One of the biggest mistakes families and players make it believing they are going to play the same sport in college that they played in HS.
This is false.
College football and high school football are two distinctly different sports, and value very different things, even if they look the same from an X’s and O’s standpoint.
K-12 education, and by extension, HS sports, is designed to be optimistic about you or your child’s potential. Teachers, coaches and well-meaning adults fill the days and lives of students who are paid to be optimists. They are paid to see the potential in your child.
This is a good and noble thing. We wouldn’t want our kids around pessimistic adults who don’t give the benefit of the doubt. (Although there probably are a lot of teachers that don’t like kids still out there who just need a W2 to pay the bills, by and large, most K-12 teachers mean well).
In the athletic realm, HS coaches are also optimists - sometimes because they actually are, and sometimes because they have to be. While there are some leagues that can outright recruit their own players, HS sports, by and large, cannot recruit. They are stuck with the crop they got. Being an optimist, encouraging your players and trying to develop them isn’t just good for their socioemotional development, it’s also good for your team.
The sample size of the types of athletes your high school coaches and families are around is considerably smaller than even the amount of players a DIII coach is scouting and evaluating every year. It is very well possible that you are the greatest TE or kicker in your HS team’s history. It is also very well possible that you are just an average DIII TE or kicker at best compared to other college kickers, or TE’s. Two different things can be true at the same time.
But, because everyone around you and your kid has a limited frame of reference, it’s easy to get caught up in the “Go D1!” bug or get pulled away from more realistic college football options for you and your family.
College coaches are not constrained by the players they have. You are not a person only, you’re also a “company asset”, to the program. They can recruit. While they do believe in development, it’s a much less tolerant development than you’d find in HS where perennially problem players with some talent can have coaches bent over backwards trying everything possible to keep them academically eligible or on the field despite being an obvious problem player.
College coaches are also paid to win. They take actions in their team’s and job security’s best interest. Because there is a very real threat that if their crop of 18-22 year olds underperform they need to tell their wife and kids they’re moving for the 4th time in 7 years to get a new job. Their evaluation of you is one of you as a player, not a person. But, few 18-22 year olds (heck most adults don’t either) have the emotional maturity to separate their personal worth from their worth as a player.
I like how Jeremy put it here on an X post recently discussing the differences between high school and college athletics:
When college coaches are evaluating a player, they tend to treat that player’s high school floor as their collegiate ceiling first. Whereas, HS coaches, parents and fans tend to treat a player’s ceiling as their collegiate floor.
“But Johnny’s private coach said he was D1!”
“But (insert random hype IG account) Timmy’s ranked #2 in his league!”
“But he had all these coaches from D1 schools follow him on X!”
Coaches do not care what anyone’s evaluation of you is except theirs. They may have a network of HS coaches and trainers they reach out to for leads to scout, but that is basically it. No college coach is going to blindly take the word of your private trainer about their potential, and if your trainer is spamming their inboxes with bad leads, they’re dropped as reliable reference for coaches.
College coaches want you to be a no-brainer for their program. Any equivocation, any rounding up, any straining to justify you as a player at their level and it’s probably not going to work out.
Outwardly, HS and college football look similar, but inwardly, they are governed by two drastically different sets of values. Be ready for it.
Coach Cahill
PS When you’re ready, feel free to schedule a free Discovery Call today if you’d like to work together or just reply to this email.
