NCSA College Athletic Scholarships Blog

Patrick Dayton has been nominated our NCSA Baseball Student-Athlete of the Month for September. He is from Archer City, Texas and graduates in 2010. Patrick is a 6’0” 180 pound infielder who was named to the All-State Honorable Mention Team as a junior after hitting .500 in 54 at bats. He was also named to the All-Area 1st Team his first two years of high school hitting .394 his freshman year and .438 his sophomore year.

If you can believe it, Patrick excels more in the classroom. He has a 4.34 GPA on a 4.0 scale, is ranked #1 in his class, and scored a 1460 on the two-part SAT (including a perfect 800 on the math section). On top of baseball and academics, Patrick’s math and science teams have placed in the top 6 in four different math and science competitions. Patrick is looking to study engineering in college and NCSA is very proud to name Patrick Dayton our NCSA Baseball Student-Athlete of the Month for September.

Here are some of our latest college baseball commitments for the 2010 class:

Brian Monette to the University of Southern Illinois – Carbondale

Brian Essig commits to the University of the Pacific

And David Johannessen decides on Florida Atlantic University

For fall sports, we are in the middle of visit season.  Recruits are visiting college campuses for both official and unofficial visits.  Most of the time these visits fall on game days.  Recruits get to see behind the curtains at what goes into the preparation for a real college contest.  These visits are a critical recruiting tool for coaching staffs hoping to make a big impression on the athletes high on their recruiting boards.

ESPN.com chronicled how the University of Notre Dame and the University of Florida handle these visits.

Big-game weekends provide an opportunity for colleges to showcase their programs, and they give recruits a game-day experience at a school they are considering. Whether it’s the best time for a prospect to use his official visit to that school is certainly up for debate, but there is no question that hosting prospects on a big weekend is a powerful way to sell a program and all that goes into a football Saturday.

So it’s significant when Notre Dame hosts Southern California on Saturday for the third time during the Charlie Weis era, there again will be a slew of talented prospects in South Bend for the game, many of whom will be taking unofficial visits.

“Obviously, it’s a big game for us and a big game for college football,” said Fighting Irish recruiting coordinator Rob Ianello, who has been with the program since Weis was hired in late 2004. “Kids like to see big games, so naturally kids want to be at this one. It’s an event. People are coming in for the event and hopefully they see Notre Dame at its finest.”

The Irish have had great success signing prospects who visit for the game with the Trojans. In the Class of 2006, seven players from six different states who visited for the 2005 USC game ended up inking with Notre Dame. In the Class of 2008, three from three different states signed with the Irish, including standout receiver Michael Floyd.

Ianello added that Notre Dame always signs a high percentage of players it brings in for official visits. Schools are allowed 56 official visits per NCAA rules, and the Fighting Irish rarely bring in that many.

“We are usually in the 38-40 range,” Ianello said.

Florida recruiting coordinator and receivers coach Billy Gonzales, the person largely responsible for bringing Percy Harvin to Florida, remembers the electric receiver’s experience in The Swamp and the lasting impression it made.

Harvin made his official visit to Florida on the weekend of Sept. 16-18, 2005. On Saturday night, the Gators hosted SEC East rival Tennessee in a prime-time, nationally televised game and won 16-7. The crowd at The Swamp was loud from start to finish, and head coach Urban Meyer earned his first signature victory as the Gators’ head coach.

Harvin’s signing with Florida “was big,” Gonzales said. “I remember him vividly saying, ‘I am sitting next to my mom and screaming to the top of my lungs and she could not hear what I was saying.’ That obviously had a tremendous impact on him coming here. Of course, he took other official visits during that recruiting cycle and we signed Tim Tebow, so that helped too.”

Big-game weekends are prime opportunities for coaching staffs to bring in and impress top talent.

“It’s something we sit down and take a look at as a staff at the end of each recruiting cycle,” Gonzales said. “We go over who visited and when and if it worked or not.”

