Eggs and Baskets

You've certainly heard the phrase, "Don't put all of your eggs in one basket." This rule applies to college recruiting as well.

It's why I always talk about starting with 50 schools and not just 20. The bigger net you cast the better. Especially when we are talking about the recruiting rules the way they are set up now. You can't just hope that the one school that sent you a camp invite is legitimately interested and will call you on June 15th. Even with the schools that call you on June 15th, you don't really know where you are on their list. A phone call is great, but trying to plan a visit is even better.

One of the things I have suggested over the last few years to the future-junior classes leading up to June 15th is to separate their list into 3 categories; schools you know are going to call, school's you think are calling and schools YOU will be calling. In doing this we are trying to do a couple different things.

First, figure out what June 15th and that week will potentially look like. Are you going to hear from your TOP choices? 2nd, is to see what ELSE you can do in the weeks prior to June 15th. If you've got 7 schools in those first two sections, then it might be time to branch out to a few more schools and maybe look at some different conferences or even levels. Hearing from even 5 schools on June 15th is a huge positive, but we don't know where we stand with those 5 schools exactly. We will potentially figure it out over the next few months. Realistically, you don't want to be 1 of 75. You want to be 1 of 10. Even then, you want to be in a schools top 3 vs being in their top 10. Which schools have you in their top 3? Pursue those heavily.

A school I talked to at Show Me already had their top 2 setter choices on the board. They knew when they were coming to camp and so each athlete already had a timeline set, whether they knew it or not. See, college coaches don't put everything into one athlete. Athletes should plan on doing that either. Really the last thing you want to do as an athlete is to put all your time, energy and focus into just ONE school. One of the more challenging parts of recruiting is putting all of those things into multiple schools. Hopefully as you go through the next few months of your process you'll be able to figure out who is more interested and filter through some of the information. That is something that someone like myself helps with going into June 15th and the months after.

Athletes aren't wrong, weird or sending mixed messages by pursuing more than one opportunity. Coaches aren certainly pursuing more than one option, so athletes and their families should do the same. Don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Until you accept an offer it's mostly all fair game. Reach out to more than one school. Talk to more than one coach each week. Plan on going on more than one visit. Do all of these things at the same time! Don't focus 100% on one school and then on the visit say, "I'd like to take another visit." Taking more than one visit is great. But make sure you are doing the things you need to do in order to make that happen if that's where you are in the process. Coaches won't fault you for taking another visit. But if that 2nd visit is going to be 4 months after your visit to the first school, you might have a problem.

Until you're done, you're not done. Keep working. Keep sending emails. Keep making phone calls.

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