Creating Your List

Creating your list is an important part of the recruiting process in my opinion. There are so many athletes that will send their film to every school in a country and then hope something sticks. It's certainly one way to go about doing it, but it certainly isn't the best. One reason families tend to move in this direction is because they don't know who will be interested in their athlete. But why don't you know that? You should be able to have some idea right? Based on feedback from club coaches/directors you should a notion of where on the spectrum you fit. Again, potentially something will stick! But I prefer NOT sending emails to 300 schools across country if I don't have to.

D1 Colleges Running a 5-1 vs 6-2

Buy Now

The other "extreme" I see sometimes is limiting your list to too few schools. Now, to be fair, there could be a specific location or major that you are really focused on and I think that's completely fair in some regards. But the two issues here are that we spend WAY too much time creating the list and NOT enough time contacting schools. Make contact with a school. It might turn out to be a bad fit and that's fine. But spending months refining your list before you send out ANY emails is wasting valuable time and touch-points with schools. The other thing that happens here is that we miss out on schools that MIGHT be a good fit and we just don't know it yet. We certainly want schools to check as many of our boxes as possible; I encourage that. But 5/7 is still pretty good in some regards and worth pursuing that as an option. Passing on schools if they aren't a perfect fit is a mistake I hear about 6 months after the fact, when they call me and ask me for help. But as I've said before, schools move on to the next athlete.

The transfer portal only highlights some of this. What we didn't realize before as important in the school, coach, atmosphere, location are now REALLY important. There are plenty of legit reasons for athletes to transfer and I don't have an issue with it in anyway. There are variables and circumstances beyond an athlete's control. There are plenty of athletes that get to college and go, "Wow, 'this thing' was way more important to me than I thought!"

Things like winning, playing time, level, location, team culture all can play a role in one way or another. I can say from experience that losing will highlight ALL of the bad in a program and in a school.

So back to your list...

You need to be asking two questions when creating your list:

1) Do I want to go to school here?

2) Can I play volleyball here?

This is where we start when we are creating our list. If I don't know the answer to either question about a school, then I put it off to the side until I know one way or the other. To help answer the questions we don't know do your research on the school and program. There are plenty of resources, including social media, that you can use to help figure this part out.

If you come up with 10 schools, great. Send 10 emails and then go back to finding more schools. D1, D2, D3, NAIA, JuCo...all are going to be good options for different athletes. Do you know the difference between these? Most athletes should have a mixture of these divisions on their list. Mostly because not every D1 schools is the same. Not every D2 is the same. Tons of reasons to cross a D1 school off your list and plenty of reasons to add a D2 school.

Here are some other things to at least consider when creating your list:

How important is playing time?

How important is it for my parents to watch me play?

How important is team culture?

How important are academics?

I remember that a parent handed a list for their athlete to me on a piece of paper. The list had 6 schools on it. I asked, "How many times has she connected with these coaches in the last month?" His response was, "Zero". I knew in my head at the time that all of those schools were done recruiting in her class. It took me just a couple days to contact those schools and have that thought reinforced.

My point is this. I'm not an extremist when it comes to creating a list. Your list is going to change and grow as you go through the process. I don't have any issue with that. So I think that we can find some neutral ground when it comes to creating a list. Be specific, sure, it's your college experience. But don't give yourself too few choices to where you're left with nothing and it puts you in a position to get frustrated. In the same way, don't just guess and hope that a coach you emailed once the entire club season will magically appear at your court.

There are well over 1,000 college experiences to choose from. Look state by state, conference by conference and division by division searching for ALL the schools that are going to possibly be a good fit. After you find a few, start sending them emails.

Start today.

If you need help creating a list or with knowing what to do next in the recruiting process, let me know.

Create your list without using a spreadsheet!

College Recruiting Needs List

Buy Now