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Tim Ryerson Common Mistakes In Athletic Recruitment (4:10)
The most important thing that we work with our client with is helping them avoid those
really common mistakes. They are really simply concepts. Probably the biggest one is to target
schools above their ability level, so they see the schools they have heard of, the school
that go on the ticker at the bottom of ESPN. Those are the schools that they target. They
want to go to Notre Dame or Alabama or Texas or Ohio State, and they don’t really have
an understanding of the different levels of playing in college. They only target those
schools. That is a major mistake that they make.
Probably just as common of mistake is that they only target a couple of schools. They
will target two schools then they will maybe have a third school that they will look at
a little bit. The problem with that if you’re not a student, if you’re not an athlete,
that’s okay. You can have a reach school, the school you are looking at, you can probably
target three schools would be okay. If you’re an athlete, because it is so competitive for
each of these spots at the college level, you can’t target three schools.
You have to target, in some cases, as many as three hundred. Not only do you have to
be able to get into that school, but that coach has to want you as an athlete and have
a need for you in your position, they have to have a financial aid package for you, then
you have to beat out 1,500 other kids that are looking at that same spot. What you want
to do is the same thing that college coaches are doing and that is they are targeting a
lot of kids for one spot. You have to target a lot of schools.
We tell our clients if you want to have ten schools make you a financial aid offer and
that is what you want, because if you are a buyer, and you are a buyer, you want to
have options. You want to have different people make offers to you so you can drive the price
down by getting the best offer. Let’s say you want to have ten offers. You need to have
maybe 50 people recruit you to get those ten offers to actually take interest in you. To
get 50 people to take interest in you, you might have to start with 500 because not every
school no matter how great. If Moms and Dads are listening, no matter how great your son
is, not everybody is going to like him. That is just part of the recruiting process.
Another common mistake that families make in the recruiting process is to have a false
sense of security. It is maybe another word for having a big ego. This might include thinking,
“Well I got a letter in the mail from a school, so they want me, so I’m set.”
If you’ve been a college coach, you understand how college coaching really works. You’ll
know that getting a letter in the mail doesn’t mean much. It is one part of the process that
is usually one of the first parts of the process, but that letter is going out to thousands
of other kids. Maybe that means they want you to come to their camp and they want some
camp money from you. Maybe that means they just want to gather some information from
you and get your video so that they can watch it. Maybe they are a school with a JV program
and tuition driven school and they just want your enrollment dollars.
A true story is I got a 60 pound boxer and that 60 pound boxer gets letters in the mail
from college coaches because we have her in our distribution database. She’ll get letters,
“Hey Hadley, we really like you as a prospect for our program and we want to take a look
at you this summer. Please come to our camp. It is $575.00.” So obviously the letter
is great. Getting letters is better than not getting letters. It is better than nobody
knowing who you are to begin with. At least they have your email address and at least
they have your mailing address. You’re getting a letter, but it doesn’t mean they are making
you a scholarship offer. There’s a lot of area between that.
Other things that athletes do and families do that are big mistakes include expecting
somebody else to do it for you. You hear this a lot, “Well my coach is going to get some
coaches to come to open gym or my club coach says that we are going to go to this big tournament
this summer and all these coaches are going to be there.” You have given your life in
a coach that just happens to be at a game at a school that you happen to want to go
to and they happen to like you and they happen to have the right need at that same time.
That happens – yeah. It also happens that people win the Powerball. It just happened
last week, so it doesn’t mean that just going to an event hoping to get recruited
is a good recruiting strategy, just like buying a Powerball ticket is probably not a good
investment strategy for the future. Could it happen? Sure it’s great, but if you are
relying just on that, you are probably missing the boat a little bit.
Those are some of the major concepts that a lot of families make mistakes on and they
are goals to try to help them not make those mistakes.