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For original article, visit this address---> http://www.post-trib.com/sports/1605974,col-laze-0604.article
June 4, 2009
BY MARK LAZERUS Post-Tribune sports editor
The cruel irony of college recruiting is that if your family desperately needs scholarship money, you probably won't get any. And if your family is wealthy enough to afford college, you just might. Because it costs money to get money.
High schoolers travel to camps throughout the Midwest, criss-cross the country on travel teams and shell out $1,000 or so to a recruiting service that may or may not do the legwork for you.
"I was a victim of one of those recruiting services," says Rensselaer grad Jake Chapman. "I was a left-handed pitcher who threw in the mid-to-high 80s and didn't get a single offer because I sat back and thought this service was doing it for me."
Chapman was lucky -- he was good enough to make it on his own, going to St. Joseph's College and playing eight years of pro ball, reaching Triple-A with the Royals, Expos and Red Sox.
Now, he's gone into business to help kids get themselves recruited. Chapman, along with current Phillies reliever Chad Durbin, has created ShowcaseU.com , a site that helps baseball recruits and recruiters alike.
And Chapman's coming to Portage High on June 16 to hold a "video combine." Players can sign up and have a highlight reel of them hitting, fielding or pitching put together and posted online. The site also will clock pitchers on a radar gun and time players in the 60-yard dash.
It's not free, of course. Chapman is running a business here. It's not quite $1,000, but it's still a major chunk of change at $299 -- $99 to sign up for the site, $200 for the video, which will be outsourced to a professional videographer.
But if a kid wants to skip the camp and still use the site, he can sign up for $99 -- "If you're not willing to invest $99 into your college career, why bother?" says Chapman -- and create his own player profile on the site. He can upload his stats, his grades, his own highlight videos, a list of schools he's interested in -- whatever he thinks will help him get noticed. He also gets access to contact information and admissions details for just about every college with a baseball program in the country -- Division I-III, NAIA, junior colleges, even bible colleges for those who want to enter the ministry and work on their split-finger.
Meanwhile, all those coaches, whether they want one or not, was sent a free log-in to the site.
"Let's say IU needs a lefty for their 2012 class," says Portage coach Tim Pirowski, a former teammate of Chapman's at St. Joseph's. "IU's coach can type in 'at least 5-foot-11, a lefty, can throw at least 80, has a 3.2 GPA or higher, and at least a certain SAT score.' He hits 'enter' and every single person in the nation (that has signed up) and hits that profile pops up."
The site (which is about to launch a softball version, too) is obviously more useful to smaller schools -- such as Purdue Cal, IU-Northwest and St. Joseph's. Schools that don't have the budget nor the time to snoop around the Midwest looking for diamonds in the rough. If Purdue wants to find itself a left-handed pitcher, chances are, Purdue will do it on its own.
But for those borderline kids? Those who want to play somewhere but don't have the money nor the inclination to spend a summer gallivanting about the country trying to get noticed by a small school? Well, it's still an uphill battle, but it's something. It's a chance.
The small-school kids, the poorer kids, the less-talented kids will always be at a disadvantage when it comes to recruiting. The way Chapman sees it, they just have to work even harder to make it happen on their own.
"With the Internet, I believe recruiting has changed," he says. "It's up to the player now."
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