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There is a framework Ben Sippola comes back to every time he talks about what separates athletes who thrive in the U.S. college system from those who do not.
He calls it the three Cs. Character, competency, and cognition. And the order matters more than most athletes and families realise.
Sippola knows this from both sides of the conversation. He went to Butler University in Indiana as a footballer from Minnesota who nobody was seriously recruiting, became a Hermann Trophy semifinalist, earned first team All-American and Academic All-American honours, was drafted by the Columbus Crew in the 2011 MLS Supplemental Draft, and played professionally in Sweden before returning to work in the game he built his life around. He is now head coach of Auckland United's men's first team and has spent years placing and developing young athletes through the U.S. college pathway.
He joined the Platform Sports podcast for a conversation that covered all of it. What college gave him. What coaches are actually looking for. What New Zealand athletes consistently get wrong. And what families should understand before they sign with any agency.
Ask Ben Sippola what college coaches are looking for and he will give you the three Cs without hesitation.
Competency comes first because it has to. Coaches need to know an athlete can play. That shows up in the highlight reel, in results, in competitive level. It is the baseline. Without it, nothing else matters.
But character, he argues, is king. And it is the one that most athletes underestimate.
"If I look in hindsight, everyone I've placed who had high competency but low character, you never hear of them. But the players that had incredible character and middle-of-the-road competency, they're all doing incredible stuff right now."
His explanation for why is not complicated. Character compounds. An athlete with strong character keeps showing up, keeps working, keeps developing. Over time, their competency catches up and often surpasses athletes who arrived with more talent but less discipline. The coach who takes a bet on character over pure ability is usually making the better long-term investment.
The third C, cognition, is about understanding. Reading the game, making decisions under pressure, knowing what the team needs rather than just what the individual wants to do. In any team sport, it is what separates technically capable athletes from genuinely valuable ones.
Coaches assess all three. But the one that most families do not prepare for, the one that can end a recruitment conversation in thirty seconds or extend it for months, is character.
The clearest example Ben offers is Kyle Adams.
Adams came through the Ole Football Academy in Auckland and went to San Diego State University, chosen in part because his brother lived in California. By Ben's own assessment at the time, Adams was a good footballer. Middle of the road for the level he was targeting. Not someone you would look at and predict a serious professional career.
What Ben fell in love with was his character.
"The moment I met Kyle Adams, I fell in love with his character. This guy, unbelievable human being."
Adams spent three years at SDSU, went into the professional game through the USL, signed with the Houston Dynamo, and made his way to Louisville City. He has earned a New Zealand senior cap and has built a career that Ben describes as one of the most remarkable outcomes he has seen from anyone he has worked with.
The talent was there. But Ben is clear that what drove the outcome was something else entirely. Adams had a vision and the character to chase it consistently, through development years, through setbacks, through a pathway that required patience and persistence rather than immediate recognition.
"His competency came as he played the game longer. Here's a guy with a vision. He knew what he wanted and he had the character to back it up."
One of the most useful concepts Ben introduces is what he calls big fish small pond syndrome.
New Zealand is a genuinely beautiful country. It is also, he argues, a place where young athletes can achieve local recognition quickly and mistake that for a more accurate measure of where they stand globally.
"The moment that you think you're the big fish, then you think you have to stop working hard to earn your right. And therefore you get this false world."
He is not dismissive of New Zealand talent. He has seen enough Kiwi players develop into serious professionals to know the ability is real. What concerns him is the perception gap, the distance between how an athlete is seen within a small competitive environment and how they would be assessed if they stepped outside it.
His formula for avoiding this is what he calls E plus O equals P. Environment creates opportunities to pursue your potential. The athletes who consistently seek out harder environments, better opposition, more challenging coaching, are the ones who keep developing. The athletes who stay comfortable with their local status, who stop being challenged in meaningful ways, often plateau without realising it.
"You can't see the field from within the field," he says. "You're so close to New Zealand, you're just not aware of the grand scheme of things, particularly as a young Kiwi."
One of the more pointed observations Ben makes is about this generation's relationship with professionalism.
He does not define being professional as earning a salary. He defines it as a way of operating in the world. And he thinks the current generation of young athletes has lost something by being so focused on the visible markers of professional sport, the NIL payments, the follower counts, the surface-level indicators of arrival, rather than the underlying behaviours that actually produce those outcomes.
"Professionalism is a way of being. Particularly this generation of players is obsessed with the paycheck. They're obsessed with Instagram. They're obsessed with all the things other than pursuit of the craft."
What the U.S. college system provides, even though it is technically an amateur environment, is an education in professional behaviour. Accountability. Time management. Showing up five minutes early not because someone told you to but because you understand what it signals. Handling feedback without collapsing or deflecting. Operating as part of a team even when individual ambitions are pulling in a different direction.
Ben's friend who runs a recruitment company and previously worked at Spotify says he always hires former NCAA Division I athletes first. The reason is exactly this. They have dealt with pressure. They have had coaches who were hard on them. They have learned how to take feedback, be curious, and stay open. Those qualities translate.
The college system, at its best, is not just a sporting opportunity. It is a four-year education in how to operate as a professional person.
When pushed to describe the trait that the best athletes he worked with had in common, Ben does not hesitate.
"Fighting spirit. The willingness and the desire to work."
He uses Joe Bell as an example, noting that even without working with him directly, you could see from watching Bell that his desire was intact. His work ethic was visible. Wherever Bell ended up, you knew what you were getting from him.
That consistency of behaviour is, in Ben's view, the most underrated quality a young athlete can develop. Not brilliance. Not raw talent. The ability to bring the same level of commitment, every session, every match, whether anyone is watching or not.
It is also, he argues, something Kiwi athletes have historically been very good at. The Ryan Nelsens, the Simon Elliotts, the generations of New Zealand footballers who made careers in professional sport were not always the most technically gifted players in their environments. They were the ones coaches trusted because they knew what they were getting.
That reputation is worth protecting.
The final section of the conversation was about agencies, and Ben was direct.
Having someone in your corner when navigating the U.S. college system, particularly if you are not based in the United States, is increasingly necessary. The landscape is too complex, too competitive, and too fast-moving for most families to navigate alone. The question is not whether to use an agency. It is how to choose the right one.
His framework is straightforward. Track record is everything. Ask which athletes the agency has placed. Ask what those athletes are doing now. A reputable organisation will be able to give you names and stories, a roadmap of what the experience they provide actually produces over time.
Third party referrals matter. Talk to athletes who have been through the process with that agency. Ask them honestly what it was like, what the support looked like, what happened when things got difficult.
"A lot of agencies will just take anybody. And then what they'll do is just give empty promises."
The warning sign he returns to is empty promises. Any agency that tells every athlete exactly what they want to hear without being honest about the work required, the timeline involved, and the realities of the competitive landscape, is not operating in the athlete's interest.
The agencies worth working with are the ones that are still here years later, building relationships, getting better at what they do, and being willing to tell a family the truth even when the truth is harder to hear than a promise.
If you are a student-athlete or parent starting to think about the U.S. college pathway, start with a conversation. Platform Sports can help you understand your options, your timeline, and what preparation actually looks like.
