by Mandy Green, Tudor Collegiate Strategies
I am about to present a webinar on Wednesday March 10th at 1pm to over 100 coaches about how to be an amazing recruiting coordinator. Click the link to register to attend live, or to get the recording afterwards.
I asked these coaches to fill me in on what the biggest challenges they face day to day that prevents them from being an amazing recruiting coordinator.
So far, the number 1 answer has been getting pulled away from recruiting by all of the other stuff that has to get done.
As a 22-year college coach veteran, I am fully aware that a typical coach’s day is filled with people, texts, emails, and voice messages begging for your time, attention, and energy.
I also realize that there are a lot of you who might not have any assistants so have to do everything yourself, you might be an assistant but the head coach keeps pulling you away to do other things, or you are constantly being interrupted by administrators or your athletes, etc.
I get that there are external factors that might be pulling you away from your recruiting duties . . . BUT ( a little tough love here), I’m going to ask you to look in the mirror and gauge how well you are prioritizing your day.
Coach, you set up your day.
If you are finding that more often than not, your days were on the frustrating side because you didn’t feel like you made any significant progress towards your recruiting responsibilities, it goes back at some point to how you are prioritizing things during those days.
How have you been doing in this department? Really think about it. Do you feel like you are proactive and in control of your days or do you just wake up and respond to everybody else?
Now, I know that we have to be available to our team, staff, administration, and recruits, but not as much as you may think or are currently doing.
Today I want to teach you one new way to think about your prioritization. When you do a better job of prioritizing things, I know that you will find that you will start having more wins than losses with your recruiting day by day.
I want you to stop prioritizing the easy.
You know if you are guilty of prioritizing easy if your day feels like there is a whole lot of busy work but you don’t feel as if you’re spending a significant amount of time on the recruiting responsibilities of your job. I’m sure that you probably intended to do a significant amount of recruiting before you got in the office. But you think that to get a great start to the day and to build some momentum, you will just get some of the easy things off of your to-list. And then what tends to happen is that you never ever really get around to doing work that will really move the needle for your program.
Again coach, you set up your day. You can choose to do things first that will make a real difference in your program and could change your program for the better in a significant way. Sure, those other things need to get done. But choose to do them only after you have spent at least 90 minutes on high priority recruiting things.
Stop prioritizing easy and start to prioritize progress. There are hundreds of items on your to-do list but there are really only a few key things that will help you accomplish your recruiting goals. Do those things first before you do the easy stuff. It sounds so simple but it was a total game changer for me when I finally started doing this.
Moving forward, I want you to do this EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.
When you are planning your day, ask yourself, what 3 things must happen today that will get me some real movement forward with my recruiting? Then, first thing when you get into the office, don’t do the easy stuff, but instead I want you to take action on something hard.
If you do the hard stuff first, you can make progress before the craziness of the day kicks in. As the recruiting coordinator, you are responsible for quality of your recruiting class. Don’t continue to allow external distractions and all of the other tasks that have to get done affect your next recruiting class.
If you do these things day after day, you will start to find yourself getting a little bit more confident, day by day your will get more momentum, you will make significant progress, and over time you will massively get a head of your competition who is continuing to let external factors affect the quality of their recruiting.