A disk full of dreams

Georgetown's Megan O'Connor has all the accolades you would expect for a top high school athlete. The junior is a three-time Cape Ann League all-league selection in softball and a two-time honoree in basketball. On the hardwood, she led her team in scoring (18.4) and rebounds (12) this season. But in the highly competitive world of college recruiting, O'Connor's impressive resume is commonplace. To attract the attention of college recruiters, O'Connor needs an edge, a way to recruit the recruiters.

She thinks she found that edge with the Danvers-based At First Glance Corporation. Capitalizing on the competition for college scholarships, At First Glance is catering to prospects like O'Connor, helping them create computerized resumes on CD-ROMs that they can send to college coaches across the country. The baseball card-sized disks, which feature video of the athlete in action, newspaper articles about their play, personal interviews, and academic and biographical information, are designed to replace both the tapes and paper resumes that high school hopefuls have traditionally sent to college coaches.

"The whole [compact] disk thing is different," said O'Connor. "I hadn't heard of anything like this. It is so much easier than making a tape. You just put it in the computer and you see all the stats and stuff."

The company is the brainchild of 34-year-old former Newburyport baseball and basketball star Jeff LaFrance. LaFrance, who worked as a baseball coach at Newburyport High and coached both baseball and basketball at Georgetown Middle-High School, launched At First Glance in January. The company currently has eight clients who pay $900 for the disks in addition to personal instruction and advice about the recruiting process. The athlete's profile is also in a database on the company's website -- www.atfirstglancecorp.com -- where it can be viewed by college coaches.

"I look through my recruiting process and I got a bad deal," said LaFrance, who played baseball at Division 2 College of Boca Raton, now known as Lynn University. "I wanted to come up with a creative way to streamline the recruiting process."

According to David Galehouse, coauthor of a book about the college recruiting process, "The Making of the Student-Athlete: Succeeding in the College Selection, Application and Recruiting Process," and operator of www.varsityedge.com, a website that provides free recruiting tips, there are hundreds of recruiting services nationwide. The number is not tracked by the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association.

The material on the CD usually comes from the client, with parents providing the video and the athlete providing the company with biographical information and a list of athletic accomplishments. At First Glance offers the disks for athletes in 18 sports, including cheerleading.

LaFrance said that the disks, help lower-level -- Division 2 or Division 3 -- prospects break down the geographic barriers that can prevent them from being recruited by the school of their choice. In O'Connor's case she is considering schools in warmer climates, but those schools don't usually mine tiny Georgetown for talent. But after At First Glance mailed her disk out to 30 schools, O'Connor was contacted by college recruiters at the University of California-Davis and Santa Clara (Calif.) University.

O'Connor doesn't think she would have drawn interest from those schools without At First Glance's help. "It gives you a chance to get into more schools than just those in New England," she said.

O'Connor's father, Kevin, said he looked at three other recruiting companies before settling a month ago on At First Glance.

Proactive parents such as Kevin O'Connor fuel At First Glance. LaFrance said that 25 years ago the demand for counsel in the college courting ritual wasn't as great. But with college costs escalating, parents now view plunking down $900 to improve their child's chances of earning an athletic scholarship as an investment -- with the potential for huge dividends.

That is why LaFrance has clients such as Triton Regional pitcher Jonathan Shepard of Salisbury. The 15-year-old sophomore, whose fastball already tops out at 85 miles per hour, is working with LaFrance in hopes of earning a Division 1 college scholarship.

But University of Connecticut men's baseball coach Jim Penders, whose 2003 recruiting class included Amesbury's Larry Day and Rich Sirois of Ipswich, cautioned parents and athletes against viewing any recruiting tool as a scholarship-procuring panacea.

"I think it's great for Division 2 or Division 3, where they have limited budgets. It fills a huge void," said Penders, who has seen the At First Glance disks. "For us it can be a great reference if we request it, but if we don't request it, it's not getting a ton of attention from us."

Tim Shea, the athletic director and head women's basketball coach at Salem State College, a Division 3 school that cannot offer athletic scholarships, said he still recommends that prospects or their parents contact coaches directly. "I put more stock into a letter, a phone call, or an e-mail than I do recruiting concerns," said Shea, who said he has not seen At First Glance's product, but has received similar electronic recruiting packages.

LaFrance said he is merely offering help, not guarantees. "I try to set realistic expectations. I'm not out to promise athletic scholarships."

To that end, he has enlisted local athletes, including former Ohio State basketball player Sean Connolly of Peabody and former University of Maine and NHL hockey player Bob Corkum of Salisbury, to help evaluate talent, and had his sales manager Tom L'Italien, a head coach at both Georgetown and Pentucket Regional, meet with more than 30 athletic directors in the region to explain his product and assure them that his goal is not to exploit high school athletes.

MIAA spokesperson Paul J. Wetzel said that L'Italien's status as both a high school coach and sales manager for At First Glance does not violate any of the state athletic association's rules. L'Italien said that to avoid a conflict of interest LaFrance handles any clients from Georgetown or Pentucket. "I don't cross that line," said L'Italien. "I don't take a kid from my teams and say come use our service."

"If I can help one person make their dream of playing college sports a reality, then I've done my job," said LaFrance.