Ep 64 - College Recruiting Process

Discover the secrets of college recruiting success with Matt Bos. Take control of your search to stand out to coaches. Get essential insights for your journey. Tune in and unlock your potential!

Transcript

00:00:03 - Introduction

This is the Your Sports Resource podcast where each week you'll learn actionable strategies that you can implement. So, the operations of your club support your coaching staff and the direction of your organization. We are committed to excellence in youth sports leadership. Let's get started.

00:00:26

Hello and welcome to the Your Sports Resource podcast. I am Matt Bos and what I want to do here is take some time to do kind of just a shorter podcast on the college recruiting process. I spent just over 17 years working in university programs and I have a lot of background in recruiting currently. 

00:00:54

Now I just help family and friends who have kids who are going off to whatever or playing whatever sport want to go off to college and kind of just help them and talk them through their process and why I felt like this could be important as we think, as most of our listeners, I believe, are going to be club coaches or high school coaches or board members from club teams, whether you're that or a parent or if there are some student-athletes out there listening, this is kind of for all of those people. 

00:01:30

And what I thought here was this is just something good and some knowledge for coaches, particularly to have to talk to their athletes about. I think it's really important that student-athletes kind of take the reins as far as their college certs goes. So I want to just go over the basics. 

00:01:51

I don't want to get into too much detail and I don't want to get like we do with everything with Your Sports Resource. I want to make this more of things that you can just take action on and rather kind of stay away from more of the theory or things like that. 

00:02:08

But I want to do something to where if you're a coach, that you can sit down and have a yearly meeting with your athletes and go over college recruiting. If you're not able to do that, maybe it's just something you can do in a team meeting and make it shorter, but it's just stuff to give your kids so that they can kind of take control of this. 

00:02:30

And why I think it's important now is because I think as a college coach, the more engaged student-athletes are in the process, and the more they take leadership and ownership over their search, the more appealing it is to a college coach. 

00:02:48

I think it's also good for the athlete because they understand a little bit more about the universities that they're looking at and at the potential programs they're looking at. So I think it gives them a better understanding. 

00:02:59

And really in these days, everybody's kind of tech-savvy, right? Parents obviously kids, people have computers. They know how to use them well now. So these are things as you're going through your college search. There are companies out there that this is what they do. 

00:03:17

You can have profiles with some of these recruiting services that you can maybe be for free and you get on a list, but typically, if you want more, if you want them reaching out to coaches, then you're going to pay. And sometimes it's a hefty sum. 

00:03:36

And honestly, for the most part, it's stuff that you can kind of just do on your own. It just takes some work and a little bit of time. So that's what I want to do. And I have to be honest when I was recruiting, I didn't have a whole lot of luck with their recruiting services. 

00:03:54

It seemed like I would get list of kids saying, hey, these people are interested in your program. And then at the end of the day, it didn't really seem when you'd start reaching out that they necessarily were. So I felt like I was at times just getting lots of lists of kids who signed up for their service rather than somebody spending the time to really fit somebody who they thought would be a good fit. 

00:04:15

Because unless they've had in-depth conversations with the coach at each one of those universities, they don't necessarily know what those coaches are looking for. So what I would suggest to your athletes is sit them down and just say, hey, listen, here are some steps you can take to kind of take ownership of this. 

00:04:31

And the first thing is whenever they're searching, they don't have to be serious about their search yet. This works for just even if they don't want to be an athlete. But go on. There's free websites out there, College Board, niche.com, there's some free services out there that are great college search engines that they will narrow things down. 

00:04:54

You can kind of tailor your search to what you're looking for and just go through those and find some kind of start poking around and kind of start looking and seeing what's out there. Some schools within their school system use things like, I think, like Naviance, and there's some other things within high schools that they're search engines out there. 

00:05:18

So just kind of go around, play around, see what's out there. What are the academic programs like? What is the student body size, locations of schools, kind of stuff like that? So that's just the initial part of the search and that's easy, right? 

