Santa Paula woman starts free web site for athletes
April 22, 2011
Sports
Vanessa White of Santa Paula recently started up a website to help connect high school athletes with college coaches.
It’s called collegesportsrecruitingnow.com and the services it offers are free to students. She said she got the idea to start the website during her doctoral dissertation for a degree in sport administration at the University of Northern California. “My focus was on technology and recruiting,” she said. “How does this new technology of websites and having information on a website affect a women’s basketball program in recruiting.”
She noted that as part of that research she discovered online recruiting services. “As I started looking at them they all were charging the kids,” White said. This brought back memories of her time at Newbury Park High School in the 1980s when, at that time, every sport you played you had to pay $100 just to participate in the sport.
She said that a lot of recruiting websites she looked at appeared to be free until you read the fine print. “I just thought there’s got to be a way you could still do this, where it’s free for the kids and you could still make money and have it run as your business,” she added. She decided that a site could be free for the kids and the college coaches could be charged to have access.
Her original website was only for girls’ sports, volleyball, basketball and softball. She said, “It was a very rudimentary version. At the time the technology wasn’t as advanced as it is now.” Because she wanted to finish her doctorate, she let the site go. In 2006 she relocated to Ventura and started thinking about the website again. She also decided the new site would cover all sports.
She charges coaches $99 a year, per sport. A coach can add an additional sport for $50. While trying to get her website off the ground, she’s offering the service free for coaches through this summer. She said summer time is the big time for camps and clinics.
