The recruiting process starts before the club season starts. As athletes switch clubs and join new ones at the start of the high school season, I usually begin working with a number of new athletes and families. Once they starting copying me on emails, I am able to go watch their highlights, see the schools they are emailing and figure out where they are in the process. Typically I will click on the film link they are sending to college coaches, so I can get an idea of wha

*Originally Published on 04/07/2022 I've made it clear from the beginning of these new recruiting rules that I wasn't a fan of them. In general I feel like they are misdirected and do nothing to fix the issues they were set up to fix. Not only that, but the schools and conferences that were the biggest proponents of these new rules because they needed to, "slow down recruiting" have done little to nothing to actually slow down their recruiting processes. I think that takin

*Originally Posted 6/29/2020 (edited 9/25/2023) This is a question that I heard a college coach ask an athlete this week and I think it's a great question for a variety of reasons. It's one of those questions where you can't just answer "yes or no" and you are forced into giving a "why" to really explain your answer. The question is partially about the answer, but it is probably more about how you come to your answer.

It's never "too early" to start your recruiting process. The flip side of that is also true! It's never "too late" to start your recruiting process. If you're a senior in high school right now and you've done 0 recruiting prior to today, you can start tomorrow and find a place to play college volleyball. That being said, it is important to know and understand that you will have limited options. While you can start "late" and still get recruited, I usually will encourage

*Originally posted 3/2/2020 My short answer is "No, they are Super-Human." I can remember my graduate assistant on the first day of the Tour of Texas Qualifier say "I'm exhausted...you guys do this every weekend you go out recruiting?" When you add it all up - 60 hour work weeks in the office; hours of work at home watching film and making recruiting phone calls; days on the road traveling; no weekends off; being away from family for days at time and sometimes back to back

It's a great sport and I love it, but the sport doesn't define me and it shouldn't define you.

I hear this all the time - "It seems that recruiting has gotten really quiet lately" "Recruiting has gotten quiet" "Coaches seem to have gone quiet"

Originally posted on 12/14/2020 Sometimes you just forget to turn the lights on...it happens to me all the time. Not usually with lights, but for me its music. I can sit at my computer in silence for a solid 30 minutes forgetting to turn my music back on. Usually it's after I get off the phone or something else that made me pause my music. But something hits me and tells me "it's too quiet!" and it gets me to turn Spotify back on so I can have that background noise I usual

Now I know that some (a lot) of this is going to change with all the craziness happening with conference realignment right now - I don't think we are done yet! - But I wrote about this back in 2019 and so I wanted to revisit some of these statistics and see what has changed potentially. To get a reference point, you can go read my "Playing In The P5" blog HERE .

*Originally posted, April 18th, 2022. I am reposting this to start the college season because I think that when you have as many upsets as happened on opening day in a college sport that is followed by millions across the country and you get 0 coverage from the main sports media, it's fair to say we need to be discussing this more. This video link was shared with me multiple times on social media and emailed/texted to me by several other people. I think it's really good.

In short and in my opinion, no, they shouldn't. If you haven't read "You Only Need One Offer" then go read that blog post as well.

What happens when the best player on your team makes a verbal commitment? Well, the mass amount of college coaches that were there, simply stop showing up. It turns out that all of those college coaches that were coming to your court were really only watching 1 athlete.

*Originally posted (5/27/2022) Older posts will sometimes be unarchived and made available to everyone if the topic is relevant to conversations currently occurring in the recruiting world. Tommy Callahan Sr. said it best, "You're either growing or you're dying. There ain't no third direction." Tommy Boy is a great movie, but how does that apply to college recruiting you ask? The answer is pretty simple. You're either in or your out.

This might not be a popular opinion, but...there it is. To quote Coach Lisle, "All it takes is one coach that believes in you."

In a similar way that I tackled the notion of college coaches watching your film in a blog post a few weeks ago, I want to talk about this topic a little bit. Again, our mindset going into the recruiting process is really important and its also important when it comes to your expectations at the college level.

June 15th contact day

One of the several issues that my former AD and myself ran into was the he apparently believed that every athlete SHOULD be able to play D1. When athletes weren't willing to put in the work, or didn't have what it takes to play at a high level, it wasn't their fault. But as many families have heard me say at seminars over the last couple of years, 95% of volleyball athletes across the country are NOT playing college volleyball at any level. 5% are. That statistic, in and

Posted originally on 10/18/2022* In many situations rules and regulations fall across the board. Every school must follow certain guidelines. For instance, volleyball courts are going to be the same size where ever you go. In our sport a team gets 3 touches on your side of the net. That is a rule that doesn't change from elementary school on to college. But not everything is the same at each level. D1, D2 and D3 all have different rules. NAIA has different rules as wel

While I mostly write about volleyball, I saw this story about other football coaches criticizing Coach Sanders at Colorado and the way it was all phrased bothered me so much that I just needed to write it all down :)

One thing that makes June 15th a smoother process for everyone is having the correct contact information available for college coaches.