Keeping score

At 6 feet 7 and 275 pounds, Norwood High School junior lineman Kyle Crowley isn't about to be overlooked by college recruiters waving athletic scholarships.

The same cannot be said for his schoolmate, sophomore Jennifer Canniff. Standing elbow-high to Crowley, the wiry soccer player barely outweighs one of his redwood-size legs.

"It's not easy getting noticed," said Canniff, who, like Crowley, dreams of playing for a Division 1 school on an athletic scholarship. "I want colleges to know what I can do."

In an effort toward such self-promotion, Canniff recently joined more than 50 local high school athletes for a battery of tests used to determine athletic ability. Held in the Norwood High School gymnasium, the tests including measurements of such skills as speed, jumping, body strength, and the ability to use a joystick to keep a dot on a computer screen inside a darting circle. The event was hosted by Athletic IQ, a start-up Canton-based website with the lofty business plan of eventually tracking more than a million high school athletes coast to coast using standardized testing. Company officials say they believe their site will help college recruiters find the perfect athletic match for their schools.

"Who knows? Maybe colleges will use this to notice me," Canniff said.

With roughly 2,800 four-year colleges looking annually to fill out their athletic scholarship quotas, the jousting for thousands of high school student-athletes and their parents can be intense, expensive, and nerve-racking. What parent doesn't dream of having his or her son or daughter be the apple of some college recruiter's eye? At many Division 1 colleges, a student-athlete committing to a full four-year athletic scholarship is akin to signing a $130,000 contract. Even a "financial package" offered from a Division 3 school -- where athletic scholarships are not available -- can mean savings of $30,000 to $50,000 for students and their families.

"I can see where something like this helps," said the heavily recruited Crowley (Boston College, Iowa, Syracuse), who took the Athletic IQ tests along with Canniff, if only for curiosity's sake. "Anything to get your name out there."

The Internet lists hundreds of businesses that promote high school athletes to colleges. AIQ's chief executive officer, Mark Butts, said that while many are reputable, instances have occurred in which high school students and their families got bilked out of thousands of dollars by companies or individuals promising athletic scholarships.

"I don't have exact names, but they're out there," Butts said. "They'll ask a family for $1,000 or $2,000 with a promise of a four-year athletic scholarship for their kid. They'll make a quick video using a kid's highlights borrowed from a high school. Many times they come through. But there are times when it proves a bad match -- where a kid from the Northeast, let's say, ends up in a small school in Alabama where he or she hates playing and living. To the recruiter, it's no big deal. They've got their money. To the kid and their family, where you live and play for the next four years is very important."

And even when those scholarship promises were kept, Butts said, what the college coach needed or wanted and what the student-athlete was able to deliver are often two different things. Many, if not most, resumes of high school athletes, he said, are built using test results either taken in a haphazard way or provided by the athletes or their coaches themselves.

"In most cases, student-athletes get recruited by colleges based on what they can provide the college," Butts said. "Many times those results for something like speed and jumping come from a camp where the counselor was holding a stopwatch or measuring where they thought the athlete jumped up and touched. Other times it comes from stats provided by the athlete or the coach or their high school. That leaves too much room for exaggeration and human error.

"As the old saying in recruiting goes: If the height of a player is reported by the parents, subtract an inch; if it's reported by the coach, subtract 2 inches."

Kimberly Eberl, spokeswoman for the Chicago-based National Collegiate Scouting Association, agreed that shady recruiting practices exist. But companies like hers, she said, treat college recruitment as a serious business.

"We represent 30 sports, from football to cross-country to lacrosse," she said. "We have a list of 35,000 college coaches to whom we send athlete profiles. We follow all NCAA guidelines and rules. We do the best we can to match up student-athletes with the proper college sports program."

Currently, 10,000 high school athletes have their results posted with her firm, she said. Those results are taken from various college-sponsored camps and from the athletes themselves. "We ask them to list their athletic accomplishments and awards," Eberl said.

But that's where the trouble could begin, AIQ vice president Jeremy Jaffe said. Too often, college recruiters don't take the time to check whether a student-athlete's list of accomplishments is exact or embellished. Questions of accuracy, he said, spill over into test results.

"You've got a kid who claims he can run a certain distance in a certain time," Jaffe said. "But that's often taken by somebody holding a stopwatch. Human errors happen."

AIQ uses computerized tracking for all seven of its tests. From flexibility to vertical, from foot speed to hand-eye coordination, everything is measured by computers and calibrated radar, Jaffe said.

AIQ's program was developed by former National Football League player Randy Tyson, a former scout for the then-Los Angeles (now St. Louis) Rams who fashioned it around the NFL scouting combine held yearly in Indianapolis.

"What I found back in my scouting days is that there wasn't a lot of accurate record-keeping at the college levels for scouts in the NFL to use," said Tyson, a 66-year-old Rhode Island resident. "You can imagine how inaccurate high school record-keeping is, especially if the results are coming from the athlete. I wanted to change that and make results of testing for gross and fine motor skills a standard thing."

Tyson said he tinkered with equipment provided him by connections he said he had with various universities across the nation. "I'd get equipment and play around with it to make it work for what I wanted," he said. Eventually he narrowed his list of tests to seven -- agility, body composition, flexibility, hand-eye coordination, speed, upper-body power, and vertical jump.

"These are the areas that can best gauge how an athlete is made up for most common sports," he said. "And what AIQ is doing by traveling around to high schools and administering the tests in a computerized manner is making sure the numbers come in standard form."

That means honest results, said AIQ vice president Keith Kenyon, a former high school athletic director in Rhode Island.

"All we promise is valid data," Kenyon said. "We don't promise athletic scholarships. We don't work for colleges or the student-athletes. We're an independent third party. We only promise accurate results."

And those could save colleges and universities hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on a promising student-athlete, said Kevin Leighton, baseball coach at Manhattan College in New York City.

"If I'm after a high school player for my team, I need to know what I'm reading is accurate," said Leighton, who said he firmly backs AIQ's standard testing form. "Accuracy is everything."

According to Jaffe, AIQ, like the Chicago-based National Collegiate Scouting Association, will make room for an athlete's own three-minute video so coaches can see the player in action. AIQ also provides the athlete's grades and SAT scores for those schools with higher admission standards.

"If a college coach taps into us and sees an athlete he or she might be interested in based on how they scored in all their tests and their grades," Jaffe said, "they can contact us and we'll contact the student-athlete's family and let them know someone is interested. From there, we let the coach know and set up an interview."

For now, to help build up its data base, AIQ is waiving its fees. Eventually, athletes will pay $50 for the test and $49 to keep their results posted for a year. The Scouting Association charges its clients $100 per month.

Canniff, who scored above average for her age group in sprinting but below average in upper body strength, said she believes it could prove money well spent for athletes like her who don't always have their names in the sports headlines.

"At the very least, I can look at all the results and know what I need to do to get better," she said. "Something like this is a great idea."

Robert Carroll can be reached at rcarroll@globe.com.