Courtney Cronin

The Clarion-Ledger

In three days, Nigel Knott will be one step closer to playing college football. The four-star Germantown cornerback is among a handful of Mississippi’s Division I prospects who will sign a letter of intent on Wednesday’s national signing day, choosing from a long list of in-state and national powers.

At the same time, former Callaway safety Dwayne Pickett Jr. will have likely wrapped up a workout at Hinds Community College, hoping to one day earn his dream offer from a Power 5program. Meanwhile, Madison-Ridgeland Academy slot receiver Karter Bounds is enjoying the final few months of his senior year, having hung up his cleats for a final time months ago.

At first glance the three have little in common, other than sharing a birth year and their sport of choice. But while their immediate futures may be very different, all three had the same goal — to play college football — and their parents quickly realized that little about the recruiting process comes free. Parents can spend thousands of dollars traveling to the various combines and camps hoping that their child will perform well enough to be noticed.

“If I had of known, I wouldn’t have gave that kid a football,” said Sabrina Givens, Knott’s mother, with a laugh. “We would’ve took up something else. I don’t know, maybe he could’ve collected baseball cards?”

Just because you spend money and put yourself in the position to be recruited, there’s no guarantee you will. But the possibility of a major payout in the form of a scholarship is enough to make many every year choose to go that route.

“In my mind, it’s a small investment for a bigger picture,” Dwayne K. Pickett Sr. said. “A free college tuition and no student loans are like a gift.”

***

There’s an old mantra that goes something like, ‘If you’re good enough to play at the next level, colleges will find you.’

Pickett Jr.’s father doesn’t buy that.

“That’s absolutely not true,” Pickett said. “You don’t just get found on a 4.3 (second) 40 (yard dash). You went somewhere and ran one.”

Thanks to the rise of social media, it’s easier than ever for a recruit to post his highlight film on Twitter, Facebook and Hudl (an online database for teams and individuals) and market himself as a prospect. But for most, that isn’t enough to get recruited.

It’s no secret that the power and influence the four main recruiting services (247Sports, ESPN, Rivals and Scout) have in getting a prospect’s name out there with player profiles and star rankings make getting recruited easier for some. But with so many prospects trying to grab attention from college programs, often times having a fast 40-yard dash time, a high vertical leap and the ideal height and weight is what separates the recruits who garner offers versus those who don’t. They’re known as the “measurables,” and they matter to college coaches the same way the highlight film does.

The camp circuit has become a critical part of the recruiting process, and most recruits begin working out and recording measurables at camps, combines and showcases during the summers leading into their sophomore and junior years.

“If you’re a prospect trying to find your name and your niche, the more camps you go to is a good thing,” ESPN national scouting coordinator Craig Haubert said. “Extra exposure doesn’t hurt.”

Often times for elite athletes whose measurables are off the charts, one showing at a camp can lead to an abundance of offers. That was the case for Knott, whose list of scholarship offers includes nearly 30 schools.

Givens’ life changed the summer of Knott’s junior year when he became active on the camp circuit. Givens always knew her son was fast and that’s what caught the eyes of coaches early on. During the course of one weekend in 2014, Knott went to Southern Miss, Ole Miss and Auburn camps, each time bettering what he had just done.

“I was shocked,” Givens said. “He ran a good time at Ole Miss and then ran faster and jumped higher at Auburn. The players were screaming and the coaches were really impressed with him. I looked over at his grandma, she looked over at me and I looked over at his dad and was like, oh my goodness, here we go. Nigel was looking at me like, 'yeah mom, we’re going to do this.' My whole life changed right there. I had to start catering around to him.”

Word of Knott’s camp performances got around as the offers poured in for the budding Germantown star. Each camp he attended, he was already on someone’s radar. That momentum never died down.

That wasn’t the case for Bounds, a 5-foot-8, 170-pound receiver. No one in his family had gone through the process of trying to secure a college football scholarship, but his mother, Connie, quickly learned that camps and 7-on-7 were a key component to getting her son the exposure he needed.

