Schools Are Narrowing Their List

I often explain to families and athletes that recruiting is two sides of the same coin. Athletes and coaches often will do the same things to each other.

Coaches will "ghost" athletes and athletes will "ghost" coaches.

Athletes will find small things they don't like about a school and coaches will typically have a few things they look for or just stay away from.

Coaches will assume an athlete isn't interested anymore because the athlete hasn't sent a text message in awhile; the athlete is thinking the same thing about the school.

...just a couple of examples.

50 schools is too many for any athlete to manage on their own. Realistically, a list will get pretty small pretty quick for athletes. 25 or 50 schools will become 5-7 with the way that recruiting revolves around the June 15th date. The situation for athletes seems to be similar to what college coaches are doing in this relatively new recruiting model.

Going into June 15th there were a lot of college coaches that told me their recruiting lists varied between 50-75 athletes. They didn't know who was interested in them or who they realistically had a shot with until they got on the phone. It's fair to say that a school's list got cut in half rather quickly based on those opening conversations. Coaches had camps on their campuses and then traveled across the country to work camps at various clubs. They then proceeded to add or remove more players from their list. By the time we got to AAU or USAV Nationals I think that most college coaches had gotten their lists to no more than 3 athletes in each position. At this point they really want to focus as MUCH time as they can on their top athletes. This is really difficult to do at USAV Nationals because the format for that tournament is atrocious and insane (but I digress).

College coaches are then spending MOST of their time on a select few athletes. Sure, they will go around and watch many of the athletes that were on their original list of 50 or so. They will also go around and watch athletes that are coming to camp, because that piece is important as well. But I think the majority of a college coaches time at Nationals in Indy this year was spent on their top athletes. They aren't going around and evaluating athletes anymore. They know who they want to watch and they spend most of their time at those courts. This happens at Qualifiers as well. College coaches spend the first day walking around, marking and evaluating athletes and then the last 2 days they are spending a LOT more time on the athletes they like the most.

College coaches don't want to worry about setting up visits in the fall for 15-25 athletes. They want to setup visits for 3 or 4. They don't want to have phone calls every week with 12 athletes, they want to have 3 or 4. Athletes can't physically go to 12 camps in one summer. As an athlete you are hopefully able to do 2 or 3. Some athletes do more than that because it's the BEST way to get in front of a college coach and they haven't been able to do that as much as they would have liked. College coaches are narrowing their list by the time they get to Nationals; especially if they are finding athletes are just as interested in their school and they are planning on coming to a camp that summer.

Ok, so maybe you aren't going to camps. Maybe you didn't send a ton of emails to put yourself in front of college coaches. Maybe you haven't had a ton of phone calls or maybe you haven't had any...does that all mean that you won't be able to play in college? Far from it. Plenty of schools will still be recruiting when we flip the calendar into next year. There is plenty to catch up on this fall during high school volleyball season. Take advantage of your recruiting opportunities during this time leading up to next club season.

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