What this is

I am writing this down because I have now had four separate conversations in which someone assumed I already knew something, and I did not, and I did not find out until later that I had not known it. I am a physician. I am professionally competent at working out how a system operates. I could not work out how this one operates and I would like a record of the attempt.

This document is not a plan. A plan would require knowing what the steps are. This is a list of what I have established so far, with the parts I am unsure about marked, so that when somebody eventually explains it to us we can see how far off we were.

Jerry — please add anything you learn from the other parents. Do not delete anything, just add.

What I have established

1. There is no office. There is no phone number for this. There is no person whose job is to tell a family what to do. I kept waiting for that part and there is no such part.
2. College coaches do not find players. Players are delivered to them. By a high school coach who calls, by a service that ranks, by a camp that measures, or by the player himself. Nobody at Fenton has ever done the first thing because Fenton has never had a reason to.
3. The film is not enough on its own. I believed — and Nick believed, and I think this is where he got it — that if the film is good, someone watches it. Everyone I have asked says the film is what confirms interest. It is not what creates it.
4. "Get to a camp" is not advice. It is the whole instruction. Three different adults said this to us in the spring. Not one of them explained that they meant a specific kind of event, run by a college, on specific Saturdays, that you have to register and pay for and drive to. I thought they meant a football camp. Like a summer camp.
5. The calendar for those runs roughly June 1 to July 25, and it does not repeat.
6. He is a senior. There is not another June.

Marked uncertain

• Whether a "verified" forty time has to be run at a specific place or whether any timing counts. Three sources, three answers.
• Whether the ranking services are something you apply to or something that happens to you. I have found no application. Answered — Aug 24, there is no application, they simply have not heard of him.
• Whether it is appropriate for a parent to email a college coach directly. Every parent I have asked has looked uncomfortable and changed the subject, which I am reading as no.
• Whether any of this is different for a player whose season starts 9–0 and whose season ends in a hospital. I do not think it is. I would like it to be.

The camps — June 2026

These are the four within driving distance that I have been able to confirm existed. I found them on August 26, which is the date I am typing this, which is the point.

I have my calendar open in the other window. He was home. Every one of those Saturdays, he was in this house.

For comparison, because I want the scale of this on paper: the Lynch family drove to Ypsilanti on a Saturday in June. Left at six in the morning. He threw for forty minutes with three other quarterbacks, a staff wrote things down, they ate at a Panera, they were home by four.

It cost them a tank of gas. That is the entire barrier. It was never money. It was knowing that you are allowed to email somebody and ask.

Who we have contacted

Schools contacted by this family, as of August 27: 0.

Questions for someone who actually knows

Kept here so I stop losing them. Struck through means answered, and I am leaving the struck ones in so we can see what took two months to find out.

• When are you supposed to start? — Freshman year. (R. Lynch, July 15.)
• Do the colleges contact the high school or the family? — Neither, if nobody has told them you exist.
• If a coach replies to a player but not to the school, is that interest or is that manners?
• Is there a version of this that still works starting in September of a senior year, and if the answer is no, will somebody please say the word no.
• Who decides that a person is 155 pounds and therefore not worth forty minutes.
• What do you do with a child who has been told for two years that if he is good enough somebody will notice, and who was good enough.

Next

1. Read his spreadsheet before saying anything about his spreadsheet.
2. Ask Coach Shaffer what a college coach would actually need from us, in one sentence, as if we are stupid, because on this subject we are.
3. Find out whether anything happens in the winter or whether June was the whole door.
4. Do not let him see this document being about him rather than about us. He is already carrying the version where it is his fault.