Understanding the Recruiting Process
What you need to be doing during your recruiting process and understanding how College Coaches recruit
Having an understanding of the steps College Coaches take to evaluate and reach out to potential recruits for their programs will help you through your own recruiting process
Here is the common order in which College Coaches
use to recruit athletes:
Putting together a list of potential prospect recruits
Before a College Coach goes deep in the recruiting, they put together a list of potential recruits that fit their recruiting needs. This list is composed of athletes from online recruiting platforms, camps, showcases, tournaments etc. A majority of these College Coaches are using online platforms like ImRecruitable because it already gives them an athletes full recruiting profile and a profile College Coaches can use to evaluate each recruit. ImRecruitable is used by thousands of College Coaches and helps them recruit athletes to their programs each and every year. As the recruiting process for these College Coaches start moving along, they will start narrowing down their own choices.
Athletes: Create your own list of potential schools you are targeting and add them to your Favorites list on your ImRecruitable profile. You are able to add as many schools as you want, however we do recommend adding the schools that will be the best fit for you both on the athletic level and academics. Creating a recruiting profile and filling it out as much as you can is very important as it will give you more exposure to College Coaches. College Coaches have filter options when they are searching for specific recruits so you want to have as many categories filled out and be able o fall under one of the College Coaches search options. Example: if a College Coach filters athletes with a 3.0 GPA or higher, you can fall under that Coaches search if you have entered in your GPA and if it is higher than 3.0.
Contacting Recruits
After some narrowing down of recruits, College Coaches will start contacting (when allowed) recruits to see if their may be a mutual interest. For those recruits that have interest as well, Coaches will send then information about their school, athletic program and sometimes a recruiting questionnaire. Some Coaches may ask if you will be at a specific event or showcase to be able to come watch you compete and this would be considered the Coach having high interest. Also, Coaches that have shown interest in your Coach Activity section of your ImRecruitable profile, is letting you know you may be a good fit for their program.
Athletes: If you receive any form of interest through email or text, make sure you are responding to each Coach and thanking them for the opportunity. You may be looked at by many Coaches and you never know which one will be the best ft for you until you do all your homework on each school. When you're in some form of contact, it also means you are being evaluated by the Coach as well. Always keep the conversation alive with these College Coaches!
Evaluating Recruits
As College Coaches start contacting the recruiting and begin evaluating them, they also start narrowing down their choices. On top of College Coaches evaluate your recruiting profiles like the ones with ImRecruitable, they will also want to get to know you more as a person. Finding out what type of personality you have and see if you'd be a good fit for their program and get along with the other players on the team.
Once a College Coach starts narrowing down their choices, they will start to offer official and unofficial visits.
Athletes: Fill your ImRecruitable recruiting profiles as much as you can. Enter in all your up to date athletic and academic stats, high school transcripts, SAT/ACT scores and personal information about yourself so College Coaches have an understanding of the type of person you are and what hobbies you may have outside of your sport. Also, as mentioned before, athletes need to be as pro active as possible with College Coaches and don't always wait for the Coach to contact you. College Coaches are busy and there are many recruits reaching out to them as well so be the one to stand out and show the Coach your ultimate interest.
College Coaches Making Offers
Once College Coaches have evaluated all recruits and have narrowed down their choices, Coaches will start to give out offers. For offers, verbal offers can be backed out by either the Coach or the recruit. Official offers, the recruit will be sent a National Letter of Intent to sign usually in their senior year of high school to make if official.
Athletes: It’s best to have a good idea of scholarships that may be available to you, details on all of your offers, and how financial aid works if needed. Make sure you’ve ranked your schools in order of the ones you would like to commit to.
College Coaches Signing Recruits
Having recruits sign letter of intent is the final steps of a College Coaches recruiting process. The recruit will typically verbal commit before receiving an official offer from the Coach in which the recruit will sign. Typically the timeline for committing and signing starts with a verbal commitment from the athlete to the school.
Athletes: Through this final process and moving forward it is very important to keep your academics in good standing in order to stay eligible and continue to meet all guidelines.