Greater Houston Senior Football Showcase: Intro and The history of the Showcase

It all started in January of 2009 at Milby High School. I was the Play It Smart Coach at Milby and Phil Camp was the Head Football Coach and AD. Coach Camp came into my office and said, "Tabor College is going to be here on March 10th email your other PIS coaches across HISD and see if any of their kids would like to come over to tryout for them. If they have a 2.5 GPA, and a 900 M/V SAT score they can get most of their college paid for. So I send out a group email and at the end of the day we have 80 HISD kids that are showing up on March 10th to tryout for Tabor. I go and tell Coach Camp and his reply is classic Camp "Hell I know the coach at Baker lets invite him down also". So I start emailing all of the D3 and NAIA coaches I can find and Camp calls some of his buddies and we have NAIA Day (that was the original name).

That year we ended up with 15 colleges and 190 HISD kids looking for a shot to play football in college. Chris Vaughn had come on board to witness everything and help out where he could. I still remember talking to Chris that day and him saying "Wow if just 30 of these kids get Offers this will be a huge success". We ended up with over 150 kids getting offers that day. Maybe more I really had not created a mechanism to track the offers and that 150 number is based on what other PIS coaches had reported. Our final number was 60 kids ending up on a college roster from that event.

We were absolutely over our heads at this point. We knew we had an "Animal" on our hands. We also knew that this was absolutely a worthwhile event that Camp, Vaughn, and I have truly turned into our life's work. It goes beyond scholastic aid and putting kids into college, and into changing lives and improving society.

Fast Forward to today as we are planning on the 7th Showcase. Our results speak for themselves. With a yearly budget of $5,000-$8,000 we have generated over 60 million dollars is scholastic aid to students in Greater Houston. We have had over 3000 students come thru the showcase for a last chance to play football in college. We have over 500 participants on a college roster from a participating school. Last years event had 41 colleges in attendance. We also established similar events in El Paso TX and Orange County California.

So why this Blog now?
1. The story needs to be told
2. I get a lot of emails and now I can say go read the blog I have answered that question on the blog which will save me a lot of time in the long run.
3. Hopefully we can provide information to a student that will change their lives for the better.

I am going to touch on a lot of topics in this Blog mostly around playing sports in college, getting ready to go to college, and the admissions process of getting into college. All of my data that I will be citing is from follow up surveys to participants and college coaches. If you have any questions please email me cobyrhoden@gmail.com.