New NSR scout talks about his unsuccessful DIY promo methods as a parent and how that led him to NSR

Unsuccessful experience promoting son to colleges leads parent to NSR

Riding from the hotel to the NSR home office this morning, I was talking to one of our new scouts from California.  He said that what really inspired him to become an NSR licensee and scout was that in 2010, when his son was a senior in high school, he and his wife tried to promote him on their own.  His next statement was all-telling.

“We didn’t hear a peep from a single college coach that we contacted.   We sent loads of E-mails and letters and go nothing, nada.  When I learned about the effectiveness with which NSR promotes their athletes, it was a no-brainer to me that this is what I needed to be doing for the athletes in my area of Northern California.”

Parents thinking that college coaches will jump on every package of info and E-mail are in for a long wait.  College coaches trust viable sources and parents aren’t in that group.

Go into practically any college coach’s office and you will find somewhere, usually tucked off in a corner, a stack of packages and tapes they’ve gotten from parents.  It’s a dust collecting area which coach’s rarely get around to reading or viewing.  Why?  Well, if you were a college coach and you had a choice of going through the info provided to you by the world’s most trusted scouting service that has been sending their program great high school student-athletes for 32  years or a parent, which would you take seriously?  Bingo.

High school scouting and college recruiting is no longer a mom ‘n pop affair where you can list your info on a free recruiting site or send a few letters or E-mails to coaches and realistically expect to get a response, much less a recruiting letter or phone call.  Not going to happen.  So, get real.

College coaches are like anyone else in business, they want to save time to make their recruiting efforts as efficient as possible.  When they decide which prospects to spend their valuable time evaluating, they aren’t silly enough to think that the top prospects will come from Mom and Dad.  That simply makes no sense.  They access info and the opinions of the pros that scout for a living, that are on the ground actually doing their prelim work of gathering athletic, academic and personal data, pushing unqualified prospects to the side and homing in on those prospects that are legitimate college athletes.

When NSR scouts pinpoint, scout and then enroll a prospect, it is because as scouts they have done the initial work that college coaches don’t have time or funds, in many instances, to do for themselves.  And, over the years these coaches have developed a level of professional respect for our scouts and our scouting and verification methods which coaches are confident result in a list of genuine college prospects.