College Recruiting

Series 1

Being overwhlemed by e-mails from "Wannabe's

The Internet, e-mails, text messaging, cell phones, facebook, are all wonderful new inventions that have drastically changed recruiting and how we communicate with prospects and how we scout and get information on potential prospects. Not only can college coaches get lightning fast scouting information on a prospect but they can also get online video of the prospect without waiting weeks or months on film, as they had to do in the past. In fact, except for football, most sports didn't even film their games. If you evaluated a prospect you had to do it in person at a game or practice or at a camp. However, the advancement in technology has greatly improved our present day recruiting procedures but has also created some problems.

One of the biggest problems for coaches is that now every kid who has a dream of playing college sports is in an easy position to contact college coaches to try and promote themselves – and they're being told to do this. They don't have to go to much trouble to mass e-mail hundreds of college coaches over and over. The coaches don't know who is legitimate or who is sincere if they are legitimate. Athletic department e-mail addresses, and even the personal e-mail addresses of the coaches, at each school are published on the schools' Web sites. Kids are being told by almost everyone, including their high school and club coaches, that if they want to play college ball they should contact the coach at every school that they are interested in a let that coach know that they are a prospect and that they want to play at their particular school … on scholarship, of course. They are led to believe that these college coaches will be impressed by their aggressiveness and consequently, many of the college coaches will likely recruit the kid. If you want to get recruited this sounds pretty easy, but this is not reality. What this type of advice, along with the ease of modern day communications, has done is create a monster for college coaches. They now get thousands of e-mails from kids trying to promote themselves. The coaches can't possibly look at or consider all these kids for recruiting. Probably 90% or more of them are "wannabes" who are unqualified to play at the colleges that they contacted – or at any college, for that matter. Those who might actually qualify will probably get lost in the overwhelming volume of these personal promotions. So what is the answer to this growing problem? Most coaches say it is: "Be nice to everyone who sends you an e-mail but don't waste your time trying to check them all out. Deal with whatever sources that you know are credible and they will weed out the "wannabes". These sources should only refer legitimate prospects that have been properly scouted and checked out.