Scholarship Aspirants Try for Jackpot Online

Source from:  usatoday.com By Jim Halley, USA TODAY 11/05/2007

Mark Cleland's daughter Kari was a two-time all-county soccer player and first in her class at Lackey High in Port Tobacco, Md., but if she were to earn a college athletic scholarship, he felt she needed an edge. Though Kari also played on a club team, VISTA United, which played in the Washington, D.C., area, Mark wanted more exposure for his daughter. He signed her up for Berecruited.com, a website that would market her accomplishments to college coaches. Now she's a freshman midfielder on scholarship at Austin Peay in Clarksville, Tenn. Though Austin Peay coach Kelley Guth says she doesn't know how much former assistant Erin Switalski might have used Berecruited.com, Kari was first spotted at a tournament. Still, Cleland plans to use the service to help his other daughter, Kelsey, who is a sophomore midfielder-forward this year at Lackey. "I spent about $50, and it saved me about $27,000 this year," Cleland says. "Pretty simple math for me. For us, the coaches don't come to southern Maryland. If you don't hit the big tournaments, you're just not going to get the exposure you need." While some college coaches say the services are helpful, others aren't so sure. "We know the kids we want to target," says John Reiners, track and field coach at Division II Chadron State College in northwest Nebraska. "If there's a kid that we're missing, we're not doing our job." Jim Harter, men's basketball coach at Division II Pace University in New York, gets plenty of e-mail from the services. "I honestly never really follow up on them," Harter says. "There aren't too many of those kids who are scholarship players. ... You have to spend your time recruiting the kids that you've seen yourself." Harter concedes there are sleepers. His team's leading scorer last season, 6-3 guard Ryan Williams, was the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference's leading scorer when he played for Paul VI in Fairfax, Va., but bigger schools weren't paying attention. "If somebody like that had been pushed by a recruiting service, he could have gone Division I," Harter said. "If somebody playing in a major metropolitan area can get overlooked, then there are sleepers out there." Berecruited.com's Jeff Cravens, who recently left as an executive at ESPN.com to take over a site that started slowly but now claims 100,000 athletes and 10,000 coaches among its users, says athletes in non-revenue sports are likely to be the beneficiaries of his site. "I think the main users are going to be Olympic sports athletes," he says. "Generally, those are the sports with smaller recruiting budgets, and coaches need to have an efficient way of finding kids." UNLV swimming coach Jim Reitz sees a definite benefit since swimming times can be easily compared: "I get a steady stream of e-mails from services. They're a help in identifying midlevel kids whom nobody knows anything about. It allows us to screen kids if their grade points or test scores are too low." Even Harter, who doesn't have much time for the services, sees one potential for their growth. "If you ever had the technology to produce better-quality video online that didn't eat up a lot of space on our computers, then maybe there would be something to it," he says. "Usually, the video we get now is quick highlights. If the technology were there where I could see whole games and the kid's numbers looked interesting, you would have something." Postgame sportsmanship: Three Magruder High (Rockville, Md.) football players received minor cuts to their hands after their 55-7 win against Blake (Silver Springs, Md.) on Friday. A Blake player, not in uniform, used a box cutter to slash the players during postgame handshakes, Magruder High officials say. Montgomery County police are investigating. Enditem