To Send or Not to Send Your Qualifier Schedule

This is a fairly large conversation between athletes, recruiters and college coaches. To be completely honest, I think that this issue of "sending your Day 1 qualifier schedule" stems from the idea that most families and athletes don't really know what to do.

1) College coaches get a lot of emails. Especially prior to qualifier weekends. When you send an email that only has the purpose of telling a coach that you're playing this weekend and will be on court 45, they see that as just another email they have to delete.

2) Recruiting coordinators are typically telling their athletes to send emails prior to a qualifier in order to bring as many college coaches to their courts. In many situations this is the bulk of recruiting advice that athletes and families get or it's what they have heard other people to and it "worked for them".

3) Given the information from the above two paragraphs, athletes fire off a bunch of emails to programs that are coming to a qualifier. Many schools they don't have any interest in attending. Many of those schools are not actually interested in those athletes either. Without college coaches responding with a "no" the athlete and family has no other information to go off of and so they send the, "I'm on court 45" email.

It's the only email many athletes will send throughout the club season, because they don't know what else to do.

Many athletes and families don't know that communication with college coaches started months ago. Or that college coaches are interested in recruiting athletes (yes, of course) but they are also interested in recruiting people.

I don't know what else to talk to a college coach about. I will just send my schedule and HOPE something works out.

If this is ALL that you're doing as an athlete in your recruiting process, then I really hope that it works out for you, but I wouldn't bet on it myself.

Believe it or not, there is a whole lot more to talk about with college coaches than what your schedule for Day 1 of Show Me is in 48 hours.

This usually ends up being a very generic, copy and paste email. College coaches notice that right away.

Then after the qualifier is over, no film update; no update on how your team did; no update on what your plan is for next week; no questions about how spring season is going; no information about WHY you are interested in their program or that you're even paying attention to anything that is happening in that program or the school as a whole.

Believe me when I tell you that there is WAY more to talk to college coaches about than your Day 1 schedule for this weekend.

Do your best to at least TRY and have those conversations.

The bottom line is if you are only sending your schedule to college coaches a few days prior to a qualifier, you need to do more. There are too many other athletes out there!

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This is a complete oversimplification of this topic I think, but it does point to the heart of the issue that athletes and parents are just not sure what to do. If you don't already subscribe to our YouTube channel, please do, because I will be talking about this issue more in depth over there soon!

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