! and they didn't get any calls July 1st (the day incoming seniors can get that first phone call from a D1 coach).

The truth is doing your own homework, contacting the coaches, sending your resume-videos-schedule-results-tournaments...etc is still the best way to go. Having your High School coach(or Travel Team, Private Head coach) make that call to your top schools is still is worth ten times what any of those firms will charge you to "list" you or make a jazzy web page no one is going to look at.

TAKKLE is a good example - you pay this fee to get listed (i think its like a few hundred $$) then you get listed in TAKKLE web site but its nothing but a glorified my space page and you get "ranked" by how many hits your page gets and how many votes people give you. And if you get enough hits they list you as a "TAKKLE top 100" and you get listed on a TAKKLE ad in SI, gimme a break!

 

[10isDad]

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.

 

[Sakkijarvi]

You can set up a page for any sport at www.TruPreps.com and it's free. The firm is owned by MaxPreps, which is a CBS company, i.e., a real business. You can link your page to MaxPreps stats, add video, still photos, news articles, and it's easy. You can't beat free.

You can get a piece of software like Worldcast

http://www.fairlogic.com/worldcast/

which is cheap and works. Click your way to adding any number of NCAA coach's names and E-mail addresses and send them all the updates you want. Directly, and from the player. Attach pdf versions of your wonderful coach's letters of recommendation, add images inline (like those html ads you get in YOUR inbox). Get in the paper, win a tournament, whatever -- time for an E- mailer. And the coaches we can get feedback from (D3 only; D1 and 2 can't write at this point since my kid is young) are appreciative in hearing from the player directly and WANT information.

Worldcast is $49.00 and we've been using it for YEARS for customer mailings, and I am now using it to send updates for my daughter, a D1 prospect in another sport. She goes to showcases and has built a following of college coaches and this is how we keep them up to speed on upcoming showcases, high school schedule, tournaments, etc.

A free TruPreps page plus a fifty dollar piece of software and you can provide everything one of these scouting services purports to provide. I've been pitched by them, and in our sport they go into the thousands of $$. Our A.D. to other coaches I've spoken to all say to stay away unless you are uninvolved, clueless, or won the lottery and have one day to live to spend all the money.