“There are a lot of pluses,” Gonzales said. “The game atmosphere certainly is one of them. The negative is that you only get to spend a limited amount of time with a recruit and their family when they come in during the season because you are preparing your team. You are going through the walk-through and getting ready to play. If you play an 8 p.m. game, by the time you get through, it’s 11 p.m. or so and there just isn’t a lot of time to spend with the recruits and their families.

“If you come in here after the season is over, then the time works out better in terms of spending time with recruits and their families.”

So it’s not like having recruits attend a big game is the only way to land them. In the Class of 2009, Gonzales signed Under Armour All-American Andre DeBose (Sanford, Fla./Seminole). DeBose did not visit until Jan. 23 and committed to the Gators two weeks earlier at the Under Armour All-American game. This recruiting cycle, the highest-ranked prospect in the ESPNU150 to set an official visit to Florida, linebacker Jordan Hicks (West Chester, Ohio/Lakota West)), will visit the Gators the second weekend in January.

Gonzales says it works best when prospects visit unofficially during the summer and then get to return to Gainesville for their official visits and are already familiar with the program, the campus and having spent the quality time with the coaching staff. Harvin had come in for an unofficial during the summer.

I’d like to make three extremely important points about the article.  One, just because this article focuses on Division I, doesn’t mean that visits don’t occur at every level.  In fact, visiting a smaller school shows a coach how much you are interested in a program, not just a ticket to a big-time match up.

Two, that the Unofficial Visit often sets up the Official Visits.  As Rob Ianello pointed out, schools save their Official visits for their very best recruits that they have offered or are very close to offering scholarships.  Therefore, its critical that recruits start the recruiting process early.

Finally, recruits should take not of how much value coaching staffs place on these visits.  If they take so much time to prepare, shouldn’t recruits do the same?  You bet!  That is how NCSA  pushes our student-athletes over the top.  NCSA gets the recruits name out early and then leads the recruit through our curriculum so they know exactly how to conduct themselves on visits.

If you are a student-athlete hoping to get recruited, take my advice;  Don’t settle for watching recruits on the sidelines on your TV.  Join them at the right school for you!

NCSA travels the country every day to educate student athletes, families and coaches about the recruiting process.  Most of the time we talk to athletes that have already decided to play sports in college.  However, since recruiting starts early than ever, sometimes we talk to athletes who are still on the fence if they want to pursue an athletic scholarship.  For those students I wanted to share an essay from a Columbia Women’s Basketball Athlete, Lauren Dwyer.  She does a great job conveying why so many high school athletes aspire to continue their athletic career in college.

A notion floats around campus that athletes get accepted to Columbia because of our athletic capabilities, implying that we didn’t have to work as hard for this opportunity as the non-athletes. I’d propose a different way of considering the situation based on priorities, values, and merit.

When we host recruits—high school basketball players we want to come to Columbia and play for us—we tell them why we came here, championing all the benefits that come with attending Columbia. My generic spew: It’s the best of everything—Division I athletics, an Ivy League education, the best city in the world with the feel of a tight-knit campus community, plus innumerable resources and opportunities at your fingertips. This paints quite a rosy picture of life here—we usually mince the details about the challenges that come with this perfect-on-paper experience.

Pressure is everywhere at Columbia—no one escapes it. Imagine also feeling the need to prove yourself to everyone around you at every turn. It can get exhausting, but we’re athletes—we don’t like to reveal any weakness.

I see two worlds that we student-athletes mainly occupy: Columbia University and Division I athletics. In both worlds, we are anomalies. In both worlds, “smart athlete” is almost considered an oxymoron.

But that’s what we are—it’s what we have to be. We are expected, just like every other student here, to perform in the classroom to the best of our ability. Further, we have to prove that our best academic efforts rival those of our non-athlete peers, despite the fact that we take the same classes, get graded according to the same scale, and have the same requirements—minus physical education, that is. We get enough of that on a daily basis. Thus, in every class, we work for the elusive A+ and to dispel the stereotype of the “dumb jock.”

