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Mar 4, 2026
How To Get Ivy+ Coaches To Notice You
How To Get Ivy+ Coaches To Notice You
00:00
15:56
Transcript
0:00
A question I get all the time from players and parents is: How do I get noticed by coaches?
0:06
And the answer, as always, is it depends, but I think it's almost always better to think of it in terms of a few sets of core principles that, you know, if you apply them, will create the highest likelihood of coaches at your desired schools getting back to you, versus there's some magic silver bullet that'll make a coach notice you and want you.
0:30
So the first thing is understanding that there is nothing anybody can do or say to make a coach want you. There are a lot of recruiting services out there.
0:40
There's a lot of trainers who kinda double up as side agents who work really hard to place their guys, and a, a big part of their business, um, is calling coaches up and endorsing players and referring them out.
0:53
Really good high school coaches do this too.
0:55
But outside of that warm referral that your trainer or high school coach is doing for you, there's nothing you can really do to make the needle move or force the coach to want you more than they're gonna want you.
1:10
What is valuable with th- having a really plugged in head coach or a trainer who knows some guys is that you can, in some cases, cut the line to punch through these inboxes that are just exploding with DMs and, and way more messages than they'll ever be able to get back to and cut through the noise because your name is coming through a trusted coach or trainer who has sent them quality players in the past.
1:37
So that's one way to do it, to shortcut the process a little bit. But even with that, even with the best endorsement possible, you still need to have what the coaches are looking for.
1:48
The bigger, faster, stronger the player, the bigger, more prestigious the level of college football they're gonna be able to play.
1:56
The problem with high school football is that most players and coaches and adults in a kid's life are very optimistic. They're paid to be optimistic. They're rounding up on your talent quite a bit. They are
2:09
teaching and coaching and working with you based off of what they think you could turn into, the person you might be, the player you might be. And that's great.
2:19
You want optimistic people around your kids when they're developing and maturing. But when you flip over to college sports, you are
2:28
now playing the same sport, but under a different set of values entirely, where you are judged not off of what you might be, but off of what you are and what you've shown.
2:39
And in fact, most coaches will take a little bit off the top on a kid's tape or measurements or potential because they know that in general, high school sports tend to inflate kids' potential.
2:54
And it's not because the coaches are bad guys. It's because in college sports, things are more zero-sum. In high school, you don't lose a game-- You don't lose your job if you lose a game. In college, you might.
3:05
In college, if you lose a game or burn a spot on the wrong player, you're gonna have to find a new house and tell your wife and your kids you're gonna-- going to a new school district.
3:15
So the decision-making process is very different from high school.
3:21
It's the same sport, but it's played on a different planet, and you really have to work hard to depersonalize the feedback you're getting because most coaches are really not malicious guys.
3:32
They are evaluating you off of the player you appear to be on tape, not the actual person you are. It's really hard for any well-adjusted adult to do that. It's really hard for a high school kid to do that as well.
3:44
So same sport, different planet. Nothing will make a coach want you.
3:49
But when you're, when you're looking at kind of getting that first beachhead of contact with coaches, I think you gotta do a couple things, and we'll just talk about the D3 to FCS level.
4:00
The nice part about the high academic schools is that in general, because their recruiting pool is much smaller in what they're allowed to admit, the coaches are a lot more likely to respond and get back to you via DM on X or via email if it's some of the older coaches.
4:18
So the first step you wanna take is fill out the recruiting questionnaire.
4:22
It's a bit redundant, and there really needs to be some kind of recruiting common app, but there isn't, even though it's more or less the same form on every website.
4:31
Go to every team you're interested in, Ivy, Patriot, NESCAC. Fill out the recruiting questionnaire.
4:37
And what that does is it creates a little data point in their system that's you, and that's gonna be the digital home base from which that team will operate as they go through their recruiting cycle and hopefully go through recruiting you.
4:53
The head coach, the position coach will probably get a ping in their email inbox, "New John Doe so and so, class of '27, position player, has submitted an inquiry form."
5:04
That inquiry form, that recruiting questionnaire, it's pretty boring, but it does cover a lot of bases. So now you're in the system as a data point.
5:13
The second thing you wanna do is get your X or Twitter profile put together. It's not a great app for mental health, that's for sure, but it is where the first contacts usually happen between coaches and players.
