We’ve been sharing the stories that inspired our founding members to come up College Prospect Network. Last month we posted our Vice President’s personal experience and our CEO’s retrospective about watching his younger brother play football. Our President, Thadd Fifer, wants to start this month off by sharing his vision and the ideas and ideals that make him excited to go to work everyday.

For many of my friends growing up, college was nothing more than a place to continue playing sports. They didn’t see it as the life-changing experience that it is because they did not grasp how important it is to a young person’s develop and life path. So, when they didn’t receive a scholarship offer and sports was no longer an option, they had no desire to attend college or find an alternative route to continue their playing careers. They simply accepted that it was over.

Now that we are a little older they are beginning to realize that athletics are not all there is to life. Education and maturation are even more important for young adults.  

I always understood their frustration and discouragement because we all felt like we didn’t get the attention we deserved. Personally, I received offers to play football at several schools in and around Texas but I really wanted to play basketball. Many of my friends felt the same way but we didn’t know how to solve it. We had no idea why the recruiting letters weren’t pouring in and, because of that, we didn’t know what to do differently.

Now, let me clarify something. I am not trying to say that every one of my friends was good enough to play sports in college. That is, in fact, beside the point. The tragedy is that many of my friends tied the idea of college directly to the sport they played. When things didn’t go well in their sport, their sole reason for aspiring to go to college vanished.

Because of that, I have always insisted that College Prospect Network is designed not only to give these athletes an outlet to maximize their exposure but also to “coach” them along the way about how important it is to find the right college program. That means everything from academics to campus size, location, reputation, culture and diversity should factor into their decision. These kids need to understand that colleges offer so much more than an avenue to continue playing a sport. And, just because they are going to have to work a little harder for exposure than some other players, doesn’t mean they should give up. Things will only workout well if they are willing to put in the time and effort. 

Take those of them that are interested in owning a business for example; they could have found a Division III college with a great business school.  Or, if they really enjoyed drawing, they may have been able to find an interested NAIA coach at a school with a great arts program. In other words, just because they aren’t getting offers from schools who play on national television every week doesn’t mean they shouldn’t pursue their playing careers elsewhere.

After all, an education last longer than sports.

We want to give our athletes the knowledge they need to make a good decision about their future. 17- and 18-year old kids don’t know what they want because they don’t understand how vital college truly is.

They deserve a fair opportunity so, when they are 30 or 40, they can be proud of the decisions they made when they were younger.

College Prospect Network gives all kids, regardless of income, academic background, or race, the opportunity to follow their dreams. All they need is a good work ethic, perseverance and the willingness to listen to us and coaches. While following that dream, they will experience growth, maturity and the education that they will be proud of forever.

– Thadd Fifer

Note: We are currently working to offer some great benefits to our member athletes to help them find internships and jobs while they are in school and after they graduate. It’s a huge part of what we want to accomplish so hopefully we will have some great news about the program within the next couple of months.

I’m not going to post my email address here to avoid spam but, if you want to contact me, please use the Contact Us page on our website. I will respond within 24 hours most of the time.

When we tell high school or AAU coaches that our website, College Prospect Network, is completely free for their athletes, many of them are skeptical and say something along the lines of, “I’ve heard this before. You may not charge them to join the site but you WILL ask for money in the future.” We understand the skepticism because there are other websites out there that claim to be free but they charge money to promote paying athletes ahead of athletes with a free profile.

We don’t do that and we never will. College Prospect Network is truly different and we are here to help athletes and the college programs that need them.

We believe that you will understand why the service is free for athletes and their parents once you get to know us a little better. You may have read our Vice president’s story about what inspired him to start the site and now we would like to share our CEO’s inspiration: his brother.

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I played football in high school but I was under no misconceptions about my level of talent. I was good enough to start on varsity for St. John Vianney of New Jersey but I knew that was as far as my football-playing career was going. My brother, on the other hand, was a tremendous football player and could have definitely contributed at the next level.

His name is Pat and he was every bit the athlete that I was not. As a high school junior he was 6’1″ and already weighed 225 pounds. He played all over the offensive line, mostly at center, but the defensive side of the ball was where he truly flourished.

Throughout his time on varsity, he played every position on the defensive line, inside and outside linebacker and both safety spots. He basically did everything except play cornerback. He was a three-year letterman, two-year starter and Team Captain his senior year because of his leadership, work ethic and unbelievable motor.

