READY OR NOT: Getting noticed half the battle for college recruits

When it comes to sending high school athletes to college programs, Hilton Head Christian Academy's recent run is tough to top.

Thirteen members of the school's most recent graduating class, including five now at NCAA Division I institutions, signed to play at a four-year colleges this season. Not bad for a school that had a graduating class of 44, not all of whom participated in athletics.

"It all starts with the athletes," Christian Academy football coach and athletics director Tommy Lewis said. "Obviously, you have to be good enough to get to the next level. You have to be good enough to have coaches want you. I'd say it started off with just a pretty good senior class."

But Lewis cited other factors, too:

• Guidance counselor Trevor Creeden is the school's former baseball coach and is well-versed in NCAA standards;

• The school tries to identify students interested in playing college athletics as early as middle school and advises them of college academic requirements;

• High teacher-to-student and coach-to-athlete ratios mean fewer players fall through the cracks;

• At the end of athletes' junior years, coaches encourage them to record video highlights and mail them, along with their transcripts, to several schools they're interested in attending.

Here is more recruiting advice from high school and college coaches and players and parents who have been through the process:

Understand the benefits and drawbacks of attending both public and private high schools: Jane Janiak has sent her kids to both. Middle son Brian started at Hilton Head Preparatory School and graduated from Hilton Head Island High. He didn't get an athletics scholarship but was an invited walk on at Villanova, where he is competing for playing time as a sophomore.

His mother said the guidance and coaching staffs at private schools usually can afford to give each student-athlete more individual attention, but because the level of play is usually better at public schools, it can be easier to catch the eyes of college coaches there.

Know the NCAA's academic requirements as soon as you enter high school, and take the SAT or ACT early in your junior year: "That's one of the main lessons we learned -- you've got to pay close attention and remember your GPA has to be at a certain level," said the Rev. Charles Hamilton Sr. His son Jansen was a highly recruited basketball and football player, who received offers from NCAA Division I schools but didn't qualify academically and enrolled at Division II Benedict College. "You've got to get on top of that early. If you wait until you're a junior, you've waited too late."

Taking college entrance exams early is key, too. That gives you time to retake the SAT or ACT if you're dissatisfied with your first results, and posting a good score early means potential recruiters don't have to worry if you'll meet NCAA initial eligibility standards.

"You'd be shocked how many kids we talk to who are in their senior years and haven't taken the SAT yet," said College of Charleston basketball coach and former Hilton Head Island resident Bobby Cremins. "It really puts them at a disadvantage."

Set realistic expectations: It's great to dream big, but aspiring college athletes can waste a lot of time and energy pursing scholarships from schools that aren't interested in them, said Ray Yost, the Christian Academy girls tennis coach who spent 15 seasons in charge of the men's and women's programs at Division II Mercyhurst College.

If an athlete doesn't attract a lot of attention from Division I schools, it almost always means the kid isn't good enough to play at that level; seldom does that mean the coach hasn't done enough to promote the player, according to Bluffton athletics director Dave Adams.

"You can't hide a Division I athlete," Adams said. "They will be found."

So if Division I coaches aren't calling, it's a good idea to have a fall-back plan for a smaller or less prestigious program, Adams said.

Recruiting services can be helpful, but they're no panacea: USC Beaufort golf coach and athletics director Kim Abbott is blunt -- companies paid to set up slick Web sites or compile highlight DVDs for student-athletes are worthless to blue-chip prospects.

"For a high-level institution, recruiting services play no role at all in the process," said Abbott, the former women's golf coach at USC's main campus in Columbia. "... But where I am now, a recruiting service plays a role."

In other words, borderline recruits or those looking to attend smaller schools might benefit from the assistance, particularly if they're unfamiliar with the recruiting process.

Yost, who also is co-owner of the College Athletic Recruiting Program that helps college-bound student-athletes negotiate the recruiting process, said he maintains a small clientele of mostly tennis players. He concentrates less on mass marketing his clients and more on using his personal connections with college coaches to uncover playing and scholarship opportunities.

