NCSA College Athletic Scholarships Blog

FAFSA stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid and can be found at http://www.fafsa.ed.gov/ The biggest mistake a lot of families make is not filling the FAFSA out because they think their family income is too high. This could not be further from the truth. Every family, regardless of income, has an EFC (estimated family contribution) number and the LOWER your EFC, the more aid you will receive. Even if you may not receive a significant amount of financial aid, you should still complete the FAFSA because it can act as an insurance policy for your son/daughter’s education. If there is a change or loss of income or an emergency in your family; you will not be eligible for college funds if you do not complete the FAFSA on an annual basis.

The first date you may submit the FAFSA is January 1 of senior year. Submit the FAFSAS on this date or as soon after as possible! University financial aid budgets are limited and are awarded on a first come first serve basis, so the earlier you submit your FAFSA, the better your chances of receiving aid. Each college/university has a specific deadline and at a certain point, the money does run out.

EFC stands for Expected Family Contribution. Use the EFC calculator HERE to determine an estimate of this number. Whatever your family’s EFC turns out to be, will make a big difference in the amount you are expected to contribute to college. So think of the EFC as the amount of money you will be expected to come up with for school (to which academic/athletic scholarships will be added).

As a review, you know the need to market your child in order for her/him to be recruited.  You know that you could do this yourself or you could use an expert.  In either case, you’ll have to invest time and money into the process.  The need for this service is even greater than it was in the 1980′s for several reasons.  Among these are:

1. the cost of college today
2. the even greater restrictions the NCAA has placed on college coaches. 
3. The internet.
4. The accelerating recruiting calendar.
5. The misinformation about recruiting from so called experts like HS coaches, Athletic Directors, and parents who went through it 15-30 years ago.

But whether a family chooses to navigate the recruiting waters by themselves or chooses to hire professional help, they are going to have to spend time and money on this process.  They are also going to have to coach their kids on how to speak to college coaches.  No college coach will offer any student-athlete a college scholarship without knowing that child.   So where do you allocate your marketing dollars?

You could choose to go to a lot of college camps.  As you’ve learned from the 5 things you need to do, your child must be involved with at least 100-200 realistic possibilities.  How many camps will you be able to attend?  Are they the right ones?  How much will they cost including transportation?  What makes you think your child will stand out from others at that camp in a college coach’s eyes?  My child received recruiting interest from 145 college coaches.  She never attended a college camp after the 8^th grade.  We went to one and that was all it took to realize that the camps are money makers for the coaching staff at the school.  Can a kid improve their skills?  Maybe.  But don’t expect to get your child recruited by attending camps.

You could market your child on our own.  You’ll have to research 100-200 realistic college opportunities.  You’ll have to determine if they have roster openings.  You’ll have to get your child’s information in front of that coach.  You’ll have to hope that information is believed and isn’t trashed.  You’ll have to put video together and do it the right way.  I’ve seen college coaches turn video off after 5-10 seconds of viewing.  Would you want that to happen to your child’s video?  You need to update coaches as your child makes progress.  And, Mom and Dad, the most important thing you need to do is to teach your child to be the “front” person with the college coach.  If you are the one calling and writing college coaches on behalf of your child, that raises a huge red flag in the coach’s mind of how serious this is for the child.  A coach will recruit a lesser athlete that is articulate, serious, and a team player over a child who relies on mom and dad to do the talking. 

As you navigate the process, how are you going to advise your child on maximizing his financial aid package?  How are you going to advise him on what happens if a college coach ceases communications?  How are you going to advise her/him on how to make the best choice for them?  All parents want their children to make the best choice.  Empowering a child to make that choice is the best gift a parent can give their child.  Do you want amateurs who have never been through recruiting in the internet age advising your child?  Or do you want a professional, whose expertise is navigating this process and have seen over 25,000 recruiting situations, advising your child?  If you choose to navigate this yourself, you must read this book.

