NEWS & UPDATES

February 8, 2012 In News By Wes Hartline

There is no off-season: Recruiting

When it comes to col­le­giate recruit­ing for ath­let­ics, there is absolutely no off-season. This past week on Feb­ru­ary 1st, col­lege foot­ball fans across the coun­try held their col­lec­tive breath as 17 and 18 year-old young men made what is likely the biggest deci­sion of their lives to date: where they will play col­lege foot­ball? National Sign­ing Day has become a win­ter hol­i­day for foot­ball fans, and the NCAA doesn’t mind. Ana­lysts will tell you this is the most impor­tant off-season day for foot­ball pro­grams, but that might be an under­state­ment. These choices have long-term ram­i­fi­ca­tions, poten­tially affect­ing Con­fer­ence Cham­pi­onships and National Cham­pi­onship games.

As many across the nation waited for fax machines to begin churn­ing out national let­ters of intent, recruiters across the nation were already prepar­ing for next year. And the year after that.

Con­sider how a sin­gle player, suc­cess­fully recruited, can impact a pro­gram: he might entice oth­ers to join him, lead­ing to a stronger class and bet­ter team down the road. If the team shows improve­ment, the next class of recruits might be inspired to join the pre­vi­ously strong class, improv­ing the ros­ter and deep­en­ing the depth of tal­ent. Think of it as “the LeBron/Miami Heat effect,” only actu­ally hav­ing cham­pi­onships to show for it.

This process does not stop. Highly rated play­ers dis­cuss how they are often recruited for three full years before announc­ing which col­lege or uni­ver­sity they will attend. With the cur­rent struc­ture, recruits can’t offi­cially declare before National Sign­ing Day, mean­ing any state­ments of intent aren’t bind­ing and that noth­ing is guar­an­teed. Any­thing can poten­tially hap­pen, so know­ing the recruits is a crit­i­cal func­tion of the process for ath­letic programs.

How can recruiters begin to under­stand how these young men think and reason?

It is most likely that every recruit signed this week grew up largely in the infor­ma­tion age. There is an enor­mous amount of data avail­able to coaches, recruiters, and ath­letic direc­tors about these ath­letes. Each uni­ver­sity should be uti­liz­ing this infor­ma­tion to find out the best way to engage these young men and devel­op­ing a rela­tion­ship with them. If you aren’t already data-mining to find out what inter­ests your recruits, you may have already lost them.

Deter­min­ing what is truly impor­tant can make or break the deci­sion for a poten­tial recruit. What if he is con­cerned about how the pro­gram gives back to the com­mu­nity, but you never uncov­ered that it’s impor­tant to him? Recruits may not be forth­com­ing with infor­ma­tion like this, but you can find out what moti­vates and inspires them. Encour­age your exist­ing ros­ter to engage these young men and really get to know them. Stud­ies show that 60+% of recruited ath­letes stay in touch with play­ers on their future teams lead­ing up to National Sign­ing Day. You have allies in your locker room and you may not know what’s being discussed.

Last year we had an SEC Coach and an SEC AD tell us how impor­tant facil­i­ties had become as a part of their own inter­nal process. It makes a huge dif­fer­ence how the pro­gram is per­ceived by these young peo­ple. While most 17–18 year olds are won­der­ing How much is being invested is how I can train or how I can learn? How will they help me focus on stud­ies when I need to? What hap­pens if I get hurt?

Now is the time to con­sider how you can answer these ques­tions in a way that has your prized five-star recruit sign on the dot­ted line.

Authored By Wes Hartline

Director of Marketing and Video Production