Don’t Choose D1 or D3. Choose Value

What’s the most common collegiate playing goal college coaches here? Simple. We hear it every day. “I want to play DI.”

The allure of Division I athletics might be a misguided objective. And it’s got nothing to do with any institutions, the level of play, or what is or is not offered at any school. 

It’s about value and being valued.

If you walk in the room and the coaches don’t remember your name, you’re not valued. If you can’t have a frank conversation about your role and your development, you’re not valued. If you don’t get the opportunity to meet people within the program other than your recruiting coach, you’re not valued.

What matters is not the division of competition that matters. In most sports, you’ll find lower division teams that can beat teams in higher divisions. 

It’s not that division I is the only path to success. There are all-time greats who played at places like Yankton, Widener, Kutztown, Chadron State and Central Arkansas. And of course, there are all-time greats from all of the big dogs.

It’s not about being the savior for a misguided program. A program that desperately needs you may have very little to offer you as far as support, competition and growth.

Being valued is where it’s at. And make sure you understand the difference between needed and valued. If the program won’t win without you, you’re needed. If they want to win with you, you’re valued.

So, how do you know that you’re being value? The environment will tell you. 

When you visit the school, do people in the program already know something about you? If they do, you’re probably valued. When you talk to the coaches, do they talk about more than just sports? If so, they’ve probably got a culture of value. When you talk to current players, do they talk about wholistic development? If they do, they’re in a culture where they are valued.

College sports are about more than just sports. They’re about growth. They’re about competition. They’re about value. If you want to be part of a program where you have a great experience, play where you are valued.

Should I attend a showcase?

Collegiate Exposure showcases and college camps are expensive. There’s no two ways about it. I’ve seen prices at low as $300 for a week-long showcase and as high at $5,000. It varies from sport to sport, from location to location, and who’s running the showcase has a lot to do with it.

As a college coach, I recommend that every kid who’s serious about playing sports in college participate in at least one showcase. It’s a great chance for prospects to connect with coaches. But the problem with attending showcases in not the cost or the coaches on hand. The most common problem is that participants are not prepared for what to expect and not realistic about their own circumstances.

Some parents will say that showcases are hit or miss. If the right coach sees you at the right time, you might find the right fit. If they don’t, better luck next time. As a college coach, I say that every showcase can be a hit if your kid is prepared.

Try to find showcases at which players have direct communication with college coaches. If the college coaches are just watching from the sidelines, there’s no guarantee that any of them will ever even look at your kid. Some showcases offer a format in which the college coaches on hand are coaching the showcase. This might happen in a drills-and-skills session. This might happen in actual competition. Either way, hands on is better for the players and for the coaches.

When a prospect has the chance to interact with a prospect, take advantage of their coaching and their expertise. Don’t talk about their school. Talk about the sport. Talk about what they’d like you to do to improve. And, after you’ve developed that relationship, ask the college coach if they have a feel for what level of collegiate athletics is appropriate for you.

When asked what level is appropriate for the prospect, most coaches will be honest. If they like the prospect, but the prospect doesn’t meet their recruiting needs, they might be willing to contact a coach at the appropriate level on behalf of the prospect. College coaches have friends at every level that we like to help.

This summer I worked a three-day camp in Philadelphia. Since that camp, I’ve spoken to over a dozen other coaches about players at that camp. Some reached out to me, some I reached out to, so I bumped into at another event, all of them were looking to either help me or be helped by me. It’s what we do.

If every coach who worked that camp talked to a dozen other coaches about that camp, that means that hundreds of coaches learned about players from that camp. Word travels. Trust me.

And if the coach you are working with is interested in you, they’ll let you know. Silence is not an effective recruiting strategy. When you ask a college coach about your level and they respond with, “I think you’d be great for us,” they’re interested.

Aside from the recruiting end of exposure camps, kids are also getting exposed to new contacts, new competition, new friends, and a new place. Don’t discount that part of the experience. If you ever went away to a sports camp, you remember your experience.

Exposure camps can be hit or miss for kids with unrealistic expectations and no direction. But if you show up ready to work, informed on the process, and ready to learn from the experts, the camp will be a hit.

Looking to get into racquet sports? Try pickleball first

 Racquet and paddle sports are in a class all their own, and that’s not always a good thing.