Finally, you could choose professional help.  If you choose a recruiting company, find out the following:

• 1) Are they organized as a franchise? Are you speaking with the franchise owner? How long has the owner owned his franchise/territory? If they are not a franchise organization, what year was the first recruiting class they worked with? (Hint, if 2005 or later, they haven’t been in business long enough to develop an impact with the college coaching community.)
• 2) How are their student-athletes marketed to college coaches? Is it a targeted approach to the right schools? Or, is it a shotgun approach to all colleges? Is 21^st century technology used, or is it still snail mail and faxes? Can you track which college coaches reviewed your child’s resume and video?
• 3) What is that organization’s true relationship with college coaches? If that organization doesn’t attend college coaches’ conventions, do they really have relationships with those college coaches? College coaches are not allowed by the NCAA to endorse recruiting companies. But those coaches do request student-athletes from those companies. Ask to see a list of those college coach requests with dates.
• 4) Who are the partnerships of that recruiting company? Companies who partner with recruiting companies do a lot of due diligence before putting their good name with someone. See who those partners are.
• 5) Find out about the client service after signing up. Find out the contact information and expected response times to your questions.
• 6) Find out about the financial aid advice the recruiting company offers.
• 7) Find out about the standardized test preparation a recruiting company offers.
• 8) Find out how your student-athlete can determine what college coaches are truly interested in your child.
• 9) Find out about what happens if a child suffers a career ending injury and can’t play in college. Do you get your money back?
• 10) Some recruiting companies like to do the “up-sale”. They’ll entice you with a low price and then constantly ask for more money as you move forward. Make sure your recruiting company spells out exactly the service you’re receiving and the time frame that service is available.
• 11) As with all businesses, make sure the company has been in business long enough to ensure that it’ll remain in business. If the company has been in business less than 5 years, be careful.

Doing your due diligence with any decision involving your child is important.  The most important due diligence a parent can help their child with is their college choice.  Getting professional help is a great way to help your child with their college decision.  To choose the right professional help ask those due diligence questions listed above.

Good luck to all of you who have the good fortune to be the parent of a talented student-athlete!

(Part 1 is here) (Part 2 is here)

There is recruiting help found all over the web.  There are companies who assure everyone that they’ll get your child recruited.  Some are free.  Some are not.  You know the need for help and, as with any service, there are good providers of help and those who aren’t as much help.  To understand the market, it’s best to understand the industry.  The recruiting industry started in the 1980’s when the NCAA started putting restrictions on the number of scholarships available for sports.  These restrictions were caused by 2 main factors:  1) the implementation of Title IX (passed in 1972) that mandated equal opportunities in sports for women.  2)  the NCAA’s desire to create a more level playing field for its member institutions.  To demonstrate the impact consider that in 1972 Coach Johnny Majors at Pitt, in his first year as head football coach, gave full scholarships to over 100 players in that recruiting class.  One of those recruits, Tony Dorsett, led Pitt to the national championship 4 years later.  In order for institutions to be in compliance with Title IX, they had to reduce scholarships in football.  The recruiting impact was that the relationship between HS coaches and college coaches became more distant.  As time went on, the rules restricting contact between college coaches and high school football players became stricter.  (As an aside, trends in football recruiting are duplicated in all other college sports.)  The high school coach had less influence because he couldn’t help as many kids get scholarships – there weren’t that many to be had.  College coaches wanted to feed their families.  In other words, they had to recruit players that would help their program win.  Since they didn’t have as many scholarships, they couldn’t afford to make any mistakes.  Therefore a need developed for college coaches to recruit nationally.  There was an equal need for high school athletes to be introduced to college coaches.  Thus the recruiting service industry was born. 

