If your high-schooler is hunting for an athletic scholarship to college, the rules are simple. Rule #1: If he has any running, blocking, or tackling skills, try to get him recruited for football (with 85 scholarships per team, everyone gets a full ride). Rule #2: Get an e-mail inbox with plenty of storage. Coaches can only call once a week, but thanks to a well-worn loophole, they can e-mail ad infinitum. Rule #3: If trying to get recruited in basketball, lacrosse, golf, or any other sport that’s doesn’t require a quarterback, you’re going to need some outside help.
 
And these days, if you’ve got enough money, nobody wants to help more than the online athletic-recruiting services. Given the stakes-many scholarships are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars-why wouldn’t they?
 
The competition for full rides is fierce, with 7 million high-school athletes vying for 375 thousand college slots. For a fee-anywhere from $100 to $5,000-websites like csarepstar.com and berecruited.com help athletes to fill their rosters. Along with sites that rate players, like scout.com, they’ve become a natural outgrowth of the social networking-site boom headed by MySpace.
 
Only problem: The people on the receiving end, the coaches, often aren’t comfortable with the arrangements. Sure, they’ll search the massive databases if they’re desperate for a tailback or point guard, but there’s something undeniably icky about websites making money off young, wide-eyed athletes. Which is why it was so surprising to learn that Jeff Becker, the Thiells native and North Rockland High sports legend, was starting his own recruiting service. Having led the Red Raiders to multiple state-championships in football and baseball and played professional baseball with the Cleveland Indians, was Becker actually selling out to the dark side?
 
Hardly. This hometown hero’s new business, NationsNext, is actually his attempt to completely reform the college-recruiting quagmire. Put simply, it’s the first free recruiting site, fully searchable by both players and coaches, and paid for by advertisers like Nike. It has the bells and whistles of other sites, including blogs and streaming video, but its most brilliant innovation-aside from the cost-is decidedly old school: trading cards. Every athlete who joins NationsNext also generates a virtual card with their photo and stats.
 
But as cute as this is, questions remain: With dozens of profitable and entrenched recruiting sites out there, can Becker’s upstart website gain traction? Can he actually help thousands of kids score scholarships? And besides, what’s so wrong with the pay-to-play recruiting services anyway?

The Dynamic Darsee Duo
 
According to Sean Darsee, a senior and pitcher for Clarkstown South High School, if you choose the right service, you can actually get much more than a virtual calling card. Sean’s father, John Darsee, MD, paid $5,000 to the Baseball Factory, a recruiting operation out of Columbia, Maryland, when his son was still a high-school freshman. In the intervening years, Sean has attended more than 15 Baseball Factory-sponsored training sessions, clinics, and camps. He has also had two personal counselors-the first, a former Major League Baseball scout, and the second, a former coach at Maryland-who helped him search for the right college and the right recruiting events (often called showcases), to show off his pitching skills. For John Darsee, the service is like “a training organization” for his son. “It’s a huge expense, no question,” says Dr. Darsee. “But I look at it as a small investment, relatively speaking.”
 
In the Darsees’ basement, which acts as a kind of war room for Sean’s scholarship search, there’s a pile of invitations to showcases. So many, in fact, that it measures a foot high. “Sean’s advisor, Kelly Kulina, will call to check and see which coaches will be there,” says Dr. Darsee, who has attended every single one of Sean’s tournaments. “If I’m going to track his progress, I need to learn, too.”
 
Beyond the Baseball Factory events, Sean also plays over the summer with a club team called the Bayside Yankees. The father-son team are also sending out DVD copies of one of Sean’s games, in which he struck out a pre-season All American. Shot from a distance, behind a fence, it’s not exactly riveting when played in real time, but Dr. Darsee claims that pitching coaches love this kind of video-“It’s real, unedited footage, not highlight reel,” he says.
 
The Darsees were interested in a number of schools at first, but the Baseball Factory steered them to a select few: St. John’s, Upon, Marist, and Iona, for starters. “They narrow down the pool to the most realistic options,” explains Dr. Darsee. The Factory’s advisor also tells Sean to keep his initial letters to coaches to one page and to send multiple short follow-up communications. Dr. Darsee admits that the likelihood of Sean getting a full ride is slim (baseball teams only get 12 scholarships, most of which are divided up), but regardless of what happens on the financial end, he just wants to see his son play collage ball.

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