by Bryan Mathews, Tudor Collegiate Strategies
As a college coach, you’re naturally competitive. You’re driven. You work hard. You recruit HARD. You are going to make this program better and bring your vision to life!
But let’s stick to that vision. Not his. Or hers. Or theirs. Yours. Only yours.
Our team here at Tudor Collegiate Strategies has incredible coaching experience, at all levels, in all sorts of sports, and all different types of institutions. Personally, it a decade worth of three sports and seven campuses. None of us are the same. And none of us want to be… for a reason. Our plethora of knowledge fuels everything. Do we pick each other’s brains daily? Absolutely.
So what is about to be written does not discourage taking ideas from others or developing yourself professionally or in a recruiting sense, but it does emphasize YOU!
Be You – The old adage “run your own race” comes to mind here. Only you hold this job title and only you have your vision for what’s best for the program. Recruit as such. Do not imitate or copy. Do not alter for vengeance or combativeness. Execute your plan and your vision. It is your job, your program, and your vision. That’s what needs to be controlled.
Finding Fit – Intercollegiate athletics is a huge world now. With that, comes a lot of exposure, media, and the dreaded… hype. Recruiting to the hype is likely not the best strategy to find the ideal fit for you, your program, or your campus. Hype = distraction. Have a strategy in place to evaluate prospects according to your program, not other’s opinions.
Your Best is Good Enough – Coaches often identify too much with the prospects they might have lost (possibly for reasons out of their control) rather than the prospects they recruited to commitment. If a coach does their best work, then that is what’s best for the program. Your best recruits are going to come through those efforts. Own the quality of what you have recruited, not a distracting thought otherwise.
Eliminate distractions to your vision, Coach. It’s the key to building consistent recruiting results.
Building consistently engaging messaging is a challenge for any coaching staff. The team at Tudor Collegiate Strategies are experts in building messaging and themes that will get responses and increase a prospect’s attention. To contact Bryan Mathews about this idea, and to get more information, email him at bryan@dantudor.com.