Those companies evolved as franchise organizations who had a back office that could put recruiting resumes together and mail them to college athletic departments.  They relied on the college athletic department secretary to put the resumes of lots of players from many sports into the correct sport coach’s mail box.  Prior to email and the internet, this was a great way to get a kid’s name in front of a large number of college coaches.  The company found these kids by selling territories or franchises.  A franchise owner qualified because they liked sports and had some money to give to the franchisor or territory salesman.  Some of these owners were really interested in a student-athlete’s success.  Others just wanted to make their investment back and would sign up any kid.  The problem begins when that package put together by the back office is sent to the college athletic department.  To save money in postage, the back office sent hundreds of resumes to every college in the country at one time.  As time wore on, college coaches realized that not all of the resumes they were looking at were of student-athletes qualified for their program.  As such, college coaches began to ignore the resumes.  In time, qualified student-athletes were ignored by colleges because they were packaged with many non-qualified student-athletes.  Still, in spite of this inefficiency, student-athletes received mail in their mailbox from college coaches.  When a student-athlete received a letter from a college coach, parents felt their investment in the recruiting company service was paying off.  But is receiving a letter from a college coach being recruited?

As they still do, in the 1980’s and 90’s, college coaches, depending on the sport, sent out thousands of letters annually.  They are marketing to large numbers in hopes of finding the best few student-athletes for their program.  So even though these student-athletes who used a recruiting service were getting letters, they weren’t getting recruited.  Because of the franchise organization structure, there was no one to advise a student-athlete on what to do with those recruiting letters.  Today, getting letters, emails, contacts from college coaches is an important first step.  A child can’t get recruited without these.  But it’s only 20% of the game.  The other 80% of the game is a child converting those contacts into personal relationships with college coaches, and converting those relationships into scholarship dollars.  And that’s all the responsibility of the student-athlete.  Mom and Dad can’t do that for the child.  The child has to interact with the college coach(es) and convince that coach they are a good fit for that program.  All recruiting services you see on the web will put some letters in your mail box.  But are they from the right schools?  I’ve talked to a kid who used a recruiting company who got letters from Ivy League schools even though he had a 2.4 GPA and an ACT score of 17.  No way that Ivy League school had any interest in that kid.  But the kid thought he was being recruited.  Clearly something had to be done to address what was not being done to help the families.  Among these issues are:  How are parents going to target the right colleges for their child?   How do parents guide their children through this process?  How can parents maximize the scholarship package their child receives?  If parents decide they want help to give their child a competitive advantage, where do they find the best help?

Stay tuned for Part 4 for the answers…..it’s not what you think.

This is the second of a 4 part series. Part 1 is here.

There are 3 areas that every parent will have to invest in to make sure you put your child in the best position to be recruited. On the athletic side, you are going to have to spend anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 per year from about 6th grade forward on travel, hotels, team fees, training, and equipment. If you’re not doing this, those other 4 student-athletes looking for the same scholarship your child is looking for is. On the academic side, you’ll want to make sure your child is earning all A’s and B’s in school. The more A’s the better! If they need help to develop the study habits to make that happen, then there could be an investment in tutors, learning centers, etc. Have you priced those lately? Then, to ensure that their test scores reflect their grades, an investment in test preparation will help. Finally there is the recruiting itself. In the vast majority of sports, the college coaches’ recruiting budget is pitifully small. They WILL NOT discover your child. College coaches don’t have a scouting budget like the NY Yankees, which is in the millions of dollars per year. You have to devote time and funds to marketing your child. If you spend $6,000 to $30,000 in athletic development and $5,000 in academic development so that your child can be athletically skilled and academically qualified enough to be recruited and your child doesn’t get recruited, what is the payoff for that investment? Also, if your child doesn’t get a chance to play, will she/he come back to you in 10 years and wonder if they could have played if only they knew how to maximize their recruiting opportunities? So where do you allocate your funds for marketing and how is the most cost effective way of doing this?

Marketing your student athlete is an important skill that 99% of parents I speak with don’t know how to do. If you never attended college or haven’t searched for a job in the age of the internet, you probably don’t know all of the ins and outs of the athletic scholarship acquisition process. Even if you are college educated or an expert at finding a job using the internet, you still are unaware of how college coaches determine who they recruit and how you can make your child part of that coach’s recruiting list. Your child has to take an active role in this process. It’s their life! They must be empowered with the skill set to market themselves to college coaches. Since your child’s college decision will impact her/him for the rest of their lives, don’t you think that it’s important that they have those skills?