Every weekend I would leave college and drive to wherever he was playing because it made me proud to watch him play. I remember thinking, “Man, this kid has it all. He’s the total package. Why aren’t colleges beating the door down to sign him?”

The answer was pretty obvious now that I know more about the recruiting process. While Pat did have it all on the field and in the classroom, there was a lot that he did not have. Namely: game film, highlight tapes, a recruiting profile, college coaches’ contact information and a clear idea of how to get his name out to coaches and scouts. The thing is, his natural position was Defensive End but, at 6’1″, he was a little under-sized for top-tier Division I programs to pay much attention to him. The schools that needed to see him were the same schools that didn’t have the budget and manpower to get out to Holmdel, NJ to find him.

Once he graduated I stopped thinking about the fact that he should have been recruited. He has done pretty well for himself so it was never a big deal to me. But then I had a revealing conversation with my father about some of the things he missed about having his family all under one roof. Surprisingly, watching Pat play football was one of the first things he mentioned.

It turns out that my father was just as proud of Pat when he played football as I was but for very different reasons.

My father, who came over from Italy when he was a teenager, never knew much about football and never really cared to learn about it. He went to all my games but it still didn’t resonate with him until Pat started playing. As I mentioned earlier, my brother had tremendous heart. He was one of the most intense, fierce competitors I have ever seen on a field, court or pitch. My father didn’t need to know much about the rules of game to appreciate Pat’s near-maniacal competitiveness; he simply loved to watch my brother attack ball carriers and blockers with everything he had. No matter the play or the score, Pat played as if it was his last time to be on a field.

When I told Pat about the conversation with my father, he agreed that he would have liked to continue his playing career for another four years. It is highly unlikely that he had any potential to play professionally but just having those four additional years would have been great for him. And for my father.

– Dominick Lombardi, CEO – College prospect Network

If College Prospect Network would have been around in time to help Pat increase his exposure to college coaches and scouts, we believe he would have had a solid, rewarding playing career in college. The good news is: it’s here now and your athletes/sons/daughters/friends don’t have to go unnoticed anymore. We are growing every week and so is our capacity to help an ever-increasing number of athletes and colleges.

I’m not going to post my email address here to avoid spam but, if you want to contact me, please use the Contact Us page on our website. Also, if you want to share your story, please leave a comment and we will let you know how to do so.

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We won’t bore you with the entire story of how and why www.CollegeProspectNetwork.com came to be but there a few key elements of our service that make us unique. You’ll understand what we do and why we do it once you understand the people who started the website.

Here is the story and inspiration that drives our Vice President, Jacob Harris, to help as many deserving athletes as possible:

I grew up playing baseball. My father coached me every year until I was 12, when he and my mother split up. After he left I lost all desire to play baseball and decided just to concentrate on school and quit playing sports. Our family also went through a pretty significant change financially so my sister and I had to stop going to private school.

8th Grade was my first year in public school and it was a severe culture shock.

I went from being in a tiny classroom with eight other students in my class to a huge campus with over 300 students in my grade. I knew nothing about public school or how sports were organized so I signed up for regular P.E. classes. The thing is, I was already 6’1″ so it took the basketball coaches about half a minute minute to hear that there was a new tall kid at school.

They came and got me out of P.E., changed my schedule and put me into the off-season basketball class.

Now, I only include that first part to communicate two things to you: 1) I didn’t have a father in the house and my mother knew absolutely nothing about how recruiting or any of that worked, and 2) I had never played a day of basketball in my life. I was literally clueless about the sport until the coaches switched me into the basketball class.

For whatever reason, I took to it pretty quickly though. I stumbled around on the 8th Grade B Team for my first year, started on the Freshman A Team the next year and, by my sophomore season, I even dressed for a couple of varsity games. This is at a Texas-5A school, mind you, the largest classification in the state. I grew to love the sport and became a gym rat but I put all my time into working on my jump shot (40 percent from the three-point line by my sophomore year) and offensive versatility and no time into working on defense, rebounding, or getting my name out to college coaches. I just figured that, if I could score, colleges would find out about me on their own.

Wrong.

By my senior year, I was pretty skilled offensively and, as I expected, the letters and calls started coming. However, they were from tiny schools in Texas that I had never heard about, not from The University of Texas or Duke or Connecticut. I was confused and angry because I didn’t understand why I wasn’t getting interest from top-tier schools. I had no idea that there was an entire culture of camps, showcases and tournaments where top players played.

