Before sending his clients on college visits, recruiting guru Tom Elias of College Prospects of America, gives them a checklist. The document tells the recruit what to expect, what questions to ask and which answers to give. But more importantly, it tells him what the NCAA allows and what it does not.

“Because if a rule gets broken,” Elias said, “whether the college has dirt on its hands or not, the kid is the one who ultimately suffers.”

NCAA infractions on campus visits range from the picayune to the scandalous. Most can affect the eligibility of a college prospect.

Prospects must take steps to ensure their eligibility prior to the actual visit. Before Division I schools can invite a prospect on an official visit, he must provide the program with a copy of his high school transcript and standardized test scores. He also must register with the NCAA Eligibility Center.

Once on campus, recruits can receive only certain benefits – transportation, parking, food, lodging, athletic event tickets and $30 worth of entertainment a day. Anything above and beyond is considered an NCAA violation.

If the illegal benefit is $100 or less, the player will be ineligible from the time the program discovers the violation, until the player pays the amount of the benefit to the charity of his choice. If the illegal benefit is between $100 and $500, the player must pay and apply for NCAA reinstatement.

If a recruit takes an illegal benefit more than $500, the NCAA will rule him ineligible for part of the season – up to 30 percent if the benefit exceeds $1,000.

According to University of Cincinnati director of compliance Maggie McKinley, most infractions are small.

“Most are considered secondary violations,” she said. “It’s something that’s inadvertent and isolated. If it’s more blatant and a program is gaining a recruiting advantage and it’s repetitive, that’s when you start to raise a lot of red flags. That’s when you can be eleveated from a secondary to a major violation.”

That’s when the program itself can be sanctioned.

But there is a different set of recruiting rules for each of the NCAA’s four football divisions. And ultimately, the onus is on the recruit to know the different policies.

Simon Kenton coach Jeff Marksberry, whose current team has two players with Division I offers, points his players to the NCAA’s clearinghouse website and eligibility manual. When he sends them on visits, he hopes for the best.

“As a high school coach, I’m not with every kid on every visit,” Marksberry said. “You just have to kind of hope that the colleges are keeping up their end of the deal. At some high schools, they have six or seven Division I kids. You can’t keep up with who is going where and who is giving what to whom. You just have to put faith in the college coaches that they’re not going to do anything to potentially harm their program or a kid’s future.”

“It’s a very, very savvy move by a school like Ohio State,” said recruiting guru Tom Elias of College Prospects of America. “By inviting all these Mid-American Conference schools and other regional schools, they expand the audience that can see players. That means all the kids who aren’t necessarily Ohio State caliber still have a reason to go there.”

“To have a kid work out for a coach and see where he stacks up is good and fruitful. But kids sometimes think they’re going to get a scholarship when they go to a certain camp. Our expertise says there must be an ongoing dialogue and relationship between coach and kid long before the camp. So when the kid gets there, the coach is on the bubble, but he wants to see how he performs next to four kids who look just like him.

“When a kid just goes to the camp and nobody knows who the kid is – there’s been no dialogue – and they think they’re just going to dazzle everyone, that’s usually disappointing.”

– Tom Elias, College Prospects of America

Link to full article: Big camps feature smaller schools By Ryan Ernst • rernst@enquirer.com • July 2, 2009