00:05:30

And even, like I said, even if they don't want to be an athlete, that's just good stuff to have once they really kind of start to get into it and they're like, hey, I'm wanting to look for a university. I think there's a couple of serious questions that need to be asked. 

00:05:47

And this is most likely between the student-athlete and the parent, particularly because I think it's really important to hit these early because as you go through these search, you're going to get bogged down in a lot of things. 

00:06:00

One of them is the distance from home. Like how far away are you comfortable going away from home? Because what happens is a lot of times kids think, I want to go to this school and it looks idealistic and it's across the country and it's going to be great. 

00:06:14

I want to get away from home, not realizing that, well, maybe then getting home looks like once or twice a year and it's a long plane flight and it's just not maybe all what it's cracked up to be. So they, I think, have to have that real conversation and say, hey, this is what I'm comfortable with and know what that means to when they are going away. 

00:06:34

The size of the school is another question. Be understanding of what is the difference between a big school and a little school. Sometimes I hear kids saying like, well, I go to this big high school, so I want a big university program. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison there, right?

00:06:54

When you get on a college campus, you're bringing all these people from all over the place, even if it's a smaller campus, you're going to meet a lot of new people. But it really comes down to class size, right? 

00:07:05

If you're in a big university, you could sometimes expect at least early on in general ed courses where you may be in a lecture hall with 2 to 300 people and there's no high schools that I know of that have class sizes like that, where at some small universities I've worked at, where there's maybe 15. So there's pluses and minuses to those, depending on personality, what you want to get out of it. 

00:07:30

But it's something to really kind of dig into and put some serious thought into. The next question, I think is probably one of the biggest ones for me, and this is one I really hit on, is have a talk with Mom and Dad or whoever's going to be paying the bulk of your university about what your actual budget is. Right. And a lot of kids think, well, I'm going to get scholarships. 

00:07:57

I have these grades. I have this. That's all fine, but at the end of the day, there's going to be something that is going, typically financially, that's going to be a constraint to what kids want to do and being realistic here for swimmers, the mass majority of people are going to go to school and they may get an academic or some other scholarship, but they're probably not going to receive athletic aid. 

00:08:25

And even if they do, it may be very minimal. Right. There's very few big-time scholarships out there for swimmers. So having that idea of the budget early on helps narrow down the search and understand where you can kind of focus things in on what you don't want to do is start going down this path of, we're looking at all these places.

00:08:44

I have all these great schools I want to look at, and then at the end of the day, the price tag comes and it's just like, well, we really can't afford that, or it doesn't make sense to pay that much, whether it's the parents having to kind of fork over the money or kind of looking at stuff like student loans and that you're going to be paying off an undergraduate degree for a long period of time. 

00:09:05

So that's a big thing that I think really they need to answer those questions and have a good understanding before they get too far into the search. The other thing I'd always ask, and as a college coach, this is one of the things I always tried to kind of hit home with kids that I was recruiting. 

00:09:27

So the next question is, whatever university you're going to go to, is that the best place to get your education and to believe that it's going to set you up to be in the situation that you want to be for your future? 

00:09:41

Because swimming is fantastic and college swimming can be one of the best experiences someone's going to have, but it could also be taken away pretty quickly, whether it's programs get cut, kids get injured. So what you want to do is you want to make sure that if swimming were taken away for some reason, is that a university that I would choose to just stay at? 

00:10:04

There is those cases where kids may transfer somewhere else, but if you're serious about your academics and you're looking to set yourself up for your future, then try to pick an institution in which swimming is important and you feel like you're going to play a vital role. 

00:10:21

But the academic side of it and the community side of it is something that you feel super comfortable with if you were to take away the swimming part, because what I would like to try to really hit home and I think where with high school aged kids and with parents is the fact that up until this point of their life, this is probably the biggest decision they're going to make, right? 

00:10:50

Like if you're a 16, 17, or 18-year-old, this is going to be looking at where you're going to go for 4 years, spend 4 years of your life, have to acclimate into a new community. This is a huge decision. So you want to make sure that you've done all your groundwork and laid all those kind of pieces out to make the best and most informed decision. 

