Subscribe to the NCSA BlogTom Crean on Recruiting Younger Athletes
May 15th, 2009 - byCollege recruiting is consistently getting younger. It is now to the point where a coach can feel that he will be behind in recruiting of he isn’t actively tracking 8th grade recruits.
“Well, we’ve been talking about this a lot. I’ve been talking about this with coaches. Recruiting’s getting so much younger. You’re going to find freshmen throughout the state, throughout the country that have got their list. Some of them already have it narrowed down. We can’t even be sending them letters outside of questionnaires.”
“Would I want to offer an eighth grader? It would have to be an extremely, extremely special case. Would we know where the eighth graders are? Absolutely. Because if you don’t, you’re behind. If you’re not actively recruiting people are freshmen, meaning being visible at their practices and games, getting them on campus for unofficial visits; we learned, I don’t think the count is done, but since we took the job last April, when you look at all the unofficial visits, when you look at the tickets used for games, we were at 286. And I don’t think the count’s over yet. And that doesn’t even count what we would hope to have this weekend because we can meet with people the day before or the day after in the sense that there’s a lot of different rules we have to follow depending on where people play.”
“But again, it’s the visibility that you have to have. If you’re not there, they know it. And that’s one reason we still feel like we’re behind in the 2010 class. Because we had to spend so much time a year ago in getting a team on the floor and then recruiting the present day seniors, or rising seniors at that point to be here. Well, our opponents had already done all of that. They were just putting the finishing touches on that. And so that puts up behind a little bit. But again, the visibility is so important and that’s, again, when you can expose your university and your program in different ways, it’s a huge part in what’s going to happen for you in building that. And frankly, Indiana lost some of that. And we’ve gotta work extremely hard to get it back.”
If you are serious about playing in college its time to get serious about the recruiting process. If you aren’t actively taking steps to reach out to coaches you could get left behind.
