What Moves the Needle in Recruiting

What moves the needle in recruiting is trust.

Trust between college coaches and high school coaches, for sure — but especially for a position like specialist, where the geographic talent map is spotty, college coaches rely on relationships with local trainers for referrals on talent worth evaluating.

This is a boon for private trainers or handlers. It’s a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg question as a private coach — myself being one. Do good players come to you because you have college connections, or do the college connections happen because you’ve got good players?

We can’t ethically claim that we, or our “service,” are the sole reason a player got the offer over another player.

And if we are all honest with ourselves as coaches, recruiting is just too complicated a process to draw any direct relationship. The results a trainer can lay claim to are correlation, more than causation.

If a player and their family want to cite you as one of the main reasons for their success, amazing. But when you’re looking for a private trainer for your own child, seeing that there is some correlation between this coach and results is important.

Can you go it alone and do all the marketing, outreach, and recruiting yourselves in-house as a family? I think so — but you will probably have a longer timeline in generating interest from college coaches.

By cozying up to a few private trainers who have preexisting relationships with college coaches, you are not only paying for their training, yes, but you are also paying for access to their network of college coaches both directly and indirectly. Directly, in that you are probably going to be a name they refer to their college network. But also indirectly, in that you’ll pop up on that trainer’s social media feeds, which are followed by college coaches.

A lot of trainers won’t explicitly say they help directly with recruiting. I don’t blame them. Recruiting is a slog — an emotionally and mentally taxing process — especially when expectations are misaligned. For example, a player or parent believes their kid is FBS while the trainer believes the player is D2. It’s also somewhat taboo to explicitly say you advise on recruiting because “You’re doing it for the money!” as many an anonymous Twitter account DM has told me. Ironically, the head coaches of many college programs who bash recruiting services as a waste of money say this while cashing salaries in the millions of dollars.

Maybe you don’t need a recruiting handler in the mold of a private admissions counselor who will hold your hand and walk you through every step of the way, but I think most families do need some guidance on the recruiting process — at least if only to understand how it works in general, and then knowing that, how it might work for their particular situation.

Are services like NCSA worth it? From a general information standpoint, they’re helpful. But they will do everything short of picking up a phone and calling a college coach on your behalf — which is, essentially, the only way any traction happens in recruiting.

College is a high-stakes proposition for families. It’s the last stop on the parenting train. It’s the last chance for a lot of parents to feel like they’ve set their child up for economic, social, and personal fulfillment in life. They feel enormous social pressure to not mess it up. When you have this kind of pressure, it’s not surprising to see services like NCSA getting bought by private equity.

• Do you only help with on-field training, or do you also help off-field with recruiting?
• What’s your recruiting philosophy? If they lack one, they’re probably not the right fit.
• What does your recruiting help look like? Is it general guidance and strategy on the process, or does it involve helping us get in direct contact with college coaches?
• How do you keep track of your work with players? Do you do a weekly check-in call? Bi-weekly?

Generally, I’d stay away from anyone who is trying to guarantee you an offer. With how nutty recruiting ends up being year to year, that’s a near-impossible thing to guarantee.

That’s all for now.

— Brendan