4 Essential Steps to Empower Your Athletes in the Recruiting Process

In the highly competitive world of college athletics recruiting, high school coaches play a crucial role in guiding their athletes toward success. By implementing these four key strategies, you can maximize your athletes' opportunities and help them manage the recruiting process more successfully.

1. Amplify Your Athletes’ Visibility with Technology

Get your athletes, and their information, where college coaches recruit: online! By using an athlete evaluation platform, you can significantly expand an athlete’s reach— connecting them with college programs that offer the best match.

Instead of repetitive, time-consuming manual or offline tasks, you can use technology to share an athlete’s information once and have it accessible to college programs at every level. Plus, by choosing a platform that’s free for both you and your athlete, every student has the opportunity to be recruited, regardless of their financial situation or participation in showcase camps. 

2. Prioritize Verified Data

Coaches need verified data to make informed decisions about an athlete. College coaches are inundated with athlete information, but trustworthy data sets prospects apart. A player's measurables – such as height, weight, and athletic performance – are only valuable if coaches can rely on the data’s accuracy.

Guide your athletes to prioritize data verification, whether through third-party validation (like camps operated by college coaches) or by providing visual evidence such as videos. To keep it efficient for your team, encourage sharing their information on a single, centralized evaluation platform seen by coaches at all levels. Verified data not only builds credibility but also increases opportunities for your athletes, making their recruiting efforts more valuable for everyone involved.

3. Provide Detailed Athlete Evaluations

As a coach, you know your athletes better than anyone. College programs rely on your insights to understand an athlete’s physicality, character, and potential. Comprehensive evaluations should highlight key intangibles such as leadership, work ethic, and coachability, while also offering comparisons that can help a college coach project an athlete’s likelihood of success.

This might sound cumbersome, but today’s technology allows you to do evaluations quickly and in a format accessible by all interested coaches. The insights you offer help college coaches make informed decisions on how a player might fit into their program. Your perspective greatly influences an athlete’s recruitment. 

4. Protect Athletes from Predatory Services

Unfortunately, the recruiting landscape has its share of pitfalls, particularly when it comes to scouting and recruiting services that charge athletes and their parents for promises of scholarship offers. It's crucial to educate your team on the reality —only college coaches can recruit and offer scholarships. Steer your athletes away from paid services that provide little value or genuine connections.

Keep your athletes focused on recruiting activities led by college coaches. Have them prioritize responding to college coach information requests, thus showing their interest and attentiveness to the recruiting process. Your athletes should spend their time and energy improving their skills, maintaining strong academic performance, and showcasing their abilities through legitimate conversations with college coaches.

Boost Your Team’s Recruiting Success 

By implementing these four steps, you can significantly enhance your athletes' chances of getting recruited. You have an impactful role to play in recruiting, helping your athletes navigate the complexities of recruitment while focusing on their personal and athletic development.

For those interested in leveraging technology to help your athletes get recruited, platforms like Scorability offer a huge recruiting database and thoughtful player evaluation process. Scorability is used by football programs across all divisions, from Power 4 to JUCO, and already hosts more than 50,000 high school athletes.

It allows high school coaches to manage team rosters, provide secure evaluations, and ensure data verification – all key aspects of the strategies discussed above. The platform is free for athletes and high school coaches, bringing equal opportunity to athletes everywhere. To learn more or to start managing your team's recruiting efforts through this platform, visit: https://www.scorability.com/coaches/

College coaches at every level use Scorability to evaluate and recruit athletes.