5:27
In your profile, in order, you wanna have your year, your position, your heightYour weight, your GPA, unweighted versus weighted, your SAT, your ACT, high school name, and if your head coach is very active on Twitter, sometimes it's helpful to put their tag or handle in your profile as well.
5:46
You also want to link your Hudl tape to your Twitter profile. Hudl's kinda weird. It's not the best platform these days. Even coaches that have Hudl accounts still somehow need to sit through ads.
5:57
And so there is a switching cost when you tap a player's Hudl link in their profile to going onto the Hudl app and leaving X, which is, like, ten, twenty seconds.
6:08
So what I recommend to families is make your Hudl tape on Hudl, make sure you're, you're all good there, and then screen record the entire thing as a video file horizontally on your iPhone, and then post that as a pinned post at the top of your timeline on your X account so that coaches can just see right away your highlights without having to leave the app and go to Hudl.
6:31
One little side note, a lot of kids don't do this, but it's really helpful. Make sure your Twitter or X profile is linked to your Hudl profile. Sometimes the search function on X or Twitter is really not great.
6:45
It's actually pretty bad.
6:46
But the search function on Hudl is quite good, and oftentimes if I've got a referral or a name I wanna check out, I can find that name a lot faster on Hudl, watch the tape, and then click their X profile from their Hudl profile.
7:00
All that is to say, you want to have your X profile set up to be optimized to be found where all your information is just right there in your profile so that coaches don't have to go looking for stuff.
7:13
Red flags on a recruit's profile are always gonna be, I don't know the location of this kid. There's no state or town. There's no GPA. There's no highlight tape, or I can't find their highlight tape on Hudl.
7:24
There's no Hudl link. The other thing also, and some kids who haven't had experience with Twitter before forget this, your default setting is to not allow people you do not follow on X to DM you.
7:38
So you need to go into privacy settings usually and just flip that on. The option will say something like, "Allow non-followers to DM you." That's really where coaches will be able to make their first contact with you.
7:49
So you've done the recruiting questionnaire. Your X profile is all set up. That's great.
7:54
So now what you wanna do is make a list of four safety schools where you could play at tomorrow, four dream schools where it's gonna be a little bit of a stretch, and I define a dream school as a school where you need a lot to go right academically but also physically.
8:10
There might be schools that are academic slam dunks for you but are physically out of reach.
8:14
Academically, it's probably not hard to go to a big state school, but most big state schools are FBS football, and so that's gonna be a higher athletic str- threshold.
8:23
There's other schools where you're an athletic slam dunk, but the academics might be a reach.
8:28
You could probably play football at an MIT tomorrow or Colby, you know, Division III football, but the academic threshold's a lot higher than other schools or state schools.
8:38
So I think you gotta have your safety schools, where could you play tomorrow, but also as you're making these lists, think about what's a safety school athletically versus academically.
8:48
What's a r- dream or reach school academically and athletically? And then I call the third list somewhere in the middle, I call it target schools.
8:56
And so a target school is if you only had hard work and steady, consistent effort to go off of, if that was the only thing we knew we could do the next twelve to eighteen months, where would you end up on hard work alone?
9:10
And for most kids, you could work really hard in the weight room, but you're not gonna be six five, or you're not gonna have the fast twitch fibers to run a four point three forty-yard dash.
9:20
But you can work really hard, get a little bit stronger, and get your grades up. It's a lot easier to have a 4.0 GPA than it is to be six seven. But the-- Lost my train of thought there for a second.
9:33
Um, but these target schools, these are most kids, if they really, really, really, really work hard and they have a little bit of athletic talent or a good amount of athletic talent, they could move themselves theoretically from being a D-III guy to a small FCS level school guy or competitive D-II school guy with that slow, consistent hard work.
9:54
I think what you're looking for in terms of school selection is you're trying to find the overlap between what you have academically and athletically and what you want.
10:08
There's, there-- So there's kinda three circles, what you want, what you got, and then what the market is willing to give you.
10:15
And timing, chance, luck, they all get a vote, and sometimes luck or chance or timing, that one vote has more weight than all your hard work does.
10:25
Unlike pure admissions, where there is some level of standardization, where everybody's following the same ED deadlines, everybody does the same common app.
10:35
There's