by Greg Carroll, Tudor Collegiate Strategies
The person most responsible for defining your program’s brand is you!
I was recently talking with a friend who I have known all the way back to high school when we played football and ran track together. We catch up a couple times a year and I always enjoy rekindling our friendship, reflecting on the crazy things we did in high school, and the fact that we actually lived to talk about them!
But invariably the conversation descends into a narrative about how unhappy he is with his job, his health and fitness, his relationship with his wife and kids, and that he generally feels bad about himself. At this point my job is to be the cheerleader, the motivator, and the friend who encourages him to take the first step to fix just one thing and build on that.
I was thinking about my friend as I was talking with a client coach a couple weeks ago about his incoming class and how he had lost a couple recruits at the last minute to schools that he described as “better schools” than his institution. When he said that it took me back to one of the first webinars I did when I joined the team at Tudor Collegiate Strategies on branding. I remember clearly one of those slides that stated if you don’t define your program your competitors are more than willing to do it for you. Like my friend, I encouraged this coach to look at something he thought he could do within his program that would make it a better program. I asked “Is there something that you can do this year, starting right now, that will make you feel better about your program?” From there we started brainstorming and we came up with a few ideas.
This particular coach had fallen into the trap of letting others define his school and accepting that description rather than being proactive, taking steps, and putting things in place that are a reflection of what he wants his program to represent.
As you launch a new school year and welcome new student athletes into your programs, this is the perfect time to consider those “gaps” between where your program is and where you would like it to be. If you can identify those “gaps” and put in place initiatives that bridge that gap, not only will you feel better about your program, you will have something fresh you and your staff can talk about during the coming year to recruits and their families. If you are not reflecting on new strategies, new programs, and new initiatives your brand can go flat and others will pass you. As this relates specifically to recruiting, here are a few things you might want to think about:
- There has never been a time when the mental health of athletes have captured the spotlight as much as now. It would be hard to avoid news about Simone Biles’ story from the recent Olympics, or Michael Phelps saga of his struggles with mental health. And there were several others who spoke about their challenges during the Olympics and from other areas. If you are not talking about mental health with your athletes and putting programming in place you’re missing opportunities to serve your athletes but also the opportunity to change your program’s story.
- Talking to your recruits and their families about ROI or return on investment has never been more important than right now. Getting talking points from your career placement office is the obvious one first stop. But you have easy access to great ROI stories from your former players and what they’re currently doing. Building out an alumni network of former players who have gone into various careers based upon the degree they obtained from your institution gives you a terrific opportunity to separate yourself from your competition. You can establish an alumni board that is inclusive of various schools/degrees within your college with a sense for geographic representation.
- Parents remain the single greatest influence on how your recruits make their decision. Just like your former players are an easy audience to capture, so are the parents of your current players. Think about how impactful a parent council could be in terms of their ability to help you recruit your next class as well as onboard the parents of your incoming class. I’ve yet to encounter a program that didn’t talk about how they promote a “sense of being a family”. Actually having a framework for utilizing your strongest advocates (the parents of your athletes paved the way for their child coming to your school) could be transformational.
- If you do not have a faculty liaison for your team you are missing out on a tremendous opportunity. In terms of recruiting, having access to a faculty member to talk to parents and recruits about how the faculty at your school support the academic success of student athletes can be an enormous asset. It’s one thing for you to talk about “academic success”. Of course you’re going to say all the right things! But those same things coming from a member of the teaching faculty gives them a legitimacy you simply don’t have. In addition, having a faculty liaison for your team demonstrates your commitment to academic success to your internal audience (other professors, deans, etc.) I’ve seen allowing these faculty to be on the bench, in the locker room, on the sidelines, access to practice, etc. open doors that were previously closed. Suddenly, the professor views the athlete who may struggle with academics differently because they saw how that student processes information about their sport quickly, completely, willingly. The professor is now part of the team. Part of the solution.
These are just a few ideas. The greater goal here is to encourage you to start thinking about things you can do to change the trajectory of your program if you feel like there are “better schools” that you are losing prospects to regularly.
The person most responsible for defining your program’s brand is you!