NCSA College Athletic Scholarships Blog

I wrote yesterday about the first two parts of ESPN’s four part series on Social media and college athletic recruiting.  The series continues today with the topic I wrote about at the end of yesterday’s post:  How athletes can harness social media to their advantage.  Below are the best excerpts from today’s article:

Both Lattimore and Gardner say they’ve used Facebook to talk with coaches. They’ve also connected with other recruits around the country, sharing notes about different colleges and talking about their futures. Although Lattimore plans to hold a traditional news conference when he ultimately announces his college choice, he’s leaning toward telling everyone his final list of five schools through his Facebook status update.

With recruits talking about everything from their recent visits to their general likes and dislikes on these sites, college coaches know they had better refresh those pages often.

“It’s our responsibility to make that sure that happens,” Utah recruiting coordinator Morgan Scalley said. “If a kid doesn’t check his e-mail but is really into Facebook, then it’s important that we learn about that. They may lie and say they don’t, but I believe the majority of college football coaches look at that stuff.”

Some prospects hope the increased attention will help them get noticed. Recruits’ families and their high school coaches have long used the Internet to promote kids by subscribing to recruiting services or posting YouTube videos. Now it’s possible for a player to send a direct message to Pete Carroll’s Twitter account and tell the USC coach, “Hey, check out the highlight videos on my Facebook profile.”

“I don’t think coaches are saying, ‘I need a quarterback, let me go MySpace it,’” said Anthony Neyer, a borderline Division I quarterback prospect from Palm Desert, Calif. “But if they’ve got somebody they’re interested in, there’s no doubt they’re checking that. I definitely think that will be a more of a predominant thing in the future.”

I 100% agree with the article’s point.  Using every available tool is necesary for a college recruit to maximize their recruiting potential.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 4:37 pm and is filed under College Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.