The Recruiting Wire 4.28
April 28th, 2008 - byOn Friday The Wall Street Journal wrote a profile about the premier High School Football All-Star Game, the US ARMY All-American Bowl. The article described how founder Douglas Berman and Richard McGuiness founded the company SportsLink that runs the bowl game. NCSA is a proud partner and a recruiting education provider with SportsLink. Two of our athletes, Sean Cwynar and Aaron Williams were lucky enough to be among those selected.
The article also described how difficult it is to identify the top-level talent for which the game is known (like Reggie Bush, right). Their scouting operation is imperative to ensuring the game live up to its reputation as the first college-level game of an athlete’s career. 
The All-American Bowl is the last station in an assembly line that aims to turn young football players into college standouts and, ideally, pros. SportsLink oversees a scouting operation that funnels players as young as 12 into invitation-only football camps. It runs a three-day scouting event to select high-school juniors for the next year’s bowl.
SportsLink’s scouting begins long before the game. Tom Lemming, who publishes a magazine on high-school football and also advises SportsLink, spends five months a year evaluating high-schoolers. He says he logs nearly 60,000 miles each year, driving through 49 states to watch 17,000 kids play (NCSA is the sponsor of his tour). He refers the best to SportsLink.
Of course this process is easier said than done. Unlike a sport like basketball, football players don’t develop the physical requirements necessary to compete at the highest level until well into their high school career.
“Sometimes you can tell at 15 and 16 who will dominate, but it’s very tough before that,” says Mr. Lemming. “A kid can dominate, and then they stop growing.”
Mr. Berman says the elite athletes begin to stand out toward the end of high school. For seventh- or eighth-graders, “we are looking for kids who are serious and have some athletic ability,” he says. “For an 11th-grader, it’s different.”
Like most high school sports and recruiting these days, finances definitely play an issue.
This year, about 2,200 kids will pay $500 apiece to attend the three-day Football University sessions with former NFL players.
Last season, Bret Cooper, an assistant high-school coach who is SportsLink’s regional director for the Philadelphia area, traveled to nearby Norristown High School. There, he saw a speedy, 6-foot-2 junior wide receiver named Je’Ron Stokes from visiting Northeast High catch a hitch pass against Norristown. Je’Ron juked several defenders, turning what should have been a five-yard completion into a 25-yard gain.
Mr. Cooper helped get Je’Ron one of 400 invitations to SportsLink’s combine in San Antonio, a three-day event where juniors do 40-yard dashes and vertical jumps for the college scouts and other evaluators who pick the next all-star team. Je’Ron, who had three scholarship offers before the combine, was voted a top receiver. By the spring, he had 20 offers. He plans to play for the University of Tennessee in 2009.
Je’Ron’s father, Ron Stokes, says he will spend $1,000 to send Je’Ron and his brother, Malik, a 15-year-old quarterback, to a SportsLink camp in June.
“It takes a lot to get these kids noticed,” says their father, who has paid for personal trainers for his kids and sent them to football camps at colleges in Florida, New Jersey, Ohio and Tennessee. “I’m giving them the things they need to have an edge.”
The reality is that it does take a lot to get noticed. It takes a lot at every level. Athletes need to continue to find ways to invest in their future. But, they also need to carefully consider how their resources are spent. For many athletes spending thousands of dollars on camps never pays off and they are left scrambling at the last minute.
NCSA helps thousands of student athletes across the country to gain the right kind of exposure, so they aren’t the ones left out when their high school career ends. The only question is: “Do You Qualify?”
