Dan Tudor

A few years ago, my wife and I excitedly watched the cement being poured for the foundation of our new home.  You don’t really realize just how much cement it takes to pour a foundation, not to mention a patio and a driveway.

After that task was completed, we came back a little later after the cement had hardened to check on the finished work. 

And that’s when we saw something unexpected…

The same men that had been carefully pouring and smoothing the cement for our new home were now etching deep lines at various points in the foundation, and even cracking it in certain places!

"What are they doing!?!?" I thought to myself.  I wanted our foundation to be perfect.  I was looking for smooth and beautiful, not cracked and etched.  The control freak in me couldn’t resist pointing out this apparant problem to one of the men overseeing the operation.  The answer he gave me was enlightening.

"We do that because we want to be the ones to determine where the cracks are in the foundation", he explained.  "It’s going to crack over time anyway.  But if we establish the main crack lines now, and etching those deep lines in the driveway as we’re laying the concrete, we can make sure that no cracks show up later in places we don’t want them."

All of a sudden, the cracks weren’t a bad thing.  I understood their purpose, and the benefit to the overall structure.

And that’s where the lesson for college coaches and recruiters comes in…

You need to show the cracks in your program early on for your prospects.

To achieve that, you have to understand what many coaches want to do first.  I have found, as we go to campuses to work personally with coaches and athletic departments, that many recruiters want to paint to "smooth" of a picture to their prospects.

"If you come to my program, we’re going to build everything around you.  You’re going to be the star for the next four years."

"Here at our school, they you’ll get all the extra academic help that you need.  We make sure that you won’t struggle with academics at all."

"The weather here is amazing all year long.  Yes, it gets a little cold during the winter, but our kids love it."

You get the point, right?  Do some of these sound familiar, Coach?  If you worry too much about presenting the "perfect" college situation for your prospect in everything you show them and tell them, you probably run the risk of making the prospect question whether they are getting the real story from you.  Kids today are smart, and they know that nothing is perfect at any college they visit.

So, its best to show them your cracks before they show up in unexpected places, at unexpected times.

As we outline in great detail in our two recruiting workbooks for college coaches, most prospects are actively searching for the seedy underbelly of your college and program: They’re looking for what’s wrong with your program, why they wouldn’t like the other players, and other reasons to cross you off the list.  Choosing a college program is a process of elimination for most prospects.  The point I’m trying to make?  They’re looking for your cracks.

Here are two big benefits to doing it, and one idea on how to do it:

•  Benefit #1: You become believable.  Presenting a picture of perfection to your recruit runs the risk of leaving them wondering what they’re missing.  Whether large or small, there are always problems or imperfections at a college or in a coach’s program.  By taking the initiative and exposing your own faults, you becoming more trustworthy: After all, if you’re open and honest in what’s wrong with your program or college, why shouldn’t the prospect assume that you’re telling the truth with regards to what you’re presenting as the selling points of your program?  Of course.  And that’s why its smart to reveal your own cracks before your competitors do it for you.
• Benefit #2:  You can turn your negatives into positives.  Presented correctly, your negatives can actually become selling points for you.  For example, you could present a negative about your campus’ remote location by saying, "We’re glad we aren’t located in the middle of a big city because it really helps build a community feeling on campus, and our players develop some great long term friendships because of it."  When you define that negative yourself, you can build in the corresponding benefits of it as well (something your competition probably won’t do!)
• How to do it:  What we do when we sit down with a new Total Recruiting Solution college client is the same thing you should do, which is make a list of the objections that you will most likely hear from one of your prospects.  Then, list the biggest ways the disadvantages of that objection would help highlight the benefits of the objection…or, the "upside" of the negative.  Using the example of the college with the remote, rural location, there are definite benefits to being an isolated campus.  Are there negatives?  Sure, potentially…especially if you have a prospect who loves city life and a more metropolitan setting.  However, they could probably be persuaded to see the upside to a more close-knit, isolated college community if that "crack" was presented in a positive way.

Coaches who highlight and reveal their negatives don’t risk losing the interest of a prospect.  On the contrary, those that do it creatively and sincerely will stand-out among those colleges that are recruiting them.

So get busy this week, coach, and start figuring out where you can start "cracking"!

Need help figuring out how to get started?  Think about attending one of our special recruiting conferences, or look into our Total Recruiting Solution plan for your program.  It’s affordable, and very effective…it’s like having a team of recruiting experts in your office ready to create messages and strategies that get you noticed and get better recruits on campus.

Contact Dan Tudor with questions by email at dan@sellingforcoaches.com.  

"Shooting is the most important offensive fundamental skill in basketball.  A team that shoots well will always be in ball games."  – Jerry Tarkanian, former UNLV head coach

Most coaches recognize it as the most important aspect of playing great basketball: Correct shooting mechanics.

Even at the college level, incredible amounts of time and energy are spent on trying to uncover mechanical defects in a player’s shooting technique, followed by more time trying to explain the needed corrections to the athlete.

