Annie Thompson was at the top of her rowing game. Her timing was good and as a port, starboard and scull, she helped propel the St. Andrews Rowing Club to plenty of wins.
At a svelte 5-feet-9-inches tall, the Milton High school senior from Alpharetta even looked the part.
But the world of rowing is still a relatively small one, making it next to impossible to get noticed and even harder to score an athletic scholarship.
That started to change during Thompson’s junior year last fall when a friend suggested she check out beRecruited.com, an Atlanta-based website that aims to connect student athletes with coaches and scholarship money.
Thompson signed up and over the course of just a few months, heard from 50 college athletic coaches.
“I’d been to rowing camps,” said Thompson. “This gave me one more foot in the door.”
With college tuition skyrocketing and financial aid drying up, Georgia students of every stripe and their parents are scrambling for ways to shore up their coffers.
If you’re an athlete like Thompson, even the prospect of a scholarship can seem daunting. Top-tier football and basketball talent might garner the attention of coaches and recruiters but athletes from lesser-known sports such as rowing or wrestling are often forced to hire private consultants.
Problem is that alternative generally comes with a $500 to $5,000 price tag, far more than what most families can afford.
Sites like beRecruited.com, however, are changing the financial landscape, offering student athletes a way to market themselves at little to no cost. It also takes some of the pressure off parents trying to figure it all out for the first time.
At beRecruited.com, athletes can create a profile that includes everything from their batting averages and yards rushed to grade-point averages and test scores free of charge, said company president Jeff Cravens.
Students, however, may purchase packages for as little as $14.99 a month to as much as $59 for a lifetime, he said.
“Our fundamental belief is that college coaches know the criteria for the kid who best fits their program,” Cravens said. “This is a very customized way for college coaches to sort through what has become a very large database of high school athletes and at the same time allow the athletes who they are most interested in to communicate with and express their interest to them.”
Craven said beRecurited.com has more than 1.2 million users, including more than a million athletes, 18,000 college coaches and 35,000 high school coaches. In addition, about 40,000 parents are registered with the site.
Julius Benton of Atlanta said he and son Josh would’ve been in the dark without beRecruited.com because “high school coaches don’t tell you anything.
“Luckily I stumbled upon beRecruited,” Benton said. “It’s like I pulled into the gas station and got a map. It was my GPS.”
Benton said using the site allowed him to contact 3,000 different coaches over a nine month period.
“The statistic is only 5.6 percent of all high school athletes will actually compete on the college level,” he said. “If you sit around a wait for it to happen you probably won’t.”
Josh, a senior football player at Chamblee High School, is the highest rated punter in Region 6-AAAA and holds the record for average punting distance there, but he wasn’t taking any chances.
Thanks to beRecruited, his father said, he signed with the University of Central Missouri, which offered him partial athletic and academic scholarships.
“We have to pay for books and food but that’s about it,” said Benton, who has helped other kids get scholarships through the site. “This service opens doors. You have to walk through.”
Although comparable sites tend to be sport and geographic specific, beRecruited is part of a growing field of do-it-yourself services that have emerged in the last few years.
Others include Collegecoaches.net, Prepchamps.com and SportsWorx.com.
Cravens said beRecruited started out as a site to help only swimmers, but now offers the service for 31 different sports.
Justin R. Hart, an assistant volleyball coach at Emory University, estimates they receive about 12 emails a month with links to profiles of prospective student-athletes. Of those, he said, Emory contacts about four of those. So far, none have been recruited through the site, said Hart.
Still, he said, the ability to immediately get an impression of a player through online video or an online profile has changed the way the university recruits.
"Being able to get an initial impression through video and be able to get an idea of [an athlete's] academics saves us time in the recruiting process in that we don't have to go and watch a particular player who does not match our criteria," he said.
In addition to academics, he said, Hart said, we are able to view video of the athlete to see if they match our volleyball skill level.
Thompson said when she first posted her credentials, she started clicking on schools she was interested in then for $9.99 a month purchased a package to see what colleges might be interested in her.
She got 50 responses.
“That was huge,” she said.
Thompson visited five of the schools, including Southern Methodist University, the University of Louisville and the University of Central Florida, with whom she eventually signed.
UCF offered her a partial scholarship, she said, that will help cover her tuition and room and board.
“The recruiting process is a lot of hard work, but it is worth every second of it in the end when you commit to a school," Thompson said.
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