It's rare that we have to pen a "Coaches Beware" piece, but after receiving a recent email, it has become apparent that one is needed to warn the coaching profession of people looking to take advantage of high school kids with big dreams, and their respective families.
That leads us to this email from a concerned high school head coach:
One of our players received a direct message from a man claiming to be Jeff Hecklinski, TE Coach and Recruiting coordinator for Kansas Jayhawks Football. Our player contacted me about because it didn’t seem legit. This man claims to be Jeff Heck and has founded “EZRecruiting” and for a certain amount of money, he will get our player evaluated by college coaches.
I sent Kansas Football an email about it and they replied back that I am not the first person to inquire about this. After I knew it was a fake, I messaged the EZ Recruit service and acted like I was interested. You can read the messages below. (There is no coach Stecker here and we didn’t not personally speak to Coach Heck, we just said that to see how far this guy would go.)
The twitter account for this guy has a ton of followers and there are people paying for this service and they believe it is really Coach Heck. These types of services are robbing our kids hopes and their wallets. This twitter account should be shut down or at the very least exposed as a fraud.
The messages exchanged between the high school coach and @RecruitingEZ, included in the screen shots below, clearly introduces themselves as Coach Heck, and how they're able to send their film out to coaches for a fee ranging from $20 for Junior Colleges to $100 for film sharing and "personal one-on-one access" to get mentored through the recruiting process.
The first thing that should smell fishy when reading the messages is how an FBS assistant coach is also the CEO of a recruiting company taking money from kids with the promise of getting them recruited. Hopefully that alone has sent off alarm bells with a number of players, parents, and coaches.
This is a great reminder of the many "snakes in the grass" out there preying on the hopes and dreams of kids and their parents hoping to land a scholarship somewhere to play football.
Thankfully, this coach was able to reach out to Kansas football and Coach Heck to personally put this one to rest, and we wanted it to serve as a warning for others out there that have been contacted by this account, as well as to raise some awareness on the types of people out there willing to use a pitch like this to scam people.