"A recruiting service can do a lot of good for a kid, but it's not going to turn him into a Division I athlete," Yost said.

Adams said he has asked college coaches what they do with information generated by recruiting services, particularly unsolicited material arriving by via e-mail. He said most receive several hundred packages and discard most of it without reading it.

Don't wait to be recruited: Abbott said many high school athletes make the mistake of believing college coaches will beat down their door. While that might be true of a handful of top-shelf recruits, the vast majority of student-athletes have to be much more proactive, she said.

High school freshmen should begin sending letters to college coaches they would like to play for. Attending summer camps at schools of interest is another way of garnering attention, she said.

Adams encourages anyone who wants to play in college to write a one-page resume and cover letter to be sent out between the sophomore and junior years.

"That gets them in the system. That gets them on colleges' radars," Adams said. "Once they're in, the colleges and coaches can follow up, and from there it mostly depends on grades and ability."

Understand many letters might yield only a few responses: "Coaches get mail from recruiting services every day, from kids every day and coaches every day," Cremins said. "My assistants have to go through them and weed out the ones that don't look that good. Of the ones that are left, I follow up with as many as possible.

"But there's a lot of wasted mail."

Cremins said he'll eventually follow up on one in 10 unsolicited letters, and he'll offer scholarships to only a small percentage of those.

The letters most likely to catch his attention come from high school underclassmen; seniors should probably save the postage.

Go where the coaches are: Adams said it is helpful to know that coaches in different sports recruit differently. For example, football and basketball coaches recruit heavily based upon an athlete's high school performance and often will attend games to scout players. College soccer, softball and baseball coaches tend to recruit more heavily over the summer and pay particular attention to travel teams and showcase tournaments, where they can evaluate many prized athletes at once.

Play hard because you never know who is watching: Bob Arundell, a Beaufort County Board of Education member and former Hilton Head High football and basketball assistant, said he knows several former Seahawk athletes capable of playing in college were passed over because they didn't hustle or practice hard.

"With some kids, you have a hard time convincing them that stuff matters," Arundell said, "but it does."

You also never know when opportunity might knock.

Gabe Gilmour was the Island Packet-Beaufort Gazette Offensive Player of the Year after leading the area in both rushing and passing in 2006. But he posted those numbers for Hilton Head Christian and simply didn't garner much attention playing against private-school competition.

He sent highlight DVDs to Newberry and Coastal Carolina, but as national signing day approached this past February, Gilmour didn't have a single scholarship offer.

At the last minute, Charleston Southern offered a partial scholarship, and he might not have gotten that had the Christian Academy not played Northwood Academy in the SCISAA Class 2-A state title game the previous November. College of Charleston head coach Jay Mills was at the game to watch his son Jared, a quarterback for Northwood Academy, and was impressed when Gilmour rushed for 215 yards and threw for 125 more in a 35-12 Christian Academy victory.

Mills made a late scholarship offer to Gilmour, who accepted. The quarterback spent most of the fall at No. 3 on the Pirates' depth chart and likely will be red-shirted this season.

Expect to dicker, but don't expect a full ride: Adams spent a quarter decade as a football coach but said he learned more about recruiting in the relatively short time that his son was a highly sought cross country prospect. Although David Adams won nine state championships in track and cross country and remains the state record holder in the latter, that wasn't enough to get him a full athletics scholarship -- such things almost never exist for male athletes who play non-revenue sports.

So the elder Adams learned to negotiate, and his son signed with Clemson.

"It's like getting a used car.," Adams said. "You're wheeling and dealing here. Give me a meal plan and take this off my housing. If he takes another minute off his two-mile, can you do this for me?"

Adams also said every official visit to a school should end with an athlete telling the coach what college he'll be visiting next -- and it doesn't hurt if that school is a conference or in-state rival.

Yost reminds athletes to consider the value of the total experience at a particular college, not just the tuition cost.

"A lot of coaches and a lot of programs have backers -- someone who takes an interest in the program and provides a lot of money for facilities and equipment," Yost said.

Find programs with backers, and college student-athletes can wind up on a team with better equipment and more exotic road trips than schools of comparable size can afford.