Put Me In, Coach: A Parent's Guide to Winning the Game of College Recruiting

PUT ME IN, COACH is an award winning, must-have guidebook for parents and their student-athletes who want to be recruited to compete in athletics at the college level. Because of limited roster spots, only a handful of high school athletes will play their sport competitively in college and even fewer will get NCAA or NAIA scholarships. For your child to be one of them, you need a game plan, and the earlier you start, the better. If you are the parent of a student-athlete who is better than most in high school athletics, but college coaches aren't lining up at your door, you will find PUT ME IN, COACH indispensable. Advice and personal observations from 40 college coaches will help you understand how to market your child so coaches take notice, how to get money from any school even those that don t give athletic scholarships, how to identify the colleges that are the right fit for your child, how to understand recruiting from the coaches point of view, and how to make the right impression and get the most out of campus visits. PUT ME IN, COACH has won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award and the Next Generation Indie Book Award, and was a finalist for the USA Best Books Award.

Laurie Richter’s foray into authorship happened quite unexpectedly. Mostly it was born out of a desire for a happy ending to her oldest son’s quest to play basketball in college. New to recruiting, Laurie was surprised at how few resources there were to guide them through the process. Having been in market research for many years, she tackled recruiting like a typical research project. She evaluated a range of schools and sports programs and questioned the many college coaches they came in contact with about every aspect of the college sports experience. The time and effort was well worth it as son Dylan now shoots hoops at Washington University in St. Louis. But along the recruiting trail, they heard too many stories with unhappy endings—the result of a lack of understanding about how recruiting really works. Penning Put Me In, Coach will undoubtedly set the stage for more happy endings among kids who want to play college sports at a school well-suited for them.Laurie received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Maryland in 1978 and went on to get an M.A. and Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. A spur-of -the moment job interview at a national psychology conference introduced her to a career path in market research with the Quaker Oats Company, where she stayed for ten years before striking out on her own with Consumer Voice, an agency she owned and operated for the next fourteen years, specializing in focus group research with Fortune 100 clients. Laurie, husband Jim, and son Brady live in Lincolnshire, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.