Racquet sports are great for developing endurance. They help with the athleticism needed for athletes of all sports. They are relatively social and easy to organize when you don’t have enough players for pick-up basketball.

The tough things about racquet sports? Space, time, money, and competition.

Most racquet sports require a space dedicated to that sport specifically. In the 1980’s clubs everywhere had racquetball courts. While some clubs have held strong, I’ve seen those courts converted into locker rooms, weight rooms, storage closets and even classrooms.

Unlike sports like basketball or soccer, a general athleticism is often not enough to be competitive in many racquet sports. You'll need a specific racquet skill set for that. And while it can be similar from sport to sport, don’t assume that a paddle tennis player can pick up a squash racquet and be ready to compete.

OK. Now that you’ve got a skill set specific to your racquet sport, the equipment and training become very important. Good luck finding a quality tennis racquet for under $150, and that’s before you get it strung for $50 or so. Most competitive players carry at least three or four racquets in their bag, some carry a half-dozen or more. Lessons with a quality instructor can run anywhere from $50 to $500 an hour.   Tennis court rental fees at some indoor clubs are as high as $100 per court per hour, although many clubs will sell time for as little as $25 an hour. Location is key here.

And then there’s the issue of competition. While not everyone is looking to be super competitive, most small towns only have a handful of good players in each racquet sport. Finding a good opponent can be difficult, and the travel to that opponent can be pricey and time consuming. I just got home from coaching at a three-day tennis camp at which each camper paid over a grand for the weekend. 

Pickleball is different. Of all the racquet/paddle sports I’ve been involved in (which is just about all of them), pickleball has the quickest path from beginner to decent.

Most people with any level of hand-eye coordination can play a game of pickleball the very first time they pick up a paddle. Try that with squash or tennis and see how it goes. You’ll spend more time chasing a rolling ball than playing the game. You won’t need to worry about topspin, walls, formations, paddle weight or any sport-specific oddities that take forever to figure out in pickleball. Some players play with funky spin, but most just hit the ball.

 There’s even a safety rule in pickleball that keeps players from standing at the net and crushing the new guy. The area nearest the net is called the "No Volley Zone" or the "Kitchen." Players who step in the kitchen to hit a ball that has not already bounced in the kitchen automatically lose the point. This helps keep intimidation and ego to a minimum.

Pickleball can be played on a variety of surfaces. Those spaces reserved for tennis, squash and racquetball can all be quickly and easily converted into a pickeball court, and then changed right back to their original state just by folding up the net and putting it away. I’ve seen pickleball on concrete, carpet, asphalt, gymnasium floors, linoleum, and even on clay tennis courts.

Check eBay right now. Odds are you’ll find a starter set that includes paddles, a net, and balls for around a hundred bucks. Unless you’re talking about those cheap, backyard badminton sets that are garbage as soon as someone swings hard and gets a shuttlecock stuck in their racquet, your chances of getting started in another racquet sport for that price are slim and none.

The general skills required to play pickleball translate to every other racquet sport. So if you start with pickleball, you've already got a head start in tennis, squash, badminton, paddle tennis, or any other racquet/paddle sport.

Many YMCA’s, town rec centers, public parks, youth organizations and senior centers are now offering pickleball for free. Some are charging a reasonable fee, but “free competition” is something that’s all but been phased out in sports.

Here’s the best part. Because of the easy introduction into pickleball, the small court (about 1/3 of a tennis court), the low cost to get started, and the general social feel that surrounds pickleball, just about anyone can play. I was on a court last week with three different races, four different age groups, three different native languages and four different nationalities. We all had a blast.

T Time with Tarek Merchant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql5g2qZ34ak&feature=youtu.be

Tanking is bad. Winning is good. Winning Culture is best.

Losing games at the professional level is bad. You’d think we’d all know that given the severity with which we treat the outcome of every youth game we watch. But, as sports fans, we’ve got this all upside-down.

I was at the Giants-Bears game this past weekend. It was probably the most exciting, albeit bizarre, Giants games I’ve ever attended. The G-Men pulled out an overtime win over a near-definite playoff team after blowing a 10-point 4^th quarter lead. Each team had a passing touchdown from a non-quarterback, Chicago had a defensive lineman rush for a touchdown a la The Fridge. The Giants had a defensive touchdown. The Giants kicker set a franchise record for longest field goal. Saquan Barkley hurdled a guy. It was big play after big play all day long.

