Social Wednesday aside, I did actually have something SMM-related to write about today. It’s one of those complete coincidences that you’ll think I’ve made up. I discovered this gem on a popular swimming blog, TimedFinals, this afternoon. The post recounts the latest trend in college athletics (that’s university sports for you foreign folk). More specifically, the post is about a website dealing in the recruiting of college athletes. Someone has taken the fine American tradition of scouting for talented, hard-working seventeen year old athletes and turned it into MySpace.
BeRecruited.com is a catalogue of high school kids who want to be recruited to college sports teams in the U.S. NCAA sport in America is a very big deal: I had my entire education, room, board, travel, and books paid for simply because I could swim, and swimming isn’t even a “money” sport. Basketball, football, and baseball bring in the bucks. However, for some weird reason that, even after four years, I never worked out, universities keep recruiting and funding athletes across a range of sports. But hey: just because I don’t get it doesn’t mean I’m complaining!
Of course, social media was going to catch up with college sport at one point or another. My sport already has an active forum and several prominent blogs. I’m sure web-savvy coaches are already using search engines and social networks to spy on their potential team members in the same way as do employers. However, with BeRecruited, seventeen and eighteen year olds are quite literally pitching themselves to the people who could fund, facilitate, and assist the next four years of their lives.
The site actually does far more than sell teenagers to universities: it features a jobs board (on a subdomain? Really?) where both high school and college sports jobs are posted. There is a rather cool blogs section where members can post entries and have these entries voted upon, Digg-style. The Videos and Testimonials sections have been put together well; the News section doesn’t appear to be branded in quite the same way as the rest of the site, but it’s still okay. The social voting system hasn’t yet taken off, but this isn’t saying it won’t. It turns out that almost all the content is on subdomains and I wonder why they did that… would http://www.berecruited.com/blogs not have done the job?
However, as TimedFinals’ Mike Gustafson highlights, the most intriguing thing about BeRecruited is the smorgasboard of young men and women who have created profiles at the site. There is something telling about the fact that the Athletes section is labeled profiles.berecruited.com… which is more important: their athletic ability, or their profiles’ presentation? Whoever developed the site knew a fair bit about social media, because the first thing you see upon entering the profiles / athletes section is “Today’s Most Popular.” The most popular athlete today, it turns out, is an aesthetically pleasing British girl whose athletic ability pales in comparison to her hotness. At this point, things become so blatantly familiar that it hurts.
I need not repeat everything that TimedFinals has already said about this interesting phenomenon aside from to briefly summarize: social media changes traditional interactions and practices. It allows quality to be assessed on a different scale. Think of the incredibly enlightening article at Reddit that received only 45 upmods, compared with the picture of a squirrel stuck in a bird-feeder that was upmodded over 400 times. That’s a real example, as of 7:40pm today, and it’s far better than anything I could have made up. The “Most Popular” list at BeRecruited is the front page of Digg, where the prettiest and shiniest things make it to the top and some of the more substantial entries remain below the fold.
Thankfully, specifying a sport elicits an alphabetically-ordered list rather than a Hot-or-Not-style contest. Even so, this is still a bit useless: coaches are usually after athletes of a certain ability rather than of a certain last name. I’m pretty certain that the site’s developers won’t find it too hard to refine search to include best performances, preferred events, and other metrics aside from photogenicness. The site would be infinitely more useful with such features. If I were in charge of the Athletes section, I would implement these search options immediately and replace the “Most Popular” section with the search interface. After all, the site’s main purpose is to help high schoolers “be recruited,” but it is incurring some bemused press.
One of TimedFinal’s points was that twenty-five percent of an athlete’s profile is dedicated to his or her pictures. Yes, pictures can be a relatively solid indication of a person’s professionalism, especially when they chose their pictures themselves. However, it seems that photos are playing too important of a role here. If it were my call, I’d allow only one picture and require far more information about a person’s sporting achievements. We may be talking about school kids here, but many of them have been working since long before their high school years with the hope of joining a college sports team, let alone having some or all of their education paid for. Their ability to take a good picture really isn’t that important.
As an aside, my introduction to the world of NCAA swimming defies SEO logic. My name would barely show up in search engines for race results and my team had no website. I may be young, but not even MySpace was around at the time I was finishing high school. I had a very juvenile Hotmail account. Yes, I remember what it was called. No, I’m not telling you, as it’s embarrassing. Contacting me via the Internet was virtually impossible. I’m not sure what I did with my time. However, upon seeing a result of mine from the New Zealand championships in 2001, the assistant coach at Washington State University somehow tracked down my coach’s email address. She can’t remember how, but she must have been pretty good with a search engine.
To think of how carefully we craft, present, and market ourselves and our talents today, it’s incredible that I’m not still stuck in Napier, New Zealand, toiling away by myself in the town’s God-awful aquatic centre. The people who have created profiles at BeRecruited have a far better chance of being picked up than I did, and I’d love to see the site become a truly invaluable resource. My advice to them would be to lose the photos (aside from a profile picture, maybe), invest in some awesome developers to create a stellar search engine, and possibly promote the hell out of the Blogs section. After all, we’re talking about college athletes here: it would be nice to know which ones won’t drop out due to not being able to write!
I feel like something has come full circle when I see my previous existence as a college swimmer meet up with what I do now. My peers and I not only didn’t do this type of online marketing six years ago, but we wouldn’t have had the resources to do so if we’d thought about it. The most we could hope for was that a good score or race result would show up in a relatively good position when someone searched for our names.
I feel kind of old now. Stop laughing!