I knew nothing outside my high school games and the mid-level AAU scene in Texas. It never occurred to me that college coaches and scouts simply cannot make it out to every city, not to mention every school. They can’t talk to every coach and player and, even if they could, that would be an incredibly inefficient way to find quality players.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and all the new scouting websites and blogs out there have made it a lot easier to be seen than it used to be but athletes still don’t know how to promote themselves, interact with college coaches and set themselves up for success.

I didn’t know any of that when I was in school and I am determined to make sure the new generation of athletes have a better understanding of the recruiting process than I did.

Luckily, my grades and test scores were very good so I had some options outside of basketball. I didn’t think it would be a big deal if I gave up basketball. I was offended that I didn’t have offers from big-name programs and decided to “hang ’em up” but I ended up regretting it.

Looking back, it was pretty impressive that I had only played basketball for a few years and I still had offers from some schools. If I had it to do again, I would have taken one of those offers and continued my playing career. Maybe I could have transferred to a top-tier program by my junior year and eventually played overseas. Maybe I would have stayed at a smaller school and graduated with a free college education instead of the student loans I am still paying off. The fact is, I don’t know what would have happened because I didn’t know how to maximize my exposure.

I want to help under-recruited athletes avoid the same mistakes I made. Regardless of whether they are Division I-caliber players who are only getting offers from small schools or NAIA-level players who are being completely missed, these athletes deserve to know and understand their options. Nobody should miss out on an opportunity simply because they aren’t experts at navigating the promotion and recruiting processes.

But, if we’re going to help athletes maximize their exposure, we also need to provide a quality product to colleges. One that they will use repeatedly. www.CollegeProspectNetwork.com is quickly becoming that.

In only six months of operation we have over 300 legitimate prospects, roughly 200 high school and AAU coaches and twenty-something college programs using the site. We are growing every single week because we understand what colleges need to see and what athletes need to do and know. We truly offer a unique service for high school athletes, their parents, their coaches and the college programs who need them.

Best of all, our website is completely and totally free for the athletes and their high school or AAU coaches! And the subscription for college programs is basically the lowest amount we could charge and still cover all our bills. We truly are here because we want to help the under-recruited players and the colleges who need them, not to squeeze money out of parents and athletes who don’t have the knowledge they need.

How many other recruiting services can say that?

– Jacob Harris

I’m not going to post my email address here to avoid spam but, if you want to contact me, please use the Contact Us page on our website. I will respond within 24 hours most of the time.

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Scottie Pippen is one of the 50 greatest players in NBA history. He is a six-time NBA Champion, 7-time All-Star and 2-time Olympic Gold Medal winner. But do you know what else he is? A former under-recruited athlete.

He did not get any attention from college programs coming out of high school. At all.

As a point guard at Hamburg High School in Arkansas, Pippen led his team to the state playoffs and was recognized as an All-Conference talent but he did not receive a single scholarship offer. He began his college career as a team manager at the University of Central Arkansas, a small NAIA school about three hours from his house. He ended up making the team as a walk-on and worked his way into the starting lineup by his sophomore season. In other words, he is the epitome of the an under-recruited athlete.

While Michael Jordan, his teammate on all six championship teams, was nailing a mid-range jumper to knock Patrick Ewing and the Georgetown Bulldogs out of the NCAA Tournament, Pippen was playing in the near anonymity. Luckily, the NBA scouts saw what the college scouts had missed.

His high school friends didn’t think he was good enough to play in college and his college friends didn’t think he was good enough to play in the NBA. Despite all the obstacles and doubt he faced, he was drafted 5th in 1987  by the Chicago Bulls and rest is history.

Compare that to his running mate, Jordan, who was never cut from his high school team – he was, in fact, placed on junior varsity because they varsity team needed a center. For whatever reason, Jordan’s imagined slight about a story that never occurred in reality has become the myth that endures about the Bulls teams of the 1990s.

Scottie Pippen is the real under-recruited athlete. His is the story we should celebrate and tell our kids. He swallowed his pride and worked hard to make his way down an alternative path to attain his goals while Jordan hurled himself down his own path to greatness by overcoming obstacles which didn’t actually exist.

Pippen is the type of athlete we would have loved to have on College Prospect Network. He is the type of person and player that inspired us to build a site to help the kids who deserve the help and the college programs who are open-minded enough to give them a shot. These players are out there and they will help a team on some level, whether it be NAIA, JUCO, Division II or Division I.

All they need is a chance like the one Scottie Pippen’s coach gave him when he picked up the phone and called the Central Arkansas coach and asked him to give Pippen a look, as a favor.