During the 4^th quarter of the game, I heard the fans in front of me talking about how much better it would have been if the Giants lost. The same two fans had a conversation earlier in the game about their kid’s youth football team being terrible because of a 3-6 record. So, to make sure we have this straight, they paid to attend a professional game that they wanted their favorite team to lose so they could potentially get a better draft pick who could potentially help their team in the future, yet they’re fed up with the local Pop Warner coach because his team was 3-6.

At the professional level, sports fans crave the opportunity to develop. At the youth level, we want results. I know this might sound crazy to some of you who want to trust the process, but I think it you had some patience to allow the youth coach to develop skills in younger players, you’d be less likely to have professional players who still need to “develop.”

Tanking is wrong. It’s against everything we should be teaching kids. Losing does not lead to winning. Learning winning habit and reinforcing winning behaviors leads to winning. Sure, some of the best players of all time were first overall picks like LeBron James, Peyton Manning and Alex Rodriguez, but how about guys like Eric Fisher, Anthony Bennett and Mark Appel? Those three were first overall picks in the past decade, and I bet most sports fans don’t even recognize their names.

The 76ers told us tanking and unloading talent to be a champion some day in the future is the “process.” Let’s take a quick look at what the process has accomplished now that Philly says the process is complete.  The 76ers currently sit in 3^rd place in the Eastern Conference, which is the NBA’s version of junior varsity. They finished 3^rd in the east last year after four seasons of being one of the worst teams in basketball including a 2015-16 season that was one of the worst seasons in the history of the game. Upper deck seats were selling for $0.11 on the secondary market that year. Eleven Cents!

So that’s the current result of tanking: third place in a sub-par conference. Is that really the goal? Let’s go through 4-5 abysmal seasons so you can be better-than-average for a few years?

Maybe I’m the idiot here, but I want my pro teams to try to win every damn game and I want to get rid of every player who’s not on board with winning culture.  If that guy was coached well as a kid and his development was nurtured back when improvement meant everything and final scores meant nothing, He’d know exactly how to play like a winner. Unfortunately, some guys grow up in a backwards sports culture.

What is winning culture? Simply defined, it's doing your job well. It's doing exactly what's asked of you to the best of your ability, then finding out how you can do it even better next time. That's how teams like the Patriots contend for a title every year. The players are not required to be All-World talent. They're required to do exactly what's asked of them to the best of their ability, and continue to improve on that. That will never go out of favor with coaches, and that will never not be the best path to athletic success.

Winning is contagious. So is losing. Lose on purpose and you are a loser. Attempt to win by instilling winning habits and committing to winning efforts and you’re a winner. Simple as that.

What's the Biggest Factor in the Recruiting Timeline? The Calendar

Your kid is a high school student-athlete. It’s their senior year and, despite a strong season, you still haven’t heard from very many college coaches. You’ve heard other kids from other sports around school talk about the coaches with whom they are talking, and some have already made their collegiate decision.

So why have coaches not been active in recruiting your kid? There could be a million different reasons why, but you might be overlooking the most obvious and overlooked reason. Maybe it’s the calendar.

                College coaches are creatures of habit. Those who have been at it for years like to stick to a calendar. If they’ve been successful, they’ve probably found a recruiting timetable that works for their sport at their school and they generally stick to it.

                I spoke last week to a parent of a potential division 3 football player who had this exact concern. His son is a solid player and an above-average student, and the family was frustrated than they’d only heard from one or two coaches. I told him to be patient.

                Although the process is becoming somewhat expedited at a lot of colleges looking for early decision candidates, the calendar for small college football has always been that coaches do the bulk of their recruiting visits to high schools after their season ends. There are exceptions to this rule, but talk to any small college football coach and he will tell you that mid-November through mid-January are reserved for two things; Recruiting visits and the annual football coaches’ convention.

                Spring sports like lacrosse, baseball and softball generally take the opposite seasonal approach. They want all of their recruiting done before their spring season starts. They’re more accustomed to watching summer showcases and tournaments so they can get their on-campus visits wrapped up during the fall semester. Most of them would love to have a verbal commitment from their recruits before their teams start practices in January.

                The other major factor in the calendar is the quality or prestige of institution. If the college at which your kid is looking to play is routinely ranked highly nationally, those seats tend to fill up earlier in the process, especially for great schools with a small student body. However, if your child’s top choices are large state schools with high acceptance rates and plenty of beds on campus, you can usually make that decision after graduating high school and still be relatively confident that you won’t be excluded from that school’s fall semester.

