Have the Football Scouts Noticed You?

Now that you have a full freshman season under your belt it’s time to start level-setting.

• Did you start or play heavy snaps on the varsity?
• If you didn’t play varsity, were you called up onto Sophs or JV?
• If not, did you start and do well on the frosh squad?
• If not are you projected to start on the varsity as a soph?

If you answered yes to any of the questions above then you should already be getting recruited and receiving a lot of generic mail from college coaches at a minimum. If that’s the situation you’re in, great! It’s time keep the momentum going and go ahead and send an updated viewership-enabled video back out to coaches at elite college programs. Show them your latest and greatest video so they can see the gains you’ve made over the past 6 months.

If you’ve answered yes to any of the questions above and didn’t receive any letters from college coaches during your freshman year, you’re already being under-recruited! Your talent and hard work is being overlooked! Remember - there are 7th graders out there getting offers - you’re going into 10th grade and you don’t even have any mail? You had a great freshman year and yet nothing is happening! Why not? There could be many reasons but the key now is that you don’t procrastinate and fall further behind. Expand the list of schools you send your profile and viewership-enabled video to right away.

For example if you believe you are a high level D1 prospect and you didn’t receive mail from any Big 12/ACC/SEC/Pac-12 schools, you should send your video to those conferences in addition to D1 schools in other conferences local to your area as well as to as many FCS, D2, NAIA & D3 schools as possible. Casting a wide net early on is very important because the more coaches that become aware of you early, the better chance you have of getting an early offer. Getting early offers for elite players is crucial as it can really snowball your recruiting process.

Once your first offer is reported through the recruiting media circuit - others tend to follow quickly after that. Any player that aspires to play at a high level should do everything possible to get his video out early and often if coaches aren’t coming to him. Doing this increases the odds of that early offer, and that early offer will accelerate the entire process. The unknown talented athlete who lays back in recruiting until their junior year takes the chance that they could be “frozen out” if other players accept their offers and stay committed to those schools.

If you answered no to the questions above, there is no need for concern, but from a recruiting perspective you shouldn’t focus on the top programs right now; continue to work hard to develop your skills and get your profile and viewership-enabled video out to as many local programs as possible at all levels as well as all of the NAIA, D2 and D3 schools in the region. You may be an elite player at a high level high school program where D1 players don’t start as juniors sometimes. You may be a late bloomer. Either way, the most important thing for you to do is cast a wide net and understand where you are in the process.