THE CHASE
For Coaches, a Race With No Finish Line
Fierce hunt for talent is no longer limited to marquee programs


By LIBBY SANDER

Chronicle of Higher Education, 5-5-08

For Coaches, a Race With No Finish Line
Many people in college sports, including the coaches themselves, say the recruiting process is only getting more frenzied, and the high-stakes pursuit of top athletes has trickled down to all levels of play.
The Chase is an occasional series on athletics recruiting.
Early in the morning, late at night, on weekends and days off and spare moments in between, college coaches work to lure the next generation of talent to their teams.

Recruiting is the backbone of college athletics, and it has always been a competitive and time-consuming pursuit. But now coaches face mounting pressure from athletes and parents clamoring for attention, and from athletic directors and even some college presidents eager to field winning teams.

The intense, high-stakes chase for top players — once associated only with marquee programs like Division I football, men's basketball, and the top women's basketball teams — is trickling down to other sports, as well as to lower divisions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Tremendous changes from technology, a booming youth-sports culture, and unprecedented numbers of high-school students all jockeying for spots at colleges — let alone on a sports team — have fed a new kind of high-pressure race.

Athletes in Division I are committing at younger ages to play for college teams. And many coaches, mindful that their salaries and recruiting budgets are tied to their win-loss records, sacrifice all semblance of a personal life to do battle with their peers and woo those young athletes. The process has accelerated so much that even some young coaches who competed for elite Division III teams just a few years ago say recruiting now bears little resemblance to how their coaches enlisted them.

Some coaches say the time has come to rein in recruiting, for both their own sanity and that of the anxious athletes vying for scholarships. Coaches in Division I women's lacrosse recently proposed changing NCAA rules to clamp down on recruiting tactics in their sport, and Division I women's soccer is considering similar changes.

But unless everyone stands down at once, nobody wants to be the first to give up an advantage. The cost, coaches say, is too great — to their future teams, and, ultimately, to their own livelihoods.

Rick McGuire, track-and-field coach at the University of Missouri at Columbia, views recruiting in its current form as the byproduct of a society obsessed with winning at all costs.

"The importance of getting the win has distorted the importance of getting the athletes to your school, and that has driven an absurd process," he says. "It's a locomotive run wild."

Searching for Balance

The recruiting process varies widely by sport and by institution, depending on the specific goals or caliber of a program. It also varies by coach.

Some coaches say they fall asleep at night thinking about how to get their top recruit and wake up in the morning worrying that a rival coach has whisked away that star prospect.

Others refuse to let recruiting dominate their lives and tell recruits and their parents not to expect constant attention — they call it "baby-sitting" — in the form of regular e-mail messages, phone calls, or gratuitous visits to high-school contests.

But most coaches fall somewhere in the middle: working hard to keep up with their competitors, but also wary of what many of them view as a recruiting process with skewed priorities.

Recruiting rules are designed in part to keep the process from being too intrusive to prospective athletes. Yet many coaches are caught up in a relentless pursuit that leaves them little time for a personal life and often compels them to use recruiting tactics that blur the lines of integrity. It is not uncommon for a coach to offer an athlete a scholarship and give the teenager just a day or two to decide.

"I feel a lot worse for the coaches than I do for the student-athletes," says Matthew Baysinger, a senior who is the captain of the University of Kansas' track team. He is also the vice chair of the NCAA's Division I Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. "I actually thought at one point in my life I'd want to do coaching, but after seeing what they have to do to get these athletes, I don't want anything to do with that."

Much of the intensity is due to the sheer numbers of high-school athletes vying for spots on college teams. In the 2006-7 academic year, 7.3 million high-school students — 54 percent of the high-school population — played on a scholastic sports team. It was the 18th straight year that participation rates had increased for high-school sports.

But for parents who have invested thousands of dollars in training for their kids, the statistics at the college level are not pretty. There are more than 399,000 athletes who compete on NCAA teams, and institutions in Divisions I and II award about $1.4-billion in athletics scholarships each year. But those scholarships go to 123,000 or so students, meaning that only about one in 60 high-school athletes gets a scholarship. And of those scholarships, very few cover the entire cost of attending college.

Other gradual but nonetheless striking changes in recent years have contributed to a pursuit of athletes that can, at times, be unhealthy for everyone involved.

Online recruiting services that market athletes to coaches, and blogs that publicly rank athletes' abilities and speculate on the many twists and turns of recruiting, have made the process far more public than it ever used to be. E-mail, cellphones, and — until the NCAA banned it — text messaging have made communication easier but also unrelenting.

NCAA recruiting rules intended to regulate communication between Division I coaches and prospective athletes have become dizzyingly complex. Some coaches now say the rules often prevent them from getting to know the athletes well enough to determine if they would be a good fit for a team.

