College recruiting: Easy for some, not for others

By Mitch Blomert and Joe Willeford
aThEENs 3410 staff

Oconee County High School senior Andrew Kowalski faces a difficult dilemma as graduation approaches.

The 18-year-old standout kicker and soccer player for the Warriors must choose to continue his athletic career in college, or walk away from organized sports altogether.

It’s a decision talented high school athletes across the country must make before they walk across the stage to receive their diplomas—attend college solely for an education, or balance it with sports on the side?

While some athletes enjoy a relatively simple recruiting process, picking up numerous full-ride scholarships from athletic powerhouses across the country after a star-studded high school career, others don’t get to enjoy the glamour. Such is the case for Kowalski, who is currently listed as a preferred walk-on in football and must be academically accepted to a college to play for them.

“My options are Georgia, Georgia Tech and Georgia Southern,” Kowalski said.

Jamie Stephens, 18, a fellow Oconee County senior and Kowalski’s teammate in soccer and football, faces the same hardship of getting noticed by universities for athletic purposes. Not only did Stephens send videos highlighting his senior season to colleges, he also made several campus visits, travelling as far as Notre Dame. But he, too, has yet to be offered a scholarship.

Warriors boys soccer coach Colin Connors empathizes with his two players’ struggles to get noticed by colleges. Even with Oconee County’s record standing at 14-0 and a No. 2 ranking among Class AAA teams in Georgia, Connors says soccer players can’t sit back and wait for scholarship offers, but instead must go out and attract the colleges themselves.

“Most of the players I have had recruited have been by smaller colleges,” Connors said. “Usually these small colleges have smaller budgets so they won't always find the player first but rather the player initiates the recruiting process by letting the school know they are interested in playing there.

“As their coach, I help kids know about what schools are interested in them or what schools they are good enough to play at and should contact if they are interested in playing in college.”

For some athletes in other sports, such as football or baseball, getting a scholarship offer from a major NCAA Division-I athletic program such as the University of Georgia is a simple task. With training camps and recruiting Web sites monitoring each individual player, finding high school talent has become a major part of athletic programs at colleges across the country.

Such was the case for UGA shortstop Kyle Farmer, who was offered a baseball scholarship his senior year at Marist School in Atlanta. Despite also receiving offers from Mississippi, Tennessee, Tulane, Vanderbilt and Louisville, it only took nine days for the freshman to commit to the Bulldogs.

“The baseball program is one of the top programs in the nation, and I wanted to play at a high level,” Farmer said. “[The coaches] were very welcoming and almost seemed like one of your best friends. I felt that all of these things put together made UGA the perfect place for me to play baseball and to get a great education."

Although Farmer was recruited mostly during his senior year of high school, the process starts even sooner for more talented athletes, especially in football. According to the NCAA, Division-I colleges can offer scholarships to high school football players as early as Sept. 1 of their junior year.

That’s when three Clarke Central High School football players in Athens began receiving scholarship offers. Alan Posey, a 6-foot-6, 305-pound junior offensive lineman, has six Division-I offers and has yet to begin his senior year of high school.

Two of his teammates, quarterback Martay Mattox and linebacker Jordan Pierce, have also received collegiate attention as juniors. Mattox has received offers from South Carolina, Maryland and South Florida, while Pierce has been offered by smaller schools such as Alabama State and Valparaiso.

“It’s become more of a trend to commit [to a college] junior year,” said UGA football writer Bill Murphy, who also runs a recruiting blog for the Gainesville Times, “If a kid doesn’t have offers by their junior year, he won’t be a Division-I athlete.”

So how are athletes being found so soon early in their high school career? Murphy believes it has to do completely with the Internet, where recruiting Web sites with profiles on each prospect is available, along with their favorite schools, a list of schools that have offered scholarships, highlight videos and a what training camps they have attended.

Two major recruiting Web sites, Rivals.com and Scout.com, each have thousands of high school athletes in their databases for football, baseball and basketball. Worldwide sports news leader ESPN also has its own recruiting site, where it lists its “ESPN 150,” a detailed breakdown of the top 150 football players in the country.

“College recruiting is huge and it gets bigger every year, and a lot of it goes back to the Internet and how quickly they can get information,” Murphy said. “There’s no excuse for not knowing what’s going on. If a coach can’t recruit and doesn’t have a good season, they’re out the door.”

But sometimes finding the next big college superstar means looking right on campus after attending the high school practices and games. That’s what Kowalski hopes for as he strives to become a college athlete without scholarship offers to guide him.

“The most important thing is to get into school first,” Kowalski said. “Then you try to make yourself appealing.”