Bob Rigney Honored for Pioneering Prep Scouting Industry

30 Years and Counting, NSR Continues Founder’s Legacy  

NSR’s 30-year anniversary of helping high school student-athletes attract the attention, receive evaluations and get recruited by college coaches starts this month as we chronicle the extraordinary legacy created in 1980 by founder Bob Rigney (pictured) and carried on today by the Rigney family. 

Dubbed “The Father of High School Scouting Services,” Mr. Rigney’s original concept is no longer a cottage industry, but instead has become a multi-million dollar viable force in high school and college sports.  

Mr. Rigney’s decision to promote his eldest son, Curtis, to college coaches by putting together a profile sheet and then sending it to college coaches was really nothing new.  To get their children promoted beyond word of mouth to college coaches, distributing profiles was a widely used method by parents in the day.  But, it’s what Bob did with the concept which uniquely qualifies him as someone who in essence changed how high school scouting and recruiting operated.   Wanting to duplicate the tremendous response Curtis received, other parents in the area asked Bob to promote their sons to colleges, too.  Bob saw a need and the potential for a business.  He would scout, interview and enroll prospects for a fee, and then promote those prospects to college coaches, also for a fee, in what would be called, The Scouting Report.  Bob was well positioned to start up this business because of three key factors:  1) He already owned a printing business, so his start up and operating costs would be minimal; 2) He already had extensive experience in coaching and professional scouting; 3) He was an experienced salesman.      

Scouting Report was established and the rest, as they say, is history.  “When I saw the tremendous response that Curtis got from colleges and the tremendous desire that other parents had for doing the same thing for their sons, it didn’t take long for my entrepreneurial spirit to kick in,” Bob said in a recent interview.  

Today, the Rigney family continues Bob’s extraordinary legacy.  Son Rusty is the company’s president while daughter Peggy serves as the firm’s chief financial officer.  The company has come a long way from the family putting together the reports and mailing them to coaches.  And, as the company grew into a nationally known entity, Bob re-named it National Scouting Report to reflect its well-deserved stature among the nation’s college coaches. 

As computers evolved and use of the Internet became prevalent, Bob saw that the future of recruiting would be tied to this new technology.  He shifted the company’s focus to representing and promoting high school prospects directly to college coaches via the Web.  As technology advancements surfaced and became available, NSR stayed at the cutting edge and today continues to reinvent how prospect information is delivered to college coaches.   

NSR now has modern digs in the Birmingham suburb of Alabaster where a home office staff does everything from A to Z.  A fully high-tech organization with four in-house video editors, Web site designers, college coach liaisons, customer service reps, along with marketing, IT and social media departments, National Scouting Report is the premier high school scouting and college recruiting organization in the world.  Field offices across America and in several foreign countries are owned by licensees who, along with their area scouts, cover every sport played in colleges across the country.  In NSR‘s lifetime, the company has helped to place thousands upon thousands of prep prospects with college athletic programs.

NSR’s strategy is unlike any scouting agency in the world in that professionally trained NSR licensees and area scouts scour the high school and travel or club landscape in search of prospects with the talent, desire, character and grades which uniquely qualify them to become legitimate college recruits.  Our reputation among college coaches everywhere was founded on the promise that we would only enroll and promote student-athletes who had all the qualities necessary to participate at the next level.  That firm commitment has never wavered.   

From its outset NSR has avoided the primary business strategy and practices most other high school scouting organizations operate under which is to fill cubicles with telemarketers, typically called counselors or advisors, who are hired to make blind phone calls to prospects hoping to get a commission by having them “sign” without ever having scouted or evaluated the kids in any justifiable fashion.  At NSR, we call this business model the “Catch and Release Method”  in which prospects are caught and then released to basically be on their own.    

NSR is service oriented and focused.  Once with NSR, prospects are guided through the recruiting process utilizing a variety of time-tested methods which keep clients informed of essential recruiting information.  Personal scouts and home office advisors are constantly on call to assist clients.  We are the real deal.  Bob Rigney would have it no other way.