Yet as the rules become more restrictive, many coaches say they are scrambling to develop relationships with a widening circle of club coaches who exert influence over prospective athletes. Although many talented athletes still play for their traditional high-school teams, more are choosing to compete on club teams, which are more selective and often travel the country playing other elite teams. Sometimes athletes forgo the traditional scholastic season altogether.

"In some ways, [recruiting] is better than it used to be, but in others it is much, much worse," says Joseph R. Castiglione, director of athletics at the University of Oklahoma. There is plenty of credit — or blame — to go around, he says.

"There are more people competing for fewer scholarships than at any time in the modern era," Mr. Castiglione says. "The competition to find the best and the brightest is fierce."

'On the Borderline'

Many of the changes in recruiting are felt most acutely among Division III coaches. With no recruiting calendar to offer them "dead periods," in which coaches are barred from evaluating or contacting prospective athletes, Division III coaches often recruit year round. They typically have much smaller coaching staffs than Division I programs, sometimes coach a second sport, and often shoulder teaching and other administrative duties in their departments.

"We're almost all gluttons for punishment," says Mary Kate Boland, women's volleyball coach at Franklin & Marshall College, a Division III institution in Pennsylvania. In addition to coaching volleyball, Ms. Boland is also the college's director of Greek life. The recruiting process is far more intense than when she was recruited to play for Franklin & Marshall 10 years ago, she says. But "I wouldn't have it any other way," she says. "If you don't love it, then you're crazy for doing it."

For Brooke Diamond, women's lacrosse coach at Washington and Lee University, in Virginia, the challenge in recruiting is to cast a wide but strategic net.

This year, her first on the recruiting trail for Washington and Lee, Ms. Diamond has the names of 300 high-school juniors whom she is considering for the Class of 2013. Of those, she predicts 100 or so will say Washington and Lee isn't for them. Another 150 won't have the academic credentials to be admitted. Maybe half of those left will accept scholarship offers to play for Division I colleges.

Of the remaining 20 or so students — those who meet the college's rigorous academic standards and are talented enough to compete on a nationally ranked team — three to five will ultimately commit.

It's a lot of work for a small yield.

"I spent a couple years in investment banking," says Ms. Diamond, who played soccer, basketball, and lacrosse at Amherst College before graduating in 2003 and taking a job at Goldman Sachs in New York. "People ask, 'Did you get out of it because of the hours?' And I say, 'Oh, you don't know what I do. The hours are comparable.'"

But, she says, "if I'm going to work a 15-hour day, I'd much rather do it watching lacrosse games and being with my team than working on a financial evaluation."

At Adrian College, in Michigan, even the college president, Jeffrey R. Docking, weighs in on coaches' recruiting activities. Coaches at the small Division III college are paid about $30,000 a year, he says. They also are given quotas.

"We give each coach a number, and if they don't hit their recruiting number, that's a problem, because that's how we maintain our enrollment," Mr. Docking says. "If you're only coaching one sport and … you can't bring in 10 kids a year, then you're not working hard enough."

Many coaches describe hectic schedules spent juggling traditional coaching duties, traveling to watch high-school sophomores and juniors play in tournaments, e-mailing recruits and their parents, arranging visits to the campus, and generally being available at any hour of the day (or night) to take a phone call from a prospect.

It is this sacrifice of time and personal life that leads some coaches to say recruiting has crossed a line between reasonable competition and impossible demands.

"The expectations and how much work actually has to go into recruiting in order to be successful — particularly at our level, where coaches are doing a lot of other things, too — I think it's on the borderline of going too far," says Albert D. Bean Jr., director of athletics at the University of Southern Maine.

'Feeling the Pressure'

In Division I, where the pressure points have always been greater because of the scholarship money involved — and the tens of millions of dollars at stake in revenue — coaches say the already quick pace has sped up considerably and shows no signs of slowing.

Marci Miller Jobson has experienced the acceleration firsthand. As a high-school soccer player in the early 1990s, Ms. Jobson decided in the spring of her senior year to play for the University of Wisconsin. After two seasons in Madison, she followed her coach to Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, and graduated in 1998. She also played for the U.S. women's national soccer team for three years.

Today the idea of a Division I-caliber player and future national-team member selecting a college during the spring of her senior year is quaint, if not unheard of. Now the women's soccer coach at Baylor University, Ms. Jobson says she is still reeling from the fact that she is beginning to receive verbal commitments from high-school sophomores.

"It's such a young age," says Ms. Jobson. "But I also know that if so many other schools are doing it, and the top players are committing early, that if I don't get on the ball and do it too, I'm going to miss out on their players."

