I was completely unaware of how difficult the college recruiting process for football was. In my blithely ignorance, I believed that college coaches just heard about good football players through the grapevine. When the time was right (somewhere around junior or senior year, I imagined) the coaches would fly out, watch a player play and offer him a scholarship. But that is not the case in the slightest, Coach Kevin Fitzgerald from PrepChamps told me.

“High school coaches will send in a film of a player or if a [college] coach hears about a player, he’ll call that high school coach and ask for some film on him,” explained Coach Fitzgerald. “You can ask any college coach. When they walk into any high school coach’s office, they have hundreds and hundreds of DVDs stacked up that they’re mailing to colleges.”

So what happens if you have a less than active high school coach or your reel of career highlights just doesn’t show all of your potential? That’s where combines and PrepChamps come in. “What we do is cut out all of that middle stuff. If that coach adds his player onto PrepChamps, when that college coach calls him up, he can say, ‘Coach Johnson, get onto PrepChamps and look up my player.’ Here’s his video and if he went to the PrepChamps combine, you can also watch his combine video.”

Wow, that sounds so much easier. But what is a combine exactly and why is it necessary to have a good combine? A combine is a series of six tests that display strength, speed and agility. “There are speed tests, which are your 40, your L drill and your pro agility,” Coach explained. “Then there are your strength tests, which are your bench presses, [then] there’s vertical jump and the broad jump. Those are power tests. They tell a coach what kind of lower body power you have. The coaches want a well-rounded player.” Combines are used in every NFL draft and as a strength and conditioning coach, Fitzgerald was in charge of organizing the NFL combine for Florida State University so he is well versed in the area, as well as a respected resource for college coaches. Combines have only recently been introduced at the high school level and they are used to help colleges seek out those scholarship worthy athletes.

“When I was a high school athlete, there weren’t really high school combines out there,” said Coach Fitzgerald. “I grew up in Southwest Florida. Florida is a huge recruiting state, but the problem for me was that I was in a little pocket of Florida that was a retirement community. Most of the colleges never even came around my town.” After serving as a strength and conditioning coach for Florida State, University of Notre Dame and Vanderbilt University, he noticed that a lot of the “blue chip athletes” his school had worked so hard to recruit were not much better than the boys he grew up playing football with in Southwest Florida.

“There are so many players out there. There are so many different places that coaches can recruit from that a lot of players just never get seen,” explained Coach Fitzgerald. “So at PrepChamps, we videotape all of our combines and put it up for free on the web. It’s just a way for the coaches to find you. If they like what they see, then they’re going to look at your highlight clips. Then if they like what they see from your highlight clips, then they’re going to see your whole game films. That’s how the process works. We’re just hopefully helping the Student-Athletes to get recognized and get recruited.”

According to Coach Fitzgerald, combines are not something that can just be run in your backyard or by your local high school coach. “I can’t tell you how many times when I was [at] Florida State, Notre Dame or Vanderbilt, that we were told this player coming in was a 4.28 40 and then we timed him ourselves and he’d be a 4.65 guy,” stated Coach Fitzgerald. “With out combines, you never really know what you’re getting. You’re basically taking the word of the high school coach, who, of course, wants to push his player. That’s the benefit for the colleges of the combine.”

There are many things that an athlete can do to help improve their combine score. Coach Fitzgerald first suggests that athletes attend as many combines as they can. In addition, if a high school program is not adequately preparing you for the combine, there are companies, such as D1 Sports Training, that can help an athlete better prepare. “As Coach [Lou] Holtz used to say, ‘Perfect practice makes perfect,’” Coach Fitzgerald explained. “At Florida State, Notre Dame and Vanderbilt, we used to incorporate a lot of these drills into our conditioning work, into our speed work. This is what I tell a lot of these high school coaches. A lot of these drills you can use as a condition and speed improvement. The more and more you do it correctly, the better your times get and the better you are at doing them.”

A perfect combine does not absolutely guarantee you a spot in a Division I school, nor does a bad combine immediately disqualify you. “Either you can play football or you can’t,” said Coach Fitzgerald matter-of-factly. “A combine isn’t going to kill a player’s chances because a college coach knows if you are a good football player or not. Basically it’s going to help them evaluate who the better athlete is that they’re trying to recruit. If I’m a college coach and I have two players that I like evenly, then what I would go to is the next step, which is the combine. It can really help a lot of players out. If you’re not a good football player, a good combine isn’t going to all of sudden get you a scholarship. If you are a good football player, a combine isn’t going to take a scholarship away from you. If you’re a good football player, there is a scholarship out there for you.”