If you’re reading this, you know that NCSA has devoted a lot of time and effort to educate student-athletes and their parents on this marketing. We call this the recruiting process and our goal is for each qualified student-athlete to achieve their maximum recruiting potential. Everyone reading this thinks they can do this on their own. Especially after they read the five things you need to know and the five things you must do. And some parents have been successful doing things themselves. However, understand the effort those parents made. They’ve devoted literally 40 to 50 hours a month to researching colleges, putting together marketing packages, contacting lots of college coaches, following-up, and fighting encouraging their children to do things they need to do, such as calling college coaches on the phone. They’ve had to put up with teen-age kids who aren’t skilled in talking to college coaches and have no desire to do so because they don’t know what to do. Does your teen-ager do everything you ask without question? Do you have 500 hours over the next calendar year to devote to this process? How much of that time will you spend spinning your wheels and targeting the wrong college coaches? How much of that time is spent driving to camps where a child has no chance of being recruited? How frustrating is all of this and does a child give up their dream if no college coaches respond to your marketing efforts?

From a financial standpoint, you will be spending money for marketing. If you aren’t spending money – you’ll be spending time. How much is your time worth? As you know from the five things you need to do, you’ll need to do the following: 1) Get a objective evaluation so that you target the right college programs; 2) Post an online resume that college coaches will look at; 3) Create a winning highlight or skills video; 4) Get in contact with at least 100 college coaches at the right places; and 5) consider all options in a thorough way so your child makes the right decision. The first can be done by comparing your child’s metrics with those of collegiate student-athletes at the various levels.  (See the recruiting guidelines for your sport.)   The next 2 can be done in a variety of ways and you can do it for as little as free – which will net zero results, to hiring professional website and video vendors which can run up to $1000. Contacting college coaches is more problematic. Since college coaches are inundated with emails and letters from a variety of sources, they only rely on trusted sources. How many emails does the typical college football coach get from a mom, dad, or kid that says, “hey, I’m 200 pounds and run a 4.4 forty yard dash…”? What do you think the college coach does with that email? (Hint: if you answered anything else but, “he hit the delete button,” you got the wrong answer.) College coaches rely on trusted sources and verified information. That’s the biggest roadblock to parents doing it themselves. They don’t have the relationships with the college coaching community to generate the kind of response from college coaches needed to maximize opportunities.

Finally, how do you empower your child with the skill set to make a life-changing decision? Most parents do a great job of raising their kids. All parents love their kids and want their kids to be the best and have the best. However, most parents can’t empower their children with the skill set to speak with college coaches. When speaking with college coaches, student-athletes need to ask the right questions in the right way so they don’t get their name crossed off of that college coach’s recruiting list. What parent knows those questions? Do you know the questions college coaches ask student-athletes to see if they should cross your child’s name off of the list? And, if you the parent think you can talk to college coaches for your child, you can’t! I’ve seen more talented student-athletes NOT get recruited because of the parent than I care to list right here. All parents have a deep emotional attachment to this outcome. However, some parents don’t know how to channel their emotions into a positive influence on their children. Would guidance from an expert be of value? Would the peace of mind of knowing you’re doing the right things and your child is getting coached the right way in this process help tone down the emotions when discussing this in your household? So where do you get that help? 

Stay tuned for Part 3 and Part 4.

Beware of incurring too many student loans.  As this NY Times article relates:

“Perhaps seduced by the idea of graduating from a well-respected university, many students tend to overlook the consequences of graduating with debts that are likely to far exceed their starting salaries. And as many borrowers have learned, student loans are among the most ironclad debts, on par with child support, alimony and overdue taxes. They stick with you no matter what.”

The interest rates are not favorable and you cannot declare bankruptcy because of them.  What parent would put this kind of burden on their child?  Particularly if that child is a student-athlete who could play at the collegiate level.  Is your child good enough to earn an athletic scholarship?  Here’s another money quote from the same article:

“You often hear the quote that you can’t put a price on ignorance,” said Ezra Kazee, who has $29,000 in student debt and has been unable to find a job since graduating from Winona State University in Minnesota last May. “But with the way higher education is going, ignorance is looking more and more affordable every day.”

