Sports Illustrated recently questioned the effectiveness of paper mailing in recruiting techniques.
During his sophomore year at Santa Barbara (Calif.) High, Roberto Nelson placed a cardboard box behind a green recliner in the family room of his home. It was a decent-sized container—it once had been used to ship a microwave—and a sufficient catchall. If he tossed something behind the recliner, it almost always fell safely into the box.
Mail arrived at the apartment complex where Nelson lived at around 2 p.m. each day. Larger envelopes didn’t fit through the slot in the front door, so the mail carrier often dumped the delivery on the doormat. Nelson would leaf through the stack when he got home from school and then toss everything over the green recliner. Sometimes he would mimic a jump shot as he cast that day’s bundle into the box.
The box Roberto Nelson placed behind the green recliner was part of an experiment to see what, if anything, had changed 25 years later. In the era of e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and the like, did coaches still use old-fashioned correspondence to court players? Could recruiting by the post still sway a kid? In short, does recruiting mail still matter?
Nelson would eventually receive scholarship offers from UCLA, Florida, Ohio State and a dozen other top programs. A 6’3″ guard, he was ranked among the top 100 players in the class of 2009. At SI’s request, Nelson saved every piece of mail he received from recruiters. The collection started with that big box but quickly expanded to include another, and then a milk crate, three shoe boxes and two large paper bags. Nelson received 2,161 pieces of mail from 56 programs, a haul so massive that at one point his mother, Roberta, threatened to throw it all in the trash if SI didn’t cart it away. “It can’t stay here anymore,” she said, likening the expanding pile to a giant blob. “It’s taking over my house.”
As the 1984 SI article noted, basketball coaches began embracing the mail as a recruiting technique after the NCAA put restrictions on alternate methods, such as the repeated visits made by Switzer’s assistants. In the 1990s innovation came only in the form of carpet-bombing campaigns such as the one USC basketball assistant David Miller orchestrated in 1996. He twice sent a future Trojan, Kevin Augustine, 500 handwritten letters in a single day.
The only significant change in the last decade has been the targeting of recruits at younger ages. Middle schoolers began receiving handwritten letters from basketball coaches, and some recruiters started sending notes to fifth- and sixth-graders. The NCAA changed the language in its bylaws last year and now prohibits coaches from mailing recruiting materials to a player before June 15 of his sophomore year of high school. But there is a loophole. Coaches are allowed to send camp brochures, questionnaires or NCAA-printed materials, such as eligibility guides, to prospects regardless of their age. Some recruiters inundate a young prospect with those documents so as to get envelopes embossed with their school’s logo into his mailbox. In one instance a basketball program sent one page of the NCAA’s 21-page Guide for College Bound Student-Athletes to a recruit each week over a stretch of more than five months.
Most striking about the correspondence Nelson received was not the volume, not even Kentucky’s whopping total of 295 mailings, but how little of it was personalized. Of the 2,161 pieces of mail that arrived on Nelson’s doorstep, only 200—or 9.3%—featured writing tailored specifically for him. Everything else was a form letter, a media guide, a press release or, most often, a photocopy of a page from a media guide.
With that as the high point it is no wonder that on most days Nelson heaved the latest bundle behind the recliner without even a cursory look. In all, he opened only 387 pieces of mail, or about 18%. (He later permitted SI to open the sealed letters.)
Five other top recruits—three from the class of 2009 and two from the class of 2010—say they also opened only a small percentage of their mail after realizing it was mostly impersonal. Why, then, do schools still send recruiting letters?
“Most coaches, especially the younger ones, know the mail is not the way to build a relationship anymore,” says a recruiter for one Pac-10 school. “But everyone else is doing it, so no one wants to be the one not to.”
In Nelson’s mass of mail it was easier to find an NCAA violation than a well-turned phrase. LSU, for example, sent Nelson four recruiting letters before the NCAA’s first allowable date, then Sept. 1 of the player’s junior year. “That occurred under the previous coaching staff,” says LSU associate AD Michael Bonnette.
“Schools often mistake what year in school a recruit is, or they are just trying to get a jump on everyone else,” says Foti Mellis, an associate athletic director at Cal.
But even those breaking the rules still send mostly form letters and other impersonal correspondence. Thus there would seem to be little separating recruiters from the credit card companies, Pennysaver and Valpak.
They all mail junk.
Noting the environmental cost compared to the number of letters Nelson opened, Gleason asked the obvious question: “If recruits don’t open the letters, why keep sending them? Why waste all that money and paper?”
Some schools might soon ask themselves the same thing. In May, Michigan and Ohio State jointly announced that they would cease printing media guides. Bygones from the pre-Internet age, these publications contain as many as 208 pages (the NCAA-mandated maximum) of records, stats, player biographies and other team information that is now also readily available electronically. Long a recruiting tool, they are no longer of much value on that front either. (Nelson received 44 guides and says he looked at “one or two.”)
Cal, Iowa, Wisconsin and the entire Mid-American Conference quickly followed the Wolverines and the Buckeyes, perhaps signaling the beginning of a trend of athletic departments’ rethinking what they print.
“The environmental issue came up after the decision was made,” says Bruce Madej, Michigan’s associate athletic director. “Mostly it came down to: Why spend $100,000 printing something that is no longer doing what it was meant do be doing?”
Even if coaches continue to recruit via paper mail, the internet has still become the dominant media in the recruiting process. For recruits, the days of paper resumes and mailing film are numbered. Coaches are looking to streamline their recruiting by looking at online profiles and watching streamed highlight videos on the internet.
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