6 TIPS FOR PARENTS OF PROSPECTIVE STUDENT-ATHLETES

1 - Be Educated
For most families, the college recruiting process is a completely foreign process and one that can have many pitfalls. The college selection process by itself is very challenging for the average family. When you throw in the additional challenge of finding colleges that are a good fit athletically, the selection process can become more difficult and more confusing. There are a lot of confusing topics and terms that you will come across in the recruiting process; official visits, early decision, EFC, red shirts, scholarship blending, equivalency sports, head-count sports, NLI, Clearinghouse, Dead period, and so on. Your job is to learn the basics, understand your role in the recruiting process, understand how coaches recruit and what the look for, and understand what admission departments and schools look for. It's not about rules; it's about understanding and working with the process. Part of our goal of Right Fit Sports was to create a recruiting knowledge-base where parents and students can learn how recruiting works, what their role is, how college coaches recruit and how to put yourself in the best possible position to select the right schools and succeed. Our knowledge-base contains over 100 articles on college selection, visiting schools, recruiting, financial aid and much more.

2 - Understand who is responsible
Many families assume that their high school coach is responsible for their recruiting process. High school coaches are great people; they work really hard and usually don't earn much money. Often, they are teachers who have papers and tests to grade or work other jobs to make a living; and most of them have families to take care of as well. The recruiting process is ultimately your responsibility. You are responsible for researching and evaluating schools, contacting college coaches, visiting schools and making decisions along the way. Your high school coach can help you with the process by determining where your skills might fit in with different college levels and programs, writing recommendations, and even placing phone calls on your behalf to college coaches after you have initiated contact. Don't be the parent that senior year says, "I thought our coach would take care of the recruiting process for us?"

3 - Be proactive
Now that you know the process is your responsibility, it's important to be proactive and research as many schools as possible. The recruiting and college selection process is not something that should sneak up on you senior year. Success in recruiting is about matching up your son or daughters academic talents, athletic talents and desires with a given college program. The families that come the closest to finding an athletic, academic, and social match are the one's who usually have the best success in the recruiting process. They have already done much of the work for the college coach, and the coach has confidence in recruiting a smart and talented athlete who wants to attend their school. There are over 1,200 NCAA colleges at the D1, D2, and D3 level, and 500+ Junior College and NAIA schools, most of which you have never heard of so researching many different colleges is imperative for your success. The Right Fit Sports college database features over 2,000 colleges that offer athletic programs that parents and students can search through!

4 - Don't follow the herd
Many students put themselves in a position to fail by simply applying to well-known schools. The problem is that everyone else throughout the country is applying to these schools and competition for admission is extremely difficult. Harvard annually receives over 20,000+ applications and admits roughly 10% of applicants each year. Despite your academic record, Harvard is going to turn down over 18,000 students each year, some of them being incredibly smart and gifted students who finished at the top of their class. Juniata, a small D3 school in Pennsylvania received 1,745 applications last year and accepted about 1,184 students or roughly 68%. Few have heard of Juniata because they are not Harvard and you won't find their basketball team on TV in March Madness or their football team in a bowl game. Juniata recently appeared in the Unofficial Guide to the 320 Most Interesting Colleges, published by Kaplan Publishing and their girl's volleyball team won the 2004 D3 national championship so they must have some pretty good athletes too! If your list of colleges reads something like Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Yale, and Princeton, you will find competition for athletic spots and acceptance extremely difficult and sometimes impossible.

5 - Be realistic
The love, time, money, and passion you have poured into your son or daughters athletic career can often cloud your judgment of their potential for a college scholarship. If you child isn’t 7 feet tall they might not play D1 basketball, and if they don’t weight 300 pounds, they might not play D1 football. One of the biggest mistakes in recruiting is overestimating athletic ability and targeting college athletic programs that your skills will simply not allow you to perform at athletically. Most parents' dream of athletic scholarships and all the money they will save and are not realistic about the chances of receiving athletic scholarship money. While your talents may garner "some" athletic scholarship money, after Division One football and basketball, there is very little athletic scholarship money to go around for most other sports. Most coaches, even at the D1 level, have a limited amount of money for their team that they divide up amongst 15 or 20 players (even more for some sports). There is far more money in the form of grants, Merit aid, outside scholarships, institutional aid, and federal financial aid, than there is athletic scholarship money. You need to explore your options at all programs at all levels, and not focus your search solely on an athletic scholarship. You also need to seek out people that can give you a realistic evaluation of your son or daughters ability and how it applies to different levels. Ultimately, only a college coach can determine whether or not you can play for them.

99.9% of us are going to college to get an education and will not be going on to a professional athletic career, so focus your efforts on the best academic opportunity that presents itself.

6 - Be Honest
We recently read a story about a recruiting service that was promoting a player to a college coach. The service and the family said the player was 6'4" and threw 92 MPH as a baseball pitcher. The coach drove 11 hours (one way) to see the player play. The player ended up being 6'1" and the fastest pitch the college coach recorded that day on his radar gun (before he left disappointed) was 77 MPH. It's easy to add a few pounds to your weight, a few inches to your height and shave a few seconds off your 60 yard-dash time but doing that is only going to hurt your chances of getting recruited in the long run. There are hundreds of college athletic programs that can provide an opportunity for your children to continue their athletic career at the college level.