Connecting High School Athletes and College Coaches with the Largest College Recruiting Service on the Web

Melissa Loyzer has spoken to U.S. recruiters vying to get the Hamilton swimmer interested in attending their colleges.

And not one of them has ever seen her 100-metre butterfly from the pool deck.

Loyzer, who swims for the Hamilton Aquatic Club at the senior level, has her grades, stats and some personal information posted on her beRecruited.com profile.

The 17-year-old is part of a growing number of young athletes logging on to recruiting websites to get their names out to college coaches.

Loyzer attends Westdale Secondary School and is one of 34 Hamilton athletes from 11 local high schools with profiles on beRecruited, one of a slew of websites available to athletes.

Takkle.com, another recruiter website, has 15 students from Westdale interested in marketing their football, badminton and rugby skills to colleges and universities.

For the Canadian players, the promise of a free ticket to college makes the appeal of these sites that much sweeter.

"Canada doesn't offer full sports scholarships," Loyzer says, explaining why she wants to swim south of the border.

"I can get to go to university for free."

She wants to study biology and has not yet picked a school, but she's eyeing the University of Nevada, University of Arkansas, and Texas A&M University.

Canadian high school athletes get visited by only a fraction of the U.S. recruiters their American counterparts do, so it's more important for them to get their names out there online, says Jeff Cravens, president of beRecruited.

"I think that what you find is football and men's basketball are well funded in getting out to places to recruit," he says, adding that the priority for American schools is to cover the 50 states and not Canada.

Corbin Browne, 15, plays on the junior and senior football teams at Sherwood Secondary School both as an offensive and defensive lineman.

He has a profile on beRecruited because, like Loyzer, he wants to study in the United States and doesn't think he has enough exposure to recruiters in Hamilton.

Once the senior season starts in the fall, Browne plans to update his profile with clips of his plays.

"I will put up videos because to be an offensive lineman you don't have stats, and videos are the only way scouts can look at you," Browne said.

Both Browne and Loyzer discovered the recruiting company through its Facebook application.

Loyzer doesn't use the social networking site's application, though, because all her Facebook friends would be able to see which coaches viewed her stats. Her beRecruited page is set to private and is only accessible to coaches.

Avi Stopper, founder of the soccer recruiting site CaptainU.com, said he restricts membership to the site to players and coaches to protect player information being broadcast to the general public. Takkle.com, though, has open profiles that anyone surfing the web can see.

"We feel that the information players are putting up there is for college coaches," Stopper said.

Once coaches are interested, they can contact players and recruit year-round.

Loyzer has received a slew of packages from different schools and is in regular e-mail conversation with a handful of recruiters.

She's reading about the different colleges for now. And she'll fill out questionnaires for the schools and send them back to recruiters before anyone gives her a concrete scholarship offer.

Loyzer still has another year at Westdale before she's off to college, so she's ahead of the game, Cravens says.

He said athletes should scope out college options before their final year of high school.

"The No. 1 piece of advice we get (from users) is to start early and make sure you're on the right track academically," Cravens says.