I just find it very much a coincidence that a new poster comes on asking about the website, the next day the person involved shows up, happens all of the time.
MN-Mom is the owner of the website. Maybe being here a while I am too protective of her and the former owners interests. You see, if someone who is a new poster comes on to endorse a site, a team, a product whatever, and someone uses it and it turns out to not be a good experience they may go back and hold the site responsible. We have had a situation happen where parents were not happy and then the come here with major complaints without going directly to the source. MN-Mom runs a business also and is busy and now she has this dilemma on how to handle this situation which shouldn't have involved the HSBBW to begin with. Sounds crazy, but parents can get out of control sometimes, me maybe being one of them.
I hope that you understand.The best part about this site is that we are parents helping parents or students with no experience other than our own kids going through it. There is enough information provided for someone to realize it takes work and can be achieved without having fear of wasting money.
I was thinking the other day about approximately how much money we had put into the process over the years, going back to high school. I would say it equalled one half of a years tuition at Clemson. That is not alot compared to some stories I hear. It took a lot of planning and figuring out how to spend the money wisely. For us it was travel baseball, getting him out there and being SEEN in the flesh, not posting on a website waiting for someone to come along and find him. I think that is the message here. We tell parents time after time to get OUT and be SEEN.
One of the reasons it worked for us, is because we were in the event and marketing business for many years. I knew nothing about college recruiting, in fact I didn't even know about Clemson until my son got a letter. So for lack of experience in that, we used our marketing experience. No matter HOW good I thought my son was, or how good he was, no one was going to find him sitting at home waiting for the college recruiter to call a coach. From my expeience, I try to help others as best as I can.
I feel that most recruiters have good intentions, but when given the money, they themselves don't know how to handle things. It is a VERY big undertaking. It is a business and for me, just because you may have been a former coach, scout, player does not mean that you have the business expertise to help someone. Most people are internet users and know all you have to do is do a search on google and every college d1,d2,d3,NAI, juco etc. in the country will pop up. It takes time and effort, it is the players and parents responsibility to see it happen, don't put your future in someone else's hands. Fungo posted about that, it was a great post.
I have a friend that called me to ask me if I ever heard of XYZ company. He was willing to shell out 2500 for their services. They knew that their son was not D1 material, but the recruiter said it didn't matter, he could make it appear as if he was, to get interest. My answer was, what are you going to do when they SEE him play. I tried to hook them up with a summer travel team. They said it was too expensive. Everyone of the teams I refered them too were up in Atlanta last week and will play in Jupiter this fall.
It angered me that this recruiter was going to do this and I do hope they stayed away. I have much distrust in these people.
My son played for a coach who ran his team like TR does. It also was a business, not for profit necessarily but to get his kids out there to be seen and help in the process. The first day of practice, you were given sheets about how to write a proper baseball resume, what to include, what not to include. And how to contact college coaches. And the coach made it his business to contact college coaches while in town or that area and to play at colleges campuses. He was trying to teach tehm the business side of recruiting, something that every summer coach who has HS kids on their team should do. HS coaches do it too, but only can spend the season with them. Junior summer, my son traveled to Omaha for the CWS and played in a tournament, played in Atlanta and almost every college campus in FL. He was being recruited by many schools before that, but come July 1st we received calls from schools who never sent on questionaire. It was well worth the 2500 it cost us.
We always could use more advice on the recruiting process in this thread, I think that it would be a great idea if you could pop in on a regular basis and answer questions for those that ask. This might also benefit you business wise as well, though I have found many people along the way with the attitude, why give advise for free when I can charge for it.
I understand where you are coming from now and I hope that you understand me as well.