Jumping To Conclusions In Your Recruiting Process

Posted originally on 10/18/2022*

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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 well.

Different conferences might have different expectations for their schools or "travel limits" that they are held accountable to. Even when we start talking about rules, guidelines and regulations that D1 schools must adhere to, there are variables. Not every school at the D1 level is fully funded (shocking I know). Just because schools are allowed to offer official visits to juniors in high school, doesn't mean they will.

This is the topic that I want to discuss here. Schools can and are allowed to offer Official Visits to juniors in high school, but that doesn't mean that they are able to. Why is this important? Because our perception of things is not always correct. Sometimes we assume something is true, when it's in fact not. If a school offers you an official visit and another school offers you an unofficial visit, it's not necessarily true that one school is more interested than the other. Both schools are interested because they want you to visit it campus, that's a positive thing. One school, in reality, just might have more budget for offering official visits to younger athletes. While the other school is saving those official visits for an athlete's senior year.

Think of it this way: I hear things like, "We haven't talked to the HC from this school yet, so they aren't as interested." Now, on the one hand, that could be entirely true. But it also could be NOT true. I've worked for multiple coaches in different situations. Some HC like to take a big role in the recruiting piece WAY prior to athletes coming on campus. Plenty of other HC like to let their assistants manage the majority of that and then they will make decisions later on, maybe in the spring/club season when they can watch them play live; or even when they come on a visit. I've had several athletes come on a visit where we intended to offer them and they hadn't talked to the HC over the phone. Now, is that an ideal situation in my opinion? No. But every school, every coach and every program handles recruiting differently.

Power 5 schools have a huge advantage over everyone else because they have the resources to send a TON of stuff out. This includes emails and handwritten mailers you'll get in your snail mail. Now, other "mid-major D1", D2, D3 and NAIA are allowed to communicate in similar ways, but a majority of them don't. Even the ones that do interact with athletes in this way do it in an extremely limited amount. What this can cause (and does cause) is an athlete to feel like an Alabama or Baylor is interested in them and other schools such as a SFA or a WT are NOT interested. This notion is based on the idea of, "If I get something, then the schools is interested." It's not an incorrect idea, it's just not something that we can say is correct 100% of the time. In that way, it's not a good marker.

Over the past couple of years I have had plenty of parents tell me, we heard from "this" school on June 15th and we had never heard from them before. Now, who is more interested; the school that calls you on June 15th or the school that sent you a questionnaire in the mail 4 moths before? While those schools are certainly all "allowed to" send things to you in the mail prior to June 15th (camp invites, and questionnaires) not ALL of the schools out there are "able to".

It's something that each athlete and family needs to think about as they go through their recruiting process. Does is it mean they are interested? Possibly. But they also could have sent that mailer out to 400 athletes. There was a D1 school in a P5 conference that sent out 75 t-shirts to their top 75 recruits in the 2023 class. Now, if you got one of those t-shirts you were probably pretty excited. But if you knew that you were #70 out of 75 athletes on their list, how excited are you about it then? It's still really, really cool! But maybe it's going to be a school that isn't reaching out and begging you to come on a visit the fall of your junior year.

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