What are the benefits and disadvantages of the college athletic recruiting services that are being launched? How can they help college coaches and are they really necessary?
The online college athletic recruiting and scouting services have been around for a while now. These services offers college coaches a recruiting tool to be able to recruit more efficiency.
There are some that say that these recruiting services are unnecessary. The statement often used to support this opinion is “If you are good enough the coaches will find you”.
I am willing to agree with this statement to an extent, a college coach should have an idea on what kind of athletes he is looking for and what kind of athletes that are coming up in his region.
However there are several occasions when a college athletic recruiting service can help the college coach.
There are several schools that don’t have money to send the coaches on recruiting trips, that’s when athletic recruiting services can serve as a useful tool.
There are also the process of recruiting an athlete that are not from your region, for example a recruiting service can connect a coach on the east coast with an athlete from the west coast. There is also an advantage for college coaches who want to recruit internationally. The recruiting services simplify the recruiting process in many ways.
First of all we have the language barrier, things can easily be misunderstood. Also these recruiting tools make it easier for college coaches to determine quickly if the athlete is something for the schools program. Efficiency is term that comes to my mind, instead of writing several e-mails back and forth to receive all documents to see if the athlete will be eligible for the University, the coach can do it all in once.
Transcripts, test scores, statistics, recruiting video all this information by providing college coaches with all these information immediately they are able to make a decision whether a student athlete is worth pursuing or not.
However there are also another side of this coin and that is that some take advantage of athletes and charge outrageous fees to help them. A young adult who may not know very much of the recruiting process is a very easy target.
As summary I would say that these services are great tools for college coaches and a great marketing tool for athletes looking to get recruited as long it is reasonable priced.