In Division I, athletes cannot officially commit to play for an institution until they sign a national letter of intent during their senior year. But there are no restrictions on when they can make unofficial, verbal commitments, which occur with greater frequency each year in many sports, coaches say.

NCAA rules bar most coaches from contacting athletes by telephone until July after their junior year. But it is common for coaches and athletes to communicate by e-mail during the athlete's junior and senior years, and athletes may call a coach as frequently as they want.

Early commitments can work well if the athlete and the coach have each done their homework on the other, most coaches say.

The far more common scenario, though, is for such commitments to arise out of a sense of fear and pressure — on both sides. Athletes are anxious for scholarships, and coaches often fear that if they cannot get an athlete "to verbal," as the saying goes, then someone else will.

Too Much, Too Soon?

For every coach who locks up a verbal commitment from a sophomore or a junior, there is another who loses it two years down the road. And it is this uncertainty that makes many coaches nervous and leads them to engage in what often feels like a round-the-clock pursuit of talented athletes.

"To my knowledge, there has never been a word in the English language called 'de-committed' until about five years ago," says J. Stanley (Skip) Bertman, athletic director and former baseball coach at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. "That became the word where the coach would say, 'He de-committed. He committed to us, but now he's going to another school.' It's so strong, this thing, it's created a new word in the English language."

The risks of early commitments are plenty, coaches say, and the younger the age, the greater the gamble.

One of the great unknowns in early commitments is whether a 15- or 16-year-old will mature into the kind of student who can survive academically at a university. In the anxious rush to commit, many athletes forgo the opportunity to explore the academic and cultural climate at the college and risk jumping into a bad fit.

And when athletes transfer because they are unhappy, coaches say, everybody suffers: the athlete, his teammates, and the coach, who must now recruit a replacement.

Of the three dozen coaches and administrators interviewed for this story, few Division I coaches said they were comfortable with early commitments or felt that they were having a favorable impact on college sports. But most said that despite their misgivings, they understood the need to keep up.

What happens at the upper echelon of college sports, they say, inevitably trickles down to affect everyone below.

"In any of the sports, there's a tendency for the rich to get richer," says Steve Simmons, men's soccer coach at Northern Illinois University. "And if you're right under that, you're going to try to do anything you can to stay with them, because if you don't, there's going to be a gap you might not be able to close."

But coaches in two of the fastest-growing sports think there is a way to put the brakes on recruiting.

The Intercollegiate Women's Lacrosse Coaches Association is petitioning the NCAA to slow down the recruiting process by regulating early commitments and scaling back the amount of communication between athletes and coaches prior to the senior year of high school.

Last month the coaches association sent four proposals to the NCAA that would amend the rules by restricting telephone calls, overnight visits, and other recruiting activities in Division I women's lacrosse.

Division I women's soccer coaches are also considering restrictions on early commitments, says Jim Sheldon, executive director of the National Soccer Coaches Association of America. Coaches associations in other sports are reportedly considering similar limits on recruiting.

Great Expectations

In the two decades that Deb Patterson has been a basketball coach, there is one thing that stands out from all others in recruiting: expectations. And sometimes, she says, it makes her wonder who, exactly, is in charge.

"It's not the coach walking in the gym saying, 'Prove to me you can play.' It's the prospect saying, 'Why weren't you there?'" says Ms. Patterson, now in her 12th year as head coach of Kansas State University's women's basketball team. "So much of what college coaches do now is in response to the expectations of the prospect or the prospect's coaches or handlers. That's a big flip from 15 years ago."

And not, she says, for the better.

"I'm not necessarily interested in spending my days trying to stroke the ego of an 18-year-old or a 17-year-old or a 16-year-old beyond communicating to them … my sincere interest and appreciation for their skills and abilities, and how we could be a good match," Ms. Patterson says. "But recruiting has taken things way beyond that."

For Rodney A. Sandberg, football recruiting coordinator at Wheaton College, a Division III college in Illinois, expectations fuel a waiting game that shapes the chase for athletes who can be, in coaches' parlance, "impact players."

Mr. Sandberg says he and his fellow coaches often find themselves waiting until a prospective football player "finally accepts reality" and realizes there will be no letters, no phone calls, and no scholarship offers from Division I colleges — and only then considers Division III.

The misapprehension is common, he says, and nobody's fault. Athletes have dreams, parents have expectations, and coaches have rosters to fill. Recruiting is an "endless" process, he says, but the magical combination of reaching out and then, at a certain point, stepping back to wait usually yields results.

"Every kid thinks he's going to Michigan," says Mr. Sandberg, who wraps up many a workday from home on the telephone with a prospect. "You have to be patient. You have to just stay with them, stay with them because the scholarships aren't going to be there nine times out of 10."

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