"The most frustrating part of what I used to do was getting my players to visually understand what they needed to do to correct their shot," said one assistant college coach.  "Man, the software has really changed the way we do things."

"The software" he is referring to is Dartfish, the revolutionary software tool for college coaches that allows an athlete to visually identify small differences in their mechanics more quickly, allowing their coaches to work with them to correct errors in those mechanics.  The results?  Fixing problems more quickly.

"We use to spend several days trying to identify and correct little mistakes and bad habits our players would fall into," said the assistant coach.  "Now it might take an hour or so."

Some of the things that college basketball coaches say that they’ve been able to more easily correct include changing shot velocities, incorrect angles of release and the trajectory of a ball once it leaves the fingertips.

"We designed the way the software works with coaches in mind," says Victor Bergonzoli, CEO of Dartfish USA.  "We’ve had great feedback from the college coaches that use it.  Over and over again, they say its given them a real advantage over their competition that still isn’t familiar with what it does."

Originally used by the U.S. Olympic team, Dartfish is becoming a mainstay in gyms across the nation’s college campuses.

To get your look at the how this new technology can work for your program, click here.

Every coach seems to have players that they can label.

You might look at a kid and say to yourself, "He’s a great practice player, but he folds in the game."  Or, you might be a coach who has an athlete who is a horrible practice player but when it’s game time, look out…he raises his game to a whole new level.

For a college coach, understanding what drives an athlete – what motivates them, what drags them down, what keeps their focus – is one of the differences between coaches who build great programs, and those that struggle to keep their jobs.

How are college coaches starting to get a read on what type of mental make-up their players have?  They are turning to an advanced sports psychology test, the Troutwine Athletic Profile (TAP) report.

Pro sports has relied on Troutwine for years, and how they are available for college coaches to use.  Want to see what the reports do, what kind of information they give a coach, and more?  Click here.

There I was on the side of the road, waiting for a tow truck, and thinking about recruiting.

My wife’s car, which had been showing signs of needing some minor tune-ups for several weeks, had suddenly overheated.  I heard a hissing sound under the hood as I stopped.  Ruling out the possibility that a family of snakes had taken up residence next to the washer fluid thingy, I deducted that whatever was once minor was now major.

And I was stuck.  Plans for the day ruined, all because I didn’t take an ounce of prevention when it came to some simple auto repairs.

With nothing to do but sit in my overheated hissing car, my thoughts turned to recruiting.  "There are lessons for coaches here," I thought to myself.

The parallels are real.  How?  Try these on for size:

• Many coaches ignore the warning signs.  That little hissing under the hood of your recruiting plan?  It’s going to turn into a big problem if you don’t get it fixed.
• It’s going to cost you more later.  Not fixing your recruiting message by tuning it up now is going to come back to bite you later.
• When it crashes, its going to cause a mini-disaster.  For me, it was a few hours of my day.  For you, it might be that position player that would be the difference between a mediocre season and a conference championship.  You might not lose your job over that kind of a season, but it’s going to put pressure on you.  All because you didn’t pay attention to the little signs months before.
• Things grind to a stop.  Bad recruiting plans mean very few prospects, very few phone calls, and very few "next level" athletes at the end of the process when you’re really looking for a good recruiting class.  It’s hard to make that happen when your recruiting plan is stopped on the side of the road waiting for help.
• You lose control over your coaching life.  This is the end result of all the consequences I just listed, and it’s the one that we deal with most during our On-Campus Workshops.  Coaches who ignore the recruiting part of their job (or at least don’t approach it as seriously as they do the coaching part of their job) end up relying on chance and luck to sign a lot of their recruits.  They choose, in many ways, to let fate and their prospects run the process rather than controlling it themselves.  The result?  Very little control over your coaching life, because successful coaching starts with successful recruiting.

So what’s the recommended tune-up for a sputtering recruiting plan?  Of course, I’ll recommend what we do for coaches, but in the event you want to handle it yourself here are the first three things I’d recommend you check under your recruiting engine:

1. Do you have a plan?  I mean a really detailed, week-by-week plan that serves as a guide for you and your staff.  Something that lets you measure success (or failure) in terms of your goals for a particular recruiting class.  Don’t have one?  Sit down with your staff and develop one.
2. Are your letters and email messages speaking your recruit’s language?  They need to be shorter, and it needs to be all about them.  And most of all, they need to be consistent…don’t let weeks go by in between contacts. 
3. Are you focused on getting them on campus?  Most coaches would answer "yes" to that question.  But that means developing a message that hits on all cylinders and doesn’t try to sell a recruit with a letter or email; that "sale" happens when they get to campus.  Make sure your campaign has a singular focus of getting athletes on campus where you can interact with them in person, one on one.

Take my word for it, Coach.  Doing the simple work now will prevent a lot of headaches down the road.