CV Teen Writes Recruiting How-To Book

Author Braden Lew and father T.J. Lew.

Lots of high school students want to grow up to be writers. Very few besides Castro Valley’s Braden Lew, however, are published authors by the time they graduate. 

Braden, who's a senior at CVHS and plays center on the Trojan volleyball team, realized few current high school athletes know much about college athletic scholarships. Many talented student-athletes never get to compete in college as a result.  

He set out to fix that and to guide students who do get noticed through the often stressful process. 

Braden says he really wants to play college volleyball. But he’s 5’10”, a perfectly reasonable height for most things but not for being a center on a Division I college volleyball team. 

He found they want you to be at least 6'4", which blocked Braden, but still gave a shot to his best friend Lukas, a volleyball player who is 6'6".  Lukas, though, had no idea how to get noticed by major college volleyball programs when men's volleyball itself is an often-overlooked sport nationally.

So, Braden, already a skilled researcher and an excellent student with a 4.5 GPA, set out to find out, his father, T.J. Lew, said. Braden ended up writing and publishing a book about what he found, "A Rockstar's Guide to College Recruiting." 

Dad, T.J. added a short section for parents of athletes. 

It’s available for Kindle through Amazon Books. 

“He doesn’t have all the answers,” T.J. Lew said, “but you’ll improve your chances of getting recruited for an athletic scholarship considerably if you follow the advice in the book.”

Braden discovered, for starters, that there are 29 scholarships available nationwide for men's volleyball, some of them partial and at private schools with relatively high tuition. Women do a bit better, with 351 volleyball scholarships, many of them full ones.

He also discovered he was tall enough to play center at Division III schools and how to pursue those opportunities.

College volleyball programs rarely have a relationship with high schools, only contacting individual students they have heard about. Usually, students must contact them to be noticed, Braden said.

 A major tip from the book, both T.J. and Braden said, is not to pay middlemen who claim to know all the coaches. They charge thousands of dollars for their supposed inside information that will supposedly get you a scholarship. 

“Do the work yourself,” Braden said. “Coaches and programs get a lot of e-mails, with about half coming from athletes themselves, and the other half from third parties they don’t really know.” 

“They take the ones from the athletes themselves a lot more seriously,” he continued. “Attach your transcripts and tell them how you'd be good for the team. Also, tell them why you really want to go to their school.”

Almost all the coaches and programs he contacted personally responded, Braden said.

“They want your e-mail; they want your cell phone number. They want to know who you are and what you can add to the team.”

He suggests finding out about the schools and their programs, to the point of looking at rosters to see what year the athletes who play your position are in.

“If there are three seniors on that team in your position, there are three openings for next year,” he said.

The process paid off for his friend Lukas, who first got an offer from UC Irvine and just got a notice of interest from Penn State. The latter school is superb academically, a member of the Ivy League, and has the nation's second-ranked men's volleyball program.

Braden has been in touch with several Division III schools, with his dream school being UC San Diego. Not only is it academically excellent, but it has a good volleyball program as well.

It’s also where his older sister Brenna lives and plays beach volleyball every chance she gets.

Volleyball runs in the family, along with other sports, in fact. Braden's younger sister Madison also plays volleyball for Castro Valley, and dad T.J. was once the assistant volleyball coach at Foothill High School in Pleasanton. T.J. and his wife Heather met in a volleyball class at Cal State East Bay, then Cal State Hayward.

Braden said his favorite subject is English, and he wants to keep writing, both fiction and non-fiction.

“I write down lots of thoughts in a notebook and later put them together in a story,” he said.

He suggests student-athletes pay attention to what else a college has to offer besides the sport or sports they're good at.

“I love sports,” he said, “but college isn’t just about sports.”