A notion floats around campus that athletes get accepted to Columbia because of our athletic capabilities, implying that we didn’t have to work as hard for this opportunity as the non-athletes. I’d propose a different way of considering the situation based on priorities, values, and merit. I wasn’t born worthy of D-I basketball player status. Nor was it a tradition passed down to me. My dad does like to swim, but even though I love him for it, it is sometimes painful to watch him rebound for me. Before every game, my mom tells me, “Have fun!”—which I appreciate and do my best to accomplish, but it’s far from a pep talk. In other words, I didn’t get to where I am today because of natural-born talent—I got here by working hard at something I love. I made basketball my priority during high school, just as some of my peers made music or community service or new business ventures their priority. Every Columbia student has something extremely special about him or her, and I consider my specialty to be my love for basketball.

In the other world, Division I athletics, we have to prove our passion for athletics. It confuses other D-I programs that we would give education such value. While basketball is my top priority, my education and future are always on my mind, too. Other programs see these as “distractions,” but Columbia sees them as necessities. Because of this, every time we step onto the court, run onto the field, get in the water, or whatever, we have to prove that we can excel simultaneously at both academics and athletics. We have to show that we deserve to compete with the other D-I programs in the country, while also taking full, challenging course loads. Here, we work to contradict the stereotype of the physically inferior scholar.

This is the duality of being a Columbia athlete. We come to the gym after pulling an all-nighter to finish a paper so we can give it our all in the early morning conditioning workout we have before classes start. We play a game against our rival and then sprint across campus to make it to our discussion section in time. We take the LSAT, MCAT, and GRE, and do interviews while sipping on recovery shakes and icing our injuries. We don’t do it for money, we don’t do it for fame—we don’t do it for anyone but our team and ourselves. We love our sport, we love our team, we love our school. We want others to have this rewarding experience as well, so we sell our recruits on these notions, trusting that they will bear the challenges with the same grace that our predecessors have shown for generations. We know the words to our school song so we can support the entire athletics community, singing raucously, “Roar, Lion, Roar!”

The author is a Columbia College junior majoring in American studies and English and comparative literature.

Far too many times I speak with families that say they want their son or daughter to have the “true” college experience.  Many times this is making an inference about size of the school.  Typically, the mental picture a family is talking about is the 15,000 students, state-school.  Don’t get me wrong, I think there are great and even the best universities out there that are “big” schools.  However, if you want to play collegiate sports this mindset may be limiting you.

Take a look at these figures:

Of the 2,871 undergraduate colleges and universities in the country,

*45.1% of schools have 0-1,000 students

*21.1% of schools have 1,000-2,500 students

*12.4% of schools have 2,500-5,000 students

*9.7% of schools have 5,000-10,000 students

*4.7% of schools have 10,000-15,000 students

*2.3% of schools have 15,000-20,000 students

*4.3% of schools have 20,000+ students

So, if you are a family going into this recruiting process, and only would like schools of more than 5,000 students then you are immediately eliminating 79% of all universities.  Just a number to think about.

Benjamin Loth a Sr. out of Chatsworth, CA is this month’s Football Impact Football Student Athlete.  Ben has made a commitment not only on the field but in the classroom as well.  He is a 3-year honor student with a 3.3 GPA and 1760 (3Part) SAT.  Ben also is a All-Conference performer for the Crespi Carmelite squad in the CIF southern section.

Ben has used NCSA’s guidance by attending 3 coaching sessions (1 one-on-one session and two group huddles).  He has also utilized NCSA’s matching process twice since July.  This along with Ben’s fantastic follow-up with the schools has parlayed to 3 D1 scholarships. 

Ben is currently choosing between Fresno State, UNLV, and Iowa State.  We congratulate Ben for being selected Impact Football Student Athlete this month, and wish him the best in his final season!

