In college athletics, recruiting is the term used for the process whereby college coaches add new players to their roster of student-athletes each off-season. In most instances, it involves a coach extending an athletic scholarship offer to a player who is about to graduate from high school or a junior college. There are instances—mostly at lower-division universities—where no scholarship can be awarded and the player has to pay for all of his or her own tuition, housing, and book fees.
Since success or failure in recruiting is seen as a precursor of a team's future prospects, many college sports fans follow it as closely as the team's actual games and it also provides a way to be connected to the team during the off season. Fans' desire for information has spawned a million-dollar industry which first developed extensively during the 1980s. Prior to the internet, popular recruiting services used newsletters and pay telephone numbers to disseminate information. Since the mid-1990s, many online recruiting websites have offered fans player profiles, scouting videos, player photos, statistics, interviews, and other information, including rankings of both a player and a team's recruiting class. Most of these websites charge for their information.
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In the United States, the most widely-followed recruiting cycle is that of college football. This is due in part to the large following football usually has at most Division I universities, especially those in the top-level Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). Division I FBS football also has the highest number of scholarship players (85) of any college sport. The NCAA allows football teams to add up to 25 new scholarship players to the roster per academic year, so long as the total number of scholarship players does not exceed 85.
For teams in the second-tier Division I FCS, scholarships are limited to an amount equal to 63 full scholarships. However, FCS schools are allowed to award partial scholarships, as long as the total number of "counters" (NCAA terminology for a person who counts against limits on players receiving financial aid for that sport) is no greater than 85. Also, FCS teams can provide financial aid to as many as 30 new players per year.
In Division II, schools are limited to an amount equal to 36 full scholarships.
The football recruiting season typically begins the summer after the previous year's class has signed—though the building of relationships between college coaches and high school players and their coaches may have been going on for months or years before that. Each summer high school players attend various football camps at nearby college campuses to be evaluated on measures of athleticism like the 40-yard dash, vertical jump, agility shuttle and the number of repetitions of the bench press that an athlete can perform at a given weight, usually 185 pounds. Recently, the SPARQ rating has become a popular composite metric of a high school football player's athleticism. At this time of year, based on game film and performance at combines, this is typically when players begin to receive most scholarship offers.
After receiving an offer, a player may choose to commit. This is a non-binding, oral agreement. Although more coaches have tried in recent years to get players to commit early, typically the most highly rated players commit within a month of National Signing Day, the day all high school players who will graduate that year can sign letters of intent to play for their college of choice. Signing Day always falls on the first Wednesday in February. Other players, who may not have as many offers to choose from, more often verbally commit earlier in the process. Players occasionally decide to sign with a different school from which they gave a verbal commitment, which often causes rancor between the fans and coaching staffs of the two schools. Junior college players, however, can sign scholarships in late December, once their sophomore seasons have ended.
A letter of intent is binding for both the player and school for one academic year as long as the player is eligible to enroll at the college.
Recruiting for Division I basketball teams is also closely followed by fans. Schools are limited to having 13 scholarship players in men's basketball and 15 in women's basketball. The formal NCAA rules and processes for recruiting and signing recruits are similar, but the identification and recruiting of talent differs from football in important ways. Whereas football players can only play in a very limited number of competitive games per year, summer camps and traveling AAU teams afford prospects the opportunity to play outside of the regular basketball season. As a result, while football players generally only come to the attention of college recruiters after excelling at the high school varsity level, top level basketball players may emerge as early as the 8th or 9th grade. Players may also consider their AAU team as their primary squad, which can make high school basketball coaches less influential in the recruiting process than high school football coaches.
Another key difference in the recruiting cycle for college basketball, as opposed to that of football, is the time of signing: