For years, college coaches have voiced frustrations over the parent involvement in recruiting. Primarily, the fact that parents want to take over the process, run the process, communicate during the process, and then possibly interfere with coaching once they arrive on your campus as a new student-athlete.
The problem, of course, is even if all that is true, it’s engrained in the culture of families and recruiting: Parents want to be involved in the lives of their sons and daughters (especially in the recruiting part of their lives!) and their student-athlete sons and daughters expect them to be involved in the recruiting part of their lives! That’s something that’ll be really, really difficult to unwire in our sports culture today.
The solution? Roll with it, Coach.
In our ongoing work with coaching staffs around the country – especially recently – we’re finding that parents hold two unique keys to successfully recruiting student-athletes:
They are prime helpers in the communication process. For coaches who get frustrated by the lack of contact or infrequent replies from the athletes they’re recruiting, there is a solution: Their parents. Mom and dad will usually enthusiastically take on the role of mediator and conduit in the information exchange process. The problem I regularly is from coaches who don’t want to include the parents in the process for fear that no relationship is built with the athlete. If handled correctly, that shouldn’t be an issue.
Oh and by the way – if you aren’t including parents in conversations early on, you risk reducing the number of on-campus visits your recruit will take to your college. Why? Because guess who coordinates and plans most college recruiting visits: That’s right, the parents. If you aren’t communicating with them about your desire to get them and/or their student-athletes on campus, don’t be surprised when they don’t end up coming for a visit.
They are key validators of decision-making when it comes to the all-important “who should I choose?” question. More than 9 out of 10 times, an athlete will follow the advice of a parent when it’s down to a handful of choices at the end of the recruiting process. Because a parent has been so deeply involved in the lives of their student-athlete child up to that point, it’s a natural instinct for a teenager to look to their parents for advice and direction.
Of course, you can continue to avoid the parents in the process – especially early on, when it counts. But our research shows that a significant number of recruits will never go deep into the process with you if their parents aren’t included, which defeats the who idea of spending time scouting, messaging and trying to recruit athletes. So, assuming you don’t want that to happen, here are three core things you will want to make sure you do as early in the process as possible.
- Ask the parents the same questions you’re asking your prospect. If you do nothing else, do this. Make this change. The quality and depth of their answers versus their athlete’s answers will astonish you, and it can be quite insightful. Not only will you get better, deeper information as you go through the process, you’ll uncover discrepancies between what the parents are thinking compared to what your prospect is thinking, which allows you to address that early on in the process and focus part of your recruiting message towards that solution sooner rather than later. As an example, if you usually ask the athlete, “so what type of campus do you picture yourself doing best at?”, and they answer “in a big city with tons of people” but her dad answers “more rural, at a smaller school where she can get individualized attention”, you instantly uncover something that you need to go into more detail on immediately in order for the recruiting process to move forward. Why? Because that’s a disagreement that’s getting discussed behind the scenes at home, and you shouldn’t be on the outside looking in when it comes to who wins that conversation.
- Ask the parents to help plan the visit to campus. Like we talked about earlier, they are the coordinators of most of the visits that’ll happen, so skip the middleman (their athlete) and go straight to the source. You’ll schedule more visits, you’ll set yourself apart from other coaches who are mistakenly ignoring this aspect of the visit, and if the parent expresses any hesitance towards the idea of committing to a visit, they’ll be able to honestly and immediately tell you why – either allowing you to fix the issue and secure the visit, or get an understanding early on that the parent is never going to give their approval for their son or daughter to attend college and compete for you on your campus.
- Ask the parents “what’s next?” This is a process. It’s measurable, and there are defined steps that both the family and your admissions department have outlined. To make sure the process continues to move forward, always ask the parents (and the athlete, as well, but especially the parent you now have a good relationship with) what they’d like to see as the next step in the process. It will speed up the decision making, reveal objections that would stay hidden otherwise, and let you understand what the family is talking about behind the scenes. You’ll get deeper, more informative answers if you take this important step in the communication process.
Ignoring parents in the process in today’s complicated and nuanced recruiting world is adding additional obstacles to your efforts when you don’t need to. It’s literally extending the recruiting process, causing you additional stress as recruiting that athlete drags on, and prevents you from really knowing what’s being talked about behind the scenes. Starting to deepen the relationship you have with your recruits’ parents will go a long way towards solving that problem.
Want to dive deeper into this idea of effectively recruiting the parents of your recruits? Click here to access all of the latest research and strategies on this topic we’ve published on our Honey Badger Recruiting site. Many of the articles are free to view, but we’d also love it if you subscribed to receive the regular extra training we give during the week to coaches who are clients and have signed-up to receive these special articles.