Here's a list of 2013 summer football camps in California, where student-athletes can hone their skills before the start of the season. Many of these camps are taught by former and current professional and college coaches.

As a high school recruit in Southern California, New England Patriots tight end Daniel Fells was equally concerned with using academics to help provide himself with a college scholarship, as he was athletics. “To be honest, I wasn’t too sure,” Fells told CLA when asked about his thoughts of playing at the next level as a prep athlete.

It was 1999. I sat in the library at Chico Senior High School during third period Monday through Friday as a “library aide.” My duties consisted of sliding the sections of the day’s newspaper into the bamboo scroll and placing it in the rack for students and faculty to read, replacing books according to catalog number, and meticulously searching the internet using Netscape or Lycos for anything and everything to do with high school football recruiting. Anything.