But even she knew the limitations her son’s height posed from the start.

“Recruiting is sexy,” Connie said. “You’ve got all these people that are looking at you and talking to you as a 16- and 17-year-old kid. They all think they’re going D-I and they’re all not.”

Still, Connie supported her son’s decision and they mapped out an entire summer’s worth of trips that included stops at 15 to 20 different camps and 7-on-7 tournaments with his Mississippi Grind team (which included star prospects like Jamal Peters and Leo Lewis) during the summer of his junior year. He made the all-combine team at a camp in Memphis and later earned MVP honors at the NUC Sports Premier Football Showcase in Atlanta during the spring of 2014, which made Karter’s dreams feel more attainable.

“That kind of fueled his desire,” Connie said. “He thought, OK, maybe this isn’t as far-fetched as I think. Maybe if I try a little bit harder, I can get that one offer if somebody will just give me a chance.”

***

Camps are where the cost of recruiting kicks in, but it’s not really the camps themselves that are all that expensive.

The Boundses never paid more than $50 for any of the camps he attended at Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Southern Miss, Texas Tech, Duke or any other college. Even local unaffiliated camps like the Varsity Preps Elite Camp that took place at Hinds in 2015 do not cost prospects more than $20. Steve Robertson of Mississippi State’s Scout.com website wanted to give under-recruited kids an opportunity to showcase their talents when he started a series of free combines in 2008.

“Ideally it’s about giving kids the ability to showcase themselves and get some objective third-party measurables that are collected and then distributed to colleges for free,” Robertson said. “As far as charging kids, I’ve always felt that some of that is exploitation. Guys like (four-star Starkville wide receiver) A.J. Brown don’t need the combine. It’s that kid out there that’s kind of the middle-of-the-road type guy. Maybe he’s a really good high school football player. Maybe he’s been under exposed, and this is an opportunity to give that guy a platform.”

The only cost for recruits attending Robertson’s camp is the money it takes to travel there and back. But gas, hotels and food adds up: Bounds attended one of the Miss-Lou All-American combines as a junior along with others that were within driving distance and a few that were a plane ride away.

“That summer he would go to a Friday night camp, a Saturday camp and then a Sunday camp,” Connie said. “I would rent a car and he would sleep the whole time and I would drive.”

Givens was also familiar with the middle-of-the-night drives to take her son from one camp to the next. As his notoriety skyrocketed, Knott went from driving to camps at Mississippi State and Ole Miss to being flown to Oregon on Nike’s dime for The Opening last summer.

Like Bounds, Givens didn’t let her son go to these camps and combines alone. While Knott’s travel and expenses were paid for to The Opening and later to the Under Armour All-America Game in December, Givens and other members of their family were responsible for fronting their own travel costs if they wanted to go with him.

“I know for a fact that when we started this, we spent about $9,000 on travel to camps and that was just going into his 11th-grade year,” Givens said. “In the end, with everything, you’re looking at about close to $15-20,000.”

Givens says she and her son have traveled to more than 30 events in the past two years. Bounds ballparks a similar figure for the cost it took her son to get recruited.

“Probably college tuition,” Connie said. “You do what you choose to do, and you don’t have to go to every camp. We were very fortunate that we could give him what he wanted at the time. We realize not everybody can do that.”

As the travel costs add up, it brings up the question of which camps are really worth the cost. While camps like the NUC Sports Premiere Football Showcases claim on their website that “90 percent of athletes that compete in the regional NUC Sports Five Star and finish in the top five have gone on to receive scholarships,” Haubert believes getting in front of college coaches is the best use of a prospect and his family’s time and resources.

“It’s more important for prospects to go to team camps,” Haubert said. “Go to an Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Alabama or Southern Miss camp. Find a program that interests you and that you have a legit chance at and work out at those camps. Ultimately that’s what’s most important. We may grade someone a certain way, 247(Sports) may grade somebody a certain way, but we don’t hand out scholarships. Coaches do that.”