In the summer of 2003 I made a pilgrimage to the place that every high-school baseball player looking to play in college should go. I had always wanted to go to this place and I still look forward to the time when I will return. The place I speak of is Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha, Nebraska, home of the College World Series. My summer travel team was competing in a tournament in Omaha and by design, we purchased tickets to go watch a weekend’s worth of college baseball at the highest level of competition. I remember everything about that trip from stealing 2nd base during a game of my own and, in the process, tearing open my chin (I still have the scar) to standing next to ESPN’s Kenny Mayne at a urinal in one of the bathrooms at Rosenblatt. The College World Series is college baseball and from then on I knew that not playing baseball in college was not an option.

 At the time, and partly due to my amazing experience in Omaha, my expectations were unrealistic. My summer coach asked me for a list of schools I’d like him to send my information to and I quickly scribbled down a list of top Division I programs I had seen playing at Rosenblatt. For me to think that I had an opportunity to play at some of these top schools was very unrealistic for me in terms of my recruiting process and my abilities as a baseball player. In other words, I was a DIII player looking to play baseball at the Division I level, except I wasn’t aware of this. When I soon realized that I would be playing baseball in college at the DIII level, I was slightly disappointed. But looking back, I understand why I was a DIII player and I don’t regret the decision I made to play baseball in college at that level. Not only had I not gotten enough exposure at an early enough age or been aware of such services such as the National Collegiate Scouting Association, but plain and simple, I just wasn’t good enough. Looking back on this I can’t help but smile at my own naivety and the fact that I am 100% satisfied with the decision I made to play baseball at John Carroll University. I may have never gotten the chance to play in Omaha or get interviewed by Erin Andrews after a big win, but I did get to play the game I love at the collegiate level. I did get to forge bonds and friendships that will last a lifetime and I did become a better all-around person by learning the values of hard work, dedication and teamwork.

We all tune in to watch big time college football programs compete on Saturdays during football season, and everyone loves the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament come March, but for those of us who won’t ever compete at that nationally acclaimed level, take pride in the following facts:

1. You train just as hard as anyone to compete at your full potential in the sport that you love.

2. You attend class just like every other student in every other college, except you have made sacrifices to prepare for games and practice as well.

3. You will form life-lasting bonds with teammates that are just as strong as those bonds that are formed at higher levels of competition.

4. You will become a better all-around person for the hard work you dedicate to your team and to your school work.

So, in my situation, while playing baseball in college was very different than someone playing baseball at a big time DI program, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. The memories I have of the experiences I went through during my playing days in college will last forever and no one can take that away from me. What I want to stress to all student-athletes is to be realistic about their expectations when it comes to playing their sport at the collegiate level. The sooner that you do this, the sooner you can embrace your future experiences as a collegiate athlete, whether it’s playing for a top tier DI program or competing for DIII school. Please believe me when I say it’s not about the recognition, or the television highlights, or the contracts with Nike and Adidas. It’s about putting on the same uniform as your teammates and competing in the sport you all love to achieve one common goal…winning. A win is the same at the DI level as it is at the DIII level and for a serious student-athlete looking to compete in college, winning is all that should matter.

The College recruiting process can take an athlete in a lot of different directions. Unfortuanatley, recruits usually make the mistake of only looking at few of the many options available. Too many recruits narrow their search to only a handful of schools at the beginning of the recruiting process. By the time they finalize their scholarship offers they are lucky to have more than one full scholarship offer.

Now consider the opposite. What if recruits were open to looking at every school possible, even if it seemed a bit unconventional? Meet UNLV senior Kicker Kyle Watson. The Las Vegas Sun profiled his long strange trip to the historically black Texas Southern and then to UNLV.

UNLV senior kicker Kyle Watson doesn’t think of himself as a pioneer or a trailblazer by being among the first white players at historically black Texas Southern.

He just wanted to play football.

In the fall of 2005, he got more out of kicking for the Tigers and attending classes at the Houston institution than he could have imagined when he left Southern California.

At Rancho Cucamonga (Calif.) High, Watson received scant collegiate interest. There were some form letters, but no college coach from the elite FBS (former I-A) saw him play or called him.

