All across the country, school has finally started for many high school student athletes. This is the most important time of their life.
The recruiting process for all high school student athletes never ends and this is more important for student athletes who are entering their senior year.
There are millions of high school student athletes out there all believing that somehow they will be found by college coaches. Parents and student athletes are misled into believing that college coaches will be interested in them because they are seniors. This, of course, is not true. College programs are only interested in the players that they know about and have established relationships with over a number of years.
In all my years of experience as a college recruiter I’ve spoken to thousands of parents who believed the recruiting process takes place at the end of the student athlete’s season. This is the worst mistake any parent or high school coach can make when it comes to recruiting. The longer you wait, the more opportunities disappear. The longer you hold off the recruiting process, the longer it will take to get college programs interested. The longer it takes for you to get a DVD into the hands of college coaches, the longer it will take for them to view it. The longer parents and high school coaches take in helping a student athlete with recruiting, is days and weeks of wasted time that could have been used to contact college coaches.
You are sleepwalking through the day to day details of the college recruiting process.
The only way the college recruiting process actually works is by actually doing something to make it work. Someone, whether it’s the parents or the high school coaches, must contact college coaches on a consistent basis for a period of years. The longer you delay this process the more opportunities that will be missed that you can never ever get back.
Think about how easy the recruiting process would be if parents, high school coaches and student athletes were consistent in contacting a large number of college coaches over a period of 2 to 4 years. With that kind of consistent effort I believe there would be a larger number of college scholarship opportunities but because many parents, high school coaches and some student athletes are sleepwalking through the entire college recruiting process opportunities are going to be lost forever.
When parents realize that there is a major problem with recruiting it’s generally at the end of the student athlete’s senior season which, by then, there may not be any time left. Parents are now scrambling around trying to find a quick solution to their college recruiting problem.
I focused a lot this conversation on parents because they are the ones with check writing power and are responsible for the student athlete in their family.
Because of money, laziness or being totally misinformed, parents are totally responsible for the success of the recruiting process or its failure.
I just think the college recruiting process is the last thing parents, high school coaches and student athletes should be sleepwalking through.
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