00:11:13

So now once you kind of have those questions kind of answered, then it's kind of simple as far as start putting a resume together. You've got people around, they'll have people around them, whether it's you as a coach potentially or a board member, parents, aunts, uncles, everybody's probably put a resume together at some point. 

00:11:35

Have them put together a one-page kind of resume that talks about their academic and athletic achievements. I think in this it's really important to have some sort of personal statement in there to just let college coaches know who you are, why you feel you would be a good fit for their team, and what you're hoping to accomplish. 

00:12:01

This goes a long way, lets coaches know kind of right off the bat who you are, kind of what you value. And it's a really good way to set a tone for college coaches. Next thing is everybody pretty much nowadays has a phone or knows someone with a phone. 

00:12:20

Get some videos, get some race videos, some nice, clear, not shaky videos, but nice clear videos of you swimming so they can kind of analyze your technique, see what you are like underwater, see what it looks like of you getting in and out of turns, getting off the block and stuff like that. 

00:12:42

Again, the more information you're going to pass on to them, the better they're going to have a chance to make a decision and be informed about who you are, what your strengths are. 

00:12:54

And a lot of times I would like to know, what's the weakness? What are the things that I can see in a kid to say, hey, they're pretty good, but I see this, this and this. Man, if we could just clean that stuff up or get better in some areas, they're going to be dynamite. 

00:13:07

Right? So those are things that are super helpful. So now you've kind of narrowed down, you've answered your big questions, you've got a resume, you've got some videos. Now you kind of dig more into that search, right? Go on. 

00:13:21

This is the point where then you've kind of have maybe the area you want to go, the types of schools start researching in a region, then what schools have swimming get on their websites, their athletic websites. Look at their roster, look at their roster size, where are they pulling kids from? 

00:13:39

Look at their facilities, look at the coaching staff. How long have the coach has been there? Kind of what's their background? These are things that, again, you're just kind of gathering all that information and if you feel like, hey, ma'am, this could be a good fit for me, that's when you want to start emailing those coaches with a nice letter, introducing yourself, including your resume and your videos. 

00:14:02

Because I can tell you what, there's nothing better than getting that straight from the athlete as a college coach, having that communication coming from the athlete, it goes a long way and it means a lot. 

00:14:19

And it shows you that, hey, these kids are super interested and that's what the coaches want. They want kids who are proactive, who are willing to put in some of the work, and those are the types of kids they want in their program. 

00:14:34

And the other part, honestly, before you get to there, I kind of maybe skipped over was look at the results, look at the conference meet results, look at the dual meet results, look at their recruiting classes from previous years, like, understand what type of athletes they're bringing in, understand what it's going to take to make an impact in that program, what it's going to take to make the conference championship team. 

00:14:59

And again, this is where it comes down to, hey, some people don't mind going in and having to work a little bit to get those spots. Some people want to go in and make an immediate impact. These are the personal things that you've kind of have to figure out as you go through this. But just informing yourself of all those details is super important. 

00:15:23

So what we've talked about here is a lot of free online tools to start doing their college search, asking those important questions. A lot of times that takes a conversation and a serious conversation with a parent. For those kids to kind of really understand what's going to work best for them, their family and set them up for their best long-term future. 

00:15:51

Put together a resume, get some videos, narrow that search down, and find that place where, hey, you can make the best impact and then start reaching out to those coaches that you feel that you're good fits for. 

00:16:09

And if you kind of done your research and you've kind of felt like, hey, I've put in the legwork, I think I've made really smart choices here with the schools that I'm picking, then most likely you probably are a good fit for that program, and it's going to probably turn out really well. 

00:16:27

So again, coaches, parents, whoever is listening to this, athletes, it's take control of your own search. It's something that just takes some time and some effort to put in. But at the end of the day, it's going to pay off huge if you do it right. So thank you for listening. Information more on what we do here at Your Sports Resource, go to yoursportsresource.com. Again, thank you for joining me today, and we will talk to you next time.