Don’t go the student loan route.  Find out if your child is good enough to play at the next level.

There have been some recent donations to nine different universities with stipulations on how to use the money.  One of those parameters is that the money be used for student scholarships – which could have some impact on athletic or academic money given out by the schools.

Spring is here!! Even if it doesn’t feel like it or look like it in your area.  The college softball season has reached the mid-point and there are a lot of great teams emerging.  I’m certain we are in for another great finish come tournament time.   

Of course, it is an extremely busy time for high school softball players.  Your season has started and the school year is winding down.  But if you are serious about playing at the next level, remember you need to stay educated with what is going on in the college game.  There are still plenty of weekends left to go see a college softball game. Or, at least, get on the websites and see where schools are ranked and how their seasons’ are progressing.  The more information you gain, the better educated you will be when it’s time for you to make your college decision.   

A great resource to help you get started is the NFCA website.  The National Fastpitch Coaches Association keeps all of the updated information on every level of college softball.  Just click on the level you are interested in and they will provide you with schedules, scores, rankings and more.Once you click on the level, you will have the option of looking at the conference websites or the individual program websites.  It is quick and easy and will get you up-to-date on all that is happening right now in the world of college softball.  

With spring fast approaching, colleges and universities are now beginning to notify students about the specifics of their financial aid packages in the form of award letters. In order to receive an award letter from a school you must first provide them with two things. First, they will need your application for admission, and second, you will need to submit your FAFSA information to them if you haven’t done so already. Once you have been accepted to a school you will receive an award letter which will detail all of the financial aid you will be receiving.Sometimes award letters come back covering enough costs and sometimes award letters may fall short of covering enough to help you afford a school. After receiving an award letter you do have the option of appealing that award in the hopes of securing additional financial aid for yourself, your son, or your daughter.

Here are a few tips to remember when writing an appeals letter to a college.

1) Always address the letter to the financial aid office, but remember to copy the coach when you send your letter. This will keep the coach in the loop and allow them to possibly put in a good word for you.
2) Begin the letter expressing your excitement about attending the college or university.
3) Expand on any expenses that may not be accurately reflected from the FAFSA and let the school know if there is any additional information you feel they need to consider. (Schools want to know about things like medical expenses for family members, not about things like credit card debt.)
4) Ask if there is any consideration the school can provide or if there is any additional funding available. Remember, never make demands in this letter.
5) Conclude the letter by again, expressing your excitement about the opportunity at this school. Also ask the school to contact you if they should need any additional information.
If you have received an award letter from another school, you may send a copy of that letter with your appeals letter so the college can evaluate this information and get back in touch with you accordingly.

When writing an appeals letter to the financial aid office there will be some times when a school may not have any additional aid to provide, but there will also be a large number of cases where you will be able to receive an additional $1000, $2000, or more. Remember, appealing your award decision is a part of the process, so do not feel bad about asking the question of these schools. The result cannot be harmful to you, but there is a tremendous upside!

The nation’s recession and credit market freeze are forcing parents of college aged children to look at different option than they were considering even a few months ago.  Families are having to make choices based on affordability rather than academic merits.  The Chicago Tribune took a look at a few Illinois families struggling with difficult decisions.

” Illinois students who may have applied to elite colleges-they are still applying there but are also applying to financially feasible schools, such as state schools,” said Jean Childers, a career center assistant at Naperville Central High School.

Over the last year, high school seniors have applied to an average of 7.3 universities and colleges-up from 5.4 the prior year-as they try to ensure getting accepted into a school they can afford, said Craig Powell, CEO of ConnectEDU, a college planner. “We have seen 60 to 65 percent of students are applying to public versus private schools,” Powell said. “A year ago that was just the inverse.”

Of course, athletes compete for scholarship dollars on a different playing field.   While athletic departments across America are feeling the crunch as well, they hold up quite well when compared to academia at large.  But, with the crunch it does mean that student athletes need to understand the financial aid process better than ever.  NCSA’s team of recruiting coaches know the process like the back of their hand.  I urge every potential student athlete to use their advantage to its fullest!