Listen up, athletes, and take charge of your future

Keith Culberson sits in an office room on the second level of the Libertyville Sports Complex, and any kid in the vicinity who's bouncing a ball or aiming one, or dreaming of doing it on the college level, should listen up.

Culberson, who once coached high school athletes and essentially still does, easily grabs your attention with his authoritative voice and knowledge about the game of college recruiting.

He's been playing it since he was a naive high school athlete himself.

A three-sport athlete at Arlington High School more than 40 years ago, he had his sights set on playing football at the next level. When college coaches started contacting him, the running back embraced the contact and ran with it.

"Just like with a lot of kids, if you put on a helmet and shoulder pads, you're going to get letters (from colleges) in football," Culberson says. "But you don't know what it means. Most of it turns into a whole lot of nothing. My impression was that if they sent me a letter, they must want me on their team."

Not necessarily.

While Culberson wound up accepting a partial football scholarship offer from a small college about nine hours from home, the fit wasn't right. For a variety of reasons, he transferred to Illinois State, where he realized he wasn't good enough to play.

So much for being a college football player.

The son of a head coach, Culberson coached sophomore football and baseball at Libertyville High School for 16 years. He also taught driver and physical education, before leaving around 1990 and joining College Prospects of America.

Today, he's an area director who handles Lake and DuPage counties as well as northern Cook for CPOA, which promotes itself at www.cpoa.com as "the most respected sports marketing service for high school student-athletes throughout the world." WeSCOUTathletes.com is CPOA's Chicago area affiliate.

While there are other companies that are in the same business of trying to market high school athletes to college coaches, there seems to be a shared philosophy.

Play the recruiting game right, and you should win - scholarship dollars.

"I tell parents, the worst thing to do is to do nothing," Culberson says. "Don't expect the high school coach to do it. That's unfair. Some do, most don't. And that's not a knock on them. They're teaching all day. Most of them are coaching more than one sport. They have families. They got private lives."

Culberson is full of advice and messages.

Kids, put the ball on your hip and perk your ears.

"It's the same process as a job search," Culberson says of securing scholarship money. "When you graduate from college, you don't go home and sit by the phone and wait for it to ring to get a job. You market, you network, you do everything you can to make contacts with the people who can possibly hire you.

"But," he adds, "just because you get a job interview, that doesn't mean you got the job. So just because you get recruited, that doesn't mean you're going to get the offer."

That's where it helps to have CPOA as a teammate. For a varying fee starting at about $1,500, the company aims to give the student-athlete who's not a sure Division-I prospect what Culberson calls "massive exposure" to college coaches all over the map.

CPOA believes it separates itself from the competition by mailing tangible information. College coaches receive from them envelopes - not just e-mails or voice-mails - containing what essentially amounts to a player's resume. The information includes the student-athlete's address, phone number, athletic and academic achievements and references.

"Kids don't realize how important (exposure) is," Culberson says. "I don't care how good you are. If a coach doesn't know who you are, he can't recruit you."

Just what parents need: More paperwork.

CPOA provides guidance there, too.

"We got a lot of knowledge now about the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) forms, financial aid, the steps you need to take and, really, how to develop leverage," Culberson says, "because everything is negotiable."

The reality is, colleges need bodies. A small-college football coach once told Culberson that his administration didn't care if he won one game all season, as long as he brought in "X" number of students.

"It's exactly like the airlines," Culberson says. "A discounted seat beats an empty seat."

For the student-athlete, the more scholarship offers or potential ones, the more leverage he or she has. Multiple offers usually lead to a counter offer from a school.

Dave Warner knows what CPOA did for him and now is training to work for the company.

A former high school shortstop and leadoff hitter for Morton West, he hooked up with CPOA following his junior year. He had caught Culberson's attention at Stevenson High School's showcase tournament.

"I had good high school numbers, but I wasn't getting looked at by anybody," Warner says. "I was kind of getting frustrated and didn't know what to do."

In just a few months, he was suddenly on the radar of several college coaches.

"I think I went from having one or two coaches calling me to, by the middle of my senior year, 12-13 coaches," he says.

He finally accepted an offer from Aurora University. He says by his senior year he was paying only $7,000 (the normal cost would be $24,000-25,000) and was playing on a winning team.

"He got what he deserved," says Culberson, proudly. "Is he going to play pro ball? No. Is he a good athlete? You're darn right he is. Is he going to play for Arizona State? No. But most kids aren't going to play at that level."

Culberson has a message, too, for student-athletes who play club sports. While there may be benefits to it, it does not guarantee a scholarship.

"Don't expect playing club sports to be your answer," Culberson says. "Think of the thousands, millions of dollars spent playing club soccer in this area.

"And a handful of kids take part in national signing date?

"I tell people, 'Don't do one thing. Do everything.' "

Got it.

BEGIN_ATTRIBUTIONjaguilar@dailyherald.comEND_ATTRIBUTION