Watson’s high school coach convinced DeChon Burns, a Texas Southern assistant now at Texas-El Paso who had played prep ball for him in nearby Riverside, to look at film of Watson.

“He came to a game and liked what he saw,” Watson said of Burns. “He offered me a full-ride scholarship to Texas Southern and I jumped on the ball.”

Watson knew what he was getting into, kind of. He visited the campus, but it was during the holidays. No students were around.

He knew of Grambling and Southern, other HBCU programs in the Southwestern Athletic Conference, but only by their band battles he saw on television.

“I was kind of oblivious to the whole deal down there,” Watson said. “It was definitely interesting being a ‘major minority’ over there. It was a fun experience, a good experience.

“But I’m glad to have ended up here.”

Watson left Texas Southern after the fall semester of 2005. He was homesick, wanted to play in the FBS instead of the FCS (former I-AA) and, well, all that losing had taken a toll.

A semester later, Robinson followed him to Las Vegas.

“It wasn’t like I left because I didn’t fit in,” Watson said. “It was a fun time, but the program wasn’t what I was looking for in a Division-I atmosphere.”

Burns again helped Watson by steering him toward UNLV. Former Rebels assistant coach Kurt Barber had played ball with Burns at USC, and Barber arranged for Watson to walk onto UNLV.

Having done it himself, Watson helped Robinson navigate a transfer from Texas Southern to UNLV.

Home is only a three-hour drive down I-15 for Watson, who earned a scholarship and defeated 15th-ranked Arizona State with a 20-yard field goal in overtime a year ago in Tempe.

Watson became UNLV’s career leader in consecutive extra-point boots, at 49, against Hawaii, and he boosted that to 59 against BYU on Saturday night at Sam Boyd Stadium.

Two weeks ago, a late 53-yarder to tie Wyoming crumpled on a botched snap.

“You always remember the bad ones,” Watson said. “Those stick with you the longest and hurt the most. I finally got a chance to kick a long one, and it’s in the clutch moments. I was excited. I had the wind with me.

“I knew it would be no problem. I really wanted it, to help the team and to prove to coaches and teammates I could hit the long ball. It stung a little, but you have to move on.”

Watson looks back fondly on his brief but unforgettable time at Texas Southern.

Whether it’s the maroon and gray of the Tigers or the scarlet and gray of the Rebels, the most important football colors are on the jerseys.

“I learned a lot,” Watson said. “Of course, your team is your family. It doesn’t matter what the color of your skin is, where you were born or how you were raised, you’re all one on a team.”

So by looking at a school that was far from the norm, Watson eventually landed at a Division I college. Keep in mind though, that he only took the unconventional route because he had no other options. What if he had considered all of the options across the country?

While it’s obvious that this is the better strategy, the devil is always in the details. Most recruits don’t have a way to reach hundreds of college coaches. They certainly don’t have the relationships to make sure that the same coaches actually watch the DVD’s they send. That is where trusted sources like NCSA come into the equation. We have both the technology and relationships to help recruits properly target hundreds of schools.  That’s the NCSA difference.

College application time is quickly approaching for high school seniors and there are a couple of tips to keep in mind for student athletes who are thinking about financial aid.

Colleges and universities can often provide early financial aid estimates for prospective student athletes in order to help families better determine how financially feasible attending a school might be.  If you are a student athlete interested in attending a school, now is a great time to speak with the coach to see how you can request an early financial aid estimate. By letting the coach know your interest in receiving an early financial aid estimate they will be able to get you in touch with the proper member of the Financial Aid or Admissions staff.

While you are checking on the potential of an early financial aid estimate you may also check with the coach to see if he or she can waive the application fee for you. First, let coach know you are very interested in applying to their school and then ask if they might be able to provide you with an application fee waiver. Application fees can add up quickly and this step will help you bypass those additional costs.

Remember, thinking about the next step is always critical in the admissions and financial aid process. Don’t be afraid to ask questions at schools you are interested in attending. Asking questions will make certain you know the proper information at each school.