                Thirdly, the quality of program often factors in to the recruiting calendar. Nationally-ranked teams often want to know early and can help you expedite the admissions and financial aid process so they can wrap up their recruiting class early and get a jump on recruiting juniors while lower-level competitors are only left with the kids that the big dogs didn’t want.

                So, if your kid plays a spring sport, wants to attend an elite institution and has not heard from that school’s coach by the fall of their senior year, they either need to initiate the contact with the coach, re-evaluate what they want to do for college, or both. But, if your kid is a fall athlete, believes they would fit in best athletically on a mid-level division 3 team, and has decent enough grades to get into and receive some academic scholarship money at those schools, they don’t need to worry about hearing from coaches until December of their senior year or so.

                Most colleges don’t treat student-athletes like general population students. They know that those student-athletes graduate at a greater rate, give back at a greater rate, and do more to promote the school off campus than those who are not as heavily involved on campus. As a parent of a prospective collegiate student-athlete, you should not be trying to equal the timeline of a non-athlete-family who has already made their college decision.

Your timeline is different. Knowing that timeline can help you make a decision at the right time and for the right reasons. If you’re not sure about your sport’s recruiting timeline, check with your high school coach and the parents of older children in the same sport.

What really matters when determining HS football playoff teams

 The New Jersey High School Football playoff system is a mess. We’ve got teams playing in the playoffs with one or two wins and teams sitting home with 6 wins. We’ve got teams with one loss traveling to teams with 3 losses. And we’ve got teams that have beaten top seeds in higher divisions that don’t get a home game in the playoffs.

The system doesn’t need to be fixed. It needs to be rewinded. What was happening in the mid 2000’s was about as perfect at a playoff system can be without head-to-head results to determine who's in and who's out.

In all of the talk that’s happening about playoff seeding, I’ve heard a few things to don’t matter at all when it comes to playoffs. Plus, I’ve got a few things that definitely matter when judging a team’s potential to win a championship.

These four focal points are good indicators of a team’s quality.

1.       Record for the last 4 games: It can take a while for a good team to come together. Not every team hits the ground running in August. In some communities, that’s easier than it is in others. Financial issues, transportation issues and distance from home to school are all factors in whether a team gets good attendance at summer workouts. Don’t punish the kids for where they live. Give them time to gel as a team during the fall. That’s why I believe the games leading up to the playoffs should carry more weight than the first month of the season.

2.       Dominant victories. Any team that wins a game by 24 points, or the equivelant of the most points a team can score in three possessions, has earned a dominant victory. Winning 28-3 and 77-7 is the same in my book. If you’ve beaten a game by 24 or more, you’ve shown dominance. And if you’ve done that to a winning team, now you’ve really accomplished something.  

3.       Prime time wins. This one might be tough to define, but rivalry wins, beating an undefeated team, and beating defending state or conference champs are statements of proof for high school teams. I’m sure this one would be easy for decision-makers to screw up, but if you’re a team that’s done all of these things, you’re definitely a playoff team in my book.

4. Defending your home turf. If a team goes undefeated at home, they're a playoff team. Period. Nobody walked into their house and stole a game. If your home fans never saw you lose, they should get another chance to see you play, even if that means going on the road. 

These three popular talking points are of no consequence and should never play a factor

1.       History. The only thing that matters is this season. Kids get, at most, a 4-year window to play high school sports. In many districts and larger schools, that window is cut down to two years because of the talent that's already there when kids are freshman and sophomores. What happened over the years is a non-factor. Unless most of those successful players are still on the team and the coaching staff remains the same, this year is this year and the past is over.

2.       Star recruits. There’s no doubt that New Jersey has cranked out some outstanding college and professional football talent over the years. Some programs seem to have a Division I recruit every year. But for every big time recruit, there are a dozen kids who have no plans to play college football that can flat-out win at the high school level. This is a team game.

3.       Total point differential: The great teams are the ones that can win blowouts, close games, defensive battles and shootouts. Winning a game against a quality opponent 7-3 has a greater value than just +4 in this silly stat line. And, in congruence with the "quality win" idea  77-7 is no better than 28-3. Total point differential screams for a high-powered offensive team to schedule a few small schools and run up the score.