Recruiting Trap: Stalling Your Process

Jason
Sep 25, 2023
5 min read

Updated: Jan 24, 2024

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It's never "too early" to start your recruiting process. The flip side of that is also true! It's never "too late" to start your recruiting process. If you're a senior in high school right now and you've done 0 recruiting prior to today, you can start tomorrow and find a place to play college volleyball. That being said, it is important to know and understand that you will have limited options. While you can start "late" and still get recruited, I usually will encourage families to start.

What I see families do every year is try to create the boundaries of their recruiting process. The biggest flaw in this way of thinking or handling your recruiting process is that there are too many variables for you to control. You can't control who is looking and for what position; you can't control positional needs that change day-to-day; you can't control what specific college coaches are looking for.

You should do the prep work. You should spend some time thinking about where you want to go to school and what your major should be. Research is necessary to the process. If you don't know anything about a school when you get on phone with a coach it can hurt your recruiting process.

Start small. When I meet with sophomores at the beginning of the club season, I tell them that my goal for them with this presentation is for them to send off 1 email in the next day or two. Just start. We can figure some of these things out as we go.

Here are some of the situations (traps) that we fall into:

"We want to get a good list together first."

Why? I understand the need to have a list of schools; trust me, I do. But why do you need to have your ENTIRE list of schools figured out and locked in (they are almost NEVER locked in - your list is always changing) before you send out 1 email? If you find a school that fits - send the email. Don't wait. There isn't a reason to. While you are putting your list together, that coach might already talking to athletes in your position! Get in the mix today, there might not be a mix for you to get into tomorrow. The needs for those schools are going to change rapidly, especially when club season starts and college coaches get out in front of athletes. Visits get set-up immediately. College coaches start to rank their athletes. Today they are looking for an OH and tomorrow they aren't. Tomorrow they are narrowing down their list of athletes in your position to 3. If you haven't emailed them, then you aren't on the list.

"We are working through an email draft."

The first email you send out isn't going to be your last. In the "old days" when you sent everything through snail mail, you sent only one letter and one game on VHS. You sat back and hoped that they received it and watched it (now we know with relative certainty that they are watching). In 2023 you are sending way more than 1 email out to a school. Your first email doesn't need to be perfect, or really even close. Name recognition now is more important. Out of the 100 athletes that any one college is supposed to be watching at a qualifier weekend, how are they going to remember who you are? You want them to see your name pop up on. your phone in UA and for them to say, "She emails us all the time, we need to go watch her." You don't do that by sending one perfect email. You do that by sending them out consistently over the course of several weeks and maybe even months. Because of that you aren't sending one long email with your life story attached to it. You are sending out multiple smaller versions of that longer email. The message you want them to receive does get to them, just in smaller pieces. You are communicating interest; you're communicating consistently and you're forcing them to come watch you play as soon as your schedules meet up.

"We need better film."

This one is completely fair. It is and can be a decent reason to wait. If you have NO film at all, that makes sense; lets get you a highlight film then! If the film you have just isn't great because of the quality or because you've really gotten that much better since last club season, then we need to be doing more to get some film out there - think about individual training or a private lesson. Maybe you're playing JV because Varsity is stacked with seniors, but you've grown two inches and are crushing the ball on the outside for JV. Can we film one match? Can we get a couple of your swings on film? It wouldn't take much honestly, to catch the attention of college coaches if you have improved that much and to that degree. Your alternative, unfortunately, is waiting until your first club tournament...in January, to send film to college coaches. Depending on your recruiting class it may or may not be a big deal. Again, we are working with dozens of variables we can't control. A college coach might need someone like you and they might be just waiting for someone like you to reach out to them. But between now and January (your first club tournament) we have the Transfer Portal. If I need something fast, as a college coach, that's where I'm going first.

Here is my point and hopefully it's getting across:

Try your best NOT to get hung up on the little things. College coaches need film and they need to see you play live. That is how this process works right now. Most college coaches aren't reading your email. Even if it's really short! They are clicking on the film link you send them. They need to know if it's even worth their time to read the rest of your email. They are evaluating you very quickly, this is true and maybe even it can be unfair. Whether or not your email is worded perfectly or you're waiting to put in your bio that you made the AVCA Phenom Watch list, college coaches are watching film of other recruits. They aren't waiting for you. Their job as college coaches is to find the best. Their job is to find the athletes that will help them win conference championships. In the time you are hesitating with your recruiting process, they are reading 100s of emails and the chances are pretty good that LOTS of college coaches out there can get an athlete that is good enough to help them in one of those emails.

Is your email one that they are looking at in the next week?

If not, we should make that happen.

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