Said Givens in retrospect: “The camps work and help, but I don’t think we would have done every last one of them. I think we would’ve just gone to the (U.S.) Army combine, the Nike one and of course the local schools here in the state of Mississippi; that comes first. Alabama is right around the corner, too. Those camps were worth it.”

***

Other costs of potentially getting recruited are separate from the camp circuit.

Several third party companies have made a profit in claiming to help athletes get recruited, and none has been more lucrative than the National Collegiate Scouting Association. Players set up a recruiting profile with their height, weight and other measurables which NCSA claims has led to more than 83,000 college commitments in more than 15 different men’s and women’s sports.

“A couple of years ago, the NCSA was up close to $50 million in yearly revenue,” said Galen Clavio, an associate professor of sports media at Indiana University. “Whether you’re talking about the camp system or the web-based system, you’re sort of talking about the same thing. We’re going to take your money and promise you that your kid is going to have a better opportunity to get recognized. That doesn’t necessarily track to what their actual potential is as a college football player.”

Pickett Jr. is what some consider a late bloomer. While he traveled the camp circuit like Bounds and Knott, the former Callaway safety didn’t really get active into his recruitment until his senior year.

“We knew he could play college ball, but it didn’t become a reality until his 10th-grade year. But we didn’t know what to do,” Pickett Sr. said. “Had I know the process then, I would’ve had him at camps all the time.”

Pickett’s ability on the field and in camps earned him offers from SWAC programs like Jackson State, Alcorn State and Texas Southern as well as a handful of junior colleges. But the 6-foot-1, 185-pounder didn’t want to stop until he achieved an offer from a high-major Division I program.

Often times a school may want to offer a prospect but is on the fence for a number of different reasons. If the player didn’t work out at the school’s camp or the coaches haven’t seen him up close, many times the player will be asked to visit campus on his own dime before an offer is extended.

That was the case with Purdue and Pickett. West Lafayette, Indiana, is a flight away from Pickett’s home in Mississippi, and his father wasn’t going to send him nearly 1,000 miles away for a campus tour and to watch the Boilermakers play Virginia Tech without the potential for something more than a ticket to the game.

“They made it like he was a priority on their list. That’s why he went up,” Pickett Sr. said. “I always ask them or (Callaway) Coach (Patrick) Austin will ask them if they’re serious about the possibility of an offer. Because he was kind of a late bloomer, schools got on him late. Any time they said they were serious, he was going to be there.”

By the end of his son’s two years of being recruited in high school, Pickett estimates he spent between $7,000-$8,000 in recruiting costs. It’s a small price to pay, in his mind, for a college education, but brings a bigger question to the table about the players whose families can’t afford to go through the financially-rigorous process.

“I think you’re leaving a lot of great athletes on the table that could never afford to go places that Dwayne and other kids have been,” Pickett Sr. said. “People say you don’t have to go (to camps and colleges) to be seen, but the kids that are being seen end up being those elite guys.”

***

In the end, for these three, what was supposed to happen did. Knott is clearly the most talented and has had the most opportunities. Pickett Jr. may one day end up at a Power 5 school, but it’ll take time. And no matter how much he wanted it, Bounds’ size proved to be too much to overcome. He’ll be a student at Mississippi State in the fall.

That does not mean there are regrets about the money and time spent chasing the dream. The parents see fine with how it all played out.

“(Bounds) told us that he wants to leave the game loving it,” Connie said. “We weren’t devastated. From a mother’s standpoint, I don’t think I could ever put a price tag on this process. … It had been a year and a half (after Karter began driving himself) that he and I spent quality time in the car together having car conversation. That felt more valuable to me than the price of any hotel, rental car or camp. I don’t regret any of it. Not one bit.”

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Contact Courtney Cronin at (601) 961-7091 or ccronin@jackson.gannett.com. Follow @CourtneyRCronin on Twitter.