How is your high school coach helping?

I know several high school coaches that do a fantastic job of helping their athletes with the recruiting process. They are usually former college players and/or coaches that understand the recruiting process fairly well. Club coaches for many years have been helping their athletes with the recruiting process. Clubs also usually have someone like myself or an experienced coach handle a large chunk of the recruiting process. This unfortunately is NOT always the case.

I saw the question raised on a recruiting page on facebook. I'm never really sure if this type of question is raised for discussion or just a general wondering, but it was brought up just the same. "How have your club and/or high school coaches helped you with the recruiting process?" My immediate response to this question was to ask, "Do you want them helping?" I commented to the post asking these questions below:

Do you want your high school coach helping?

Can they help?

Who do they know?

How much about the actual recruiting process do they know?

How many phone calls are they going to make for you?

How many emails are they going to send for you?

I think in general it's just expected that a coach (club or high school) is going to automatically "help" with the recruiting process. Unfortunately I'm finding more and more that isn't what's happening. Of course if you are lucky enough to have a high school coach that is really active in the process for/with you then that is fantastic and great. But I think we ask the wrong question at the start of this. We ask "Is the high school coach going to help?" instead of asking "How...?"

One way of asking that question is general and creates low expectations if any at all. The other way of asking that question is specific and creates a standard (large or small) for that coach to fit into. Some of the other questions I raised above certainly come into play as well. If you have a coach that doesn't know a ton about the process and begins to give you bad advice, how helpful is that? It's not really any different then the mom they told me her "person" at NCSA told her their daughter was too young to be sending emails to college coaches; this was weeks prior to the June 15th contact date for the 2023 class. I wrote about that HERE.

Help is great. Not all help is the same. I get a different amount of help from my 10 year old than I do from my 3 year old. While the difference there might be mostly the screaming, it still matters. You want people helping you that are going to help you in a positive way. This process can be hard. We can't go into it assuming that we are going to get a certain level of help from someone that doesn't have the desire or the capacity to help at that level. Ask questions. Ask a LOT of questions. Ask a LOT of different people a lot of questions. Be sure to read my blog as well, it's obviously always helpful.