The nation's top-rated high school kicker was in a film session this summer when his equipment bag started vibrating. It was his cellphone buzzing.
A UCLA coach had sent a text message inviting him to Westwood to watch a practice. Later, he received a text message from a Notre Dame coach asking him to call the school.
Bound by NCAA rules prohibiting them from contacting Sherman Oaks Notre Dame High senior Kai Forbath by telephone until Sept. 1, recruiters did the next best thing. They turned to text messages, instant messaging and e-mails, the very forms of technology that teenagers use to stealthily contact each other.
Given the increasing competition for top athletes, colleges across the country are upgrading coaches' phones, purchasing new computer software and expanding databases as hand-held BlackBerrys, Treos and Sidekicks join whistles, bullhorns and dry-erase markers as indispensable accessories for today's coaches.
"Technology has completely changed the recruiting game," said Nathaniel Hackett, the football recruiting coordinator at Stanford. "People can get ahold of anybody from anywhere."
Some say that's the problem.
The NCAA has various rules limiting telephone calls, but there are no restrictions on e-mails and text messages.
The rules are designed, officials say, so that the haves and have-nots among colleges will be on relatively equal footing when it comes to recruiting. Compared to a telephone call, text and e-mail messaging were thought to be relatively inexpensive yet effective options.
Unless, of course, you are a heavily recruited teenager whose family didn't purchase a phone plan that included unlimited text messaging.
Kelli Pedersen, whose daughter Kayla is a sought-after junior basketball player from Red Mountain High in Mesa, Ariz., said at first she got a kick out of all the attention.
"We were eating dinner and she had her phone on vibrate and it started going off at the table," Kelli said. "She's text messaging and it would go off again. We thought it was funny."
The humor stopped when the family considered what its next phone bill might look like with more than two dozen coaches now text messaging Kayla. Charges are about 10 cents a message, depending on the plan.
Pedersen's grandfather gave Kayla the cellphone as a gift and was so stunned after receiving the initial bill this month that he called the phone company because "he didn't believe it was true," Kayla said
