Volleyball Recruiting Advice for 8th Graders

I have no issue with parent's, families and athletes starting early with their recruiting process. I haven't had any 8th grade clients, but I have had plenty of 9th graders start the fall of their first high school season. It's different for all of them. Sometimes they are playing JV and other times they are actually able to start on their varsity team. It doesn't necessarily matter a ton, but the biggest thing is always growth.

I've been able to respond to a few questions or comments on social media recently. I don't chime in on many of these Facebook groups too often, but every once in awhile I decide to say something. The question has been posed, several times, about 1) when an athlete should start their recruiting process and 2) if they should use something like NCSA? I'm actually going to answer question 1 in a different blog post, but I'll take on question 2 here now.

2) Should You Start Using NCSA?

This decision is completely up to you. I can tell you a few things though:

Online recruiting platforms that sell athletes on a "reactive" recruiting model is one of the biggest reasons why I started PRI in 2018. Their sell is that college coaches will "find" you because they have a platform with a lot of traffic. This is true. What they don't tell you is that the majority of their traffic is from the links, highlights and profiles that YOU (the athlete) is sending out to schools. Athletes are the ones generating all of this traffic to their platform; not the platform itself. As I said the other day on social media, "These recruiting platforms aren't writing your emails for you over the holiday break."

They like to get you committed early. Really before anyone knows what they are doing, getting into or before the athlete has some idea of what they want. NCSA isn't bad. But they do get you connected to a platform before you even know how to make a highlight - and they also don't really teach you how to make one. As I discussed in my blog post "More Than A Hammer" having a tool is great. NCSA is a tool. But if you don't know how to use that tool, then the tool is worthless. You need to know how this system works. You need to understand it, a little bit at least, so that you can get through it. You need better advice than "just send emails" too by the way. But there's no way for you to know any of this stuff BEFORE you sign up with NCSA. Now, if you were spending that kind of money and someone was going to actually help you through the process, that's something different. But I don't know of any NCSA people that talk to college coaches on a regular or consistent basis. I talk to them everyday. The advice that we give out to athletes is advice that we are filtering down from college coaches - the people you're trying to get recruited by. NCSA tells you to spend a bunch of money and then doesn't really give you the structure to help you manage the things that you need to do.

NCSA isn't all bad. It's a good hub for all your info. There is some cool features.

But why get NCSA if you're in the 8th grade? I honestly can't give you a good reason. It doesn't seem like it's worth it to me. It will be at least a year before any chunk of college coaches will come and watch you; realistically it won't happen until you're a sophomore. So why spend the $ when you're in 8th grade. I'm an advocate for starting early, sure, but anything that I would task an 8th grader in doing she can do for free using YouTube as her hub. By the time you become a sophomore and figure out that you're not really good enough to play at the schools you really want to go to, you've already spent the money. That seems to be the biggest reason they get you in early. Only 5% of high school volleyball athletes are playing at the college level. There is a huge market for these platforms to grab you early, knowing that (probably) the majority of their subscribers aren't actually going to play college volleyball. Most 8th graders don't know.

So what's my volleyball recruiting advice to 8th graders who, at this point, want to play college volleyball?

Work hard.

Get better.

Be a good teammate.

Have fun.

Love the sport.

That's it. Just do that. If you want to play volleyball at the college level, this is the best thing you can do to pursue your goal as an 8th grader. No emails. No highlights. Just focus on those 5 things. It will help in lots of ways.