For Recently Graduated High School Athletic Prospects, Where’s the Offer?

No One Wants to Own the Failure

Literally thousands of deserving senior prep athletic prospects, freshly graduated from high school, will not realize their dreams of playing college sports this coming fall.  Sad, isn’t it?  All the work, time, effort and money invested in this crucially important dream and nothing to show for it in terms of a scholarship offer.   

What went wrong?  Well it depends on whom you ask. 

Quiz the high school, club or travel coaches and they will feign responsibility.  The excuses are predictable.  The athlete or parent didn’t express an interest in time to get them an offer.  The college coaches they know had already signed the players they needed.  The prospect’s attitude really went downhill as the season came to a close, or maybe the excuse would be that the kid and parents wouldn’t follow up on the leads offered to them.  Whatever the reason, one thing is for certain; personal accountability will not be a part of the answer. 

Nor should it be, frankly.  It is not the coach’s responsibility to promote their players to college coaches.  Their job is to teach the athlete and coach the game.  Promoting athletes is not inherent to their position.  Some will say it is, but really it’s not.  First, about one in a hundred of these coaches has a clue about how the recruiting process actually works including when and which college coaches can evaluate or contact prospects.  Few are aware about the NCAA and NAIA eligibility centers and what their purpose is.  Fewer still can tell you how many scholarships a DI, DII, NAIA or NJCAA school is permitted to offer.  And, want details on what the National Letter of Intent entails?  Good luck.  All that said, they don’t know these things because it is not their job to know.  You do not learn these things through osmosis.  You learn it by being immersed in recruiting every day, year after year, not by dabbling in it a few weeks or months of the year.

Ask the parents what happened.  It’s more likely they will take some of the blame because in the end they know it was avoidable.  They listened to people and coaches who said that if their kid was good enough that college coaches would find them.  They listened when told that their kid would be seen and recruited if they just played club or travel sports.  They listened when outsiders said scouting services were a waste of time and money.  They listened and they came away with zilch.  And now, they have to look their kid in the eye every day knowing that had they taken the aggressive, professional route, things most likely would have been different because their child really did have the ability, desire and grades to play at some college level. 

Finally, ask the athlete, if you can look them in the eye without seeing their once in a lifetime dream fade in the distance.  They’ll shrug and walk away, reminded that they were taken down the wrong path by adults who should have known better, but instead clung to archaic ideas of how dreams in the real, modern world of recruiting are captured and embraced because they really were that special.