Thursday, February 16, 2006
Ex-Hokie gets into recruiting business
Randy King
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More than six years later, the Leesburg native will still tell you how fortunate he was.
"In high school, I was kicking the ball in the end zone ... I was doing everything right as far as kicking was going but no one knew about me," said Kibble, who punted at Tech from 1996-99.
"My coach didn't do anything. Unfortunately in some of the high schools, if you don't have a coach or an athletic director pushing for you and unless you're in the top of the news all the time, not many people know about you."
Kibble drew Tech's notice when he and his father, James Sr., sent a highlight video to the Hokies' football office. Kibble's tape must have been head-turning stuff. He got a late scholarship offer. He got lucky.
"My father and I probably sent out about 50 tapes," Kibble recalled. "And I'll never forget when he called Syracuse the coach answers the phone and my dad said, 'Hey, this is Jim Kibble, father of Jimmy Kibble, I sent you a tape.' And the guy had no idea who I was. And my dad said the coach put the phone down and you could hear him clacking through the tapes and he finally said, 'I found the tape and I'll watch it tonight.' And this was about a month and half after we sent it.
"So, yeah, I was lucky."
While he has spent the past six years bouncing around on the post-college football map -- unsuccessful workouts with four NFL teams (New England, New York Jets, Chicago Bears and Washington Redskins -- plus playing stints in the AF2, AFL and NFL Europe as a place-kicker), Kibble has had a lot of time to think about the future. About two years ago, Kibble said he started thinking about starting a business that could help high school athletes expose themselves to potential colleges and possible scholarship offers.
"It's easy to go from college to the NFL ... you think you're the greatest thing and when something doesn't go right the real world comes real quick," said Kibble, who at 28 is now married with two young children and a third one on the way. "Being an athlete, being drawn to sports, I wanted to help young athletes who may have been in a situation like me in high school where nobody knew about them."
As he continues to chase his dream of playing professional football, Kibble decided he would start his second online business -- "SuperRecruits.com", a recruiting service he designed to help high school athletes draw attention from colleges.
"This is legitimately a service," Kibble said. "I want to help kids. I've been down the road and it's frustrating. It's just another tool. I tell kids we're not guaranteeing anything but exposure. We're going to help market you, but that doesn't mean you can just sit back. You've got to be working, too, for a once in a lifetime shot. There is no replacing a college athletic career."
Kibble's service is not free. Hey, the guy has mouths to feed. The service charges an introductory rate of $54.95 for a personal Web profile. Video highlightes cost $9.95 a month or $89.95 per year. Kibble noted there are other such services who charge more than $1,000 annually.
"You've got the ones that are free ... but if they're free, I can't imagine them bending over backwards to help you, plus your information is not that safe," Kibble said. "And then you've got the big boys out there who are charging thousands of dollars and that doesn't bode well for a family that doesn't have that to invest.
"My idea is to give parents and athletes a way to put up a mininal investment -- plus we have eight levels of secruity built into the database -- and the athletes gives us the top 10 college choices that they're interested in. What's good is college coaches know we're not going to bombard them everytime we get a soccer player, I'm not going to e-mail every soccer coach I know. Because an athlete that registers with us in Roanoke may not want to go play soccer in Hawaii.
"We've got 17 sports available. Over 112 coaches have registered in the last month in 13 sports. We've got schools rep from Virginia to Hawaii, from Division I to Division III and the NAIA.
The computer-savvy Kibble also runs "kickndesigns.com", a Web-design company. His third Web site is "jimmykibble.com," which includes statistics, articles and video of his performances that he hopes may catch the eye of an NFL coach or personnel director. He doesn't expect to buy a mansion anytime soon off his latest online business venture.
"Probably the biggest question I get form parents is 'how do you expect to make money'?," he said. "My answer is this isn't a get-rich quick scheme. I'm not trying to go out there and ask parents to refinance their houses.
"The beauty of it is a coach doesn't have to wait 4-5 days to see a kid. The coach can go in to recruit whoever he wants, or if someone calls up, he can go in and specifically look for this athlete. So the opportunity here is while the kid can still be e-mailing coaches, they can be faxing something and calling and leaving messages. If they get a coach or leave a message, they can say, 'coach, you can view all my information at SuperRecruits.com. College coaches can register for free and my information is available 24/7."
"My idea is I want to help kids. When people say, 'oh, how are you going to make money?' Well, there's 7 million kids [who participated in U.S. high school athletics last year] out there. This company doesn't need to be charging a thousands dollars in hope of making billions of dollars. The money we make is going to be reinvested into this company to make it better and better so that each year we can be up to date. We're 100-percent NCAA compliant and I think that's what coaches like.
"We're not selling a bill of goods that's going to be wrong. They know that we'll contact them if someone is interested. They know that they can go in recruit whoever they want. But we also verify everyone who comes into the system because you don't need 'Joe Wacko' signing up to give kids information.
I grew up in a law enforcement family so this is one of those deals that personal security and personal safety is No. 1 convern as far as this goes. And I want parents to know that their information, their home phone number, home address, anything personal about them or their student-athlete they're going to be safe."
In the meantime, Kibble hopes to continue to get his kicks somewhere. With current Cincinnati Bengals ace kicker Shayne Graham handling the kicking .
"I think Coach Beamer said it best once when he said the best thing about having Jimmy Kibble as our punter is we don't know where the ball is going and neither does the other team," recalled Kibble, laughing.
"There are still, even six years later, who still remember me as a punter. People still ask me like, 'Didn't you get into that UVa fight", and I'm like, 'don't even start.'
If he runs out of kicks on the football field, he has the Internet businesses to fall back on. His first online company "kickndesigns.com" has been a success.
" I spent so much of last 10 years of my life fiddling around with computers that I found a niche," said Kibble, whose family lives in Leesburg. "My clients like my customer support. I give people exactly what they want as far as web design goes. And I'm reachable. Small business ... my clients know they can reach me 24/7. And the best part is I can do this while chasing my dream. I maintained over 25 sites while I was in NFL Europe in Germany. Those guys didn't know what to do with me in Cologne [Germany] last year."
I helped the sheriff up in Manassas and a delegate in Richmond with their Web sites and they won [elections], and people started saying why don't you do this for real? Basically, I'm self-taught. I joke with people that maybe if I would have paid more attention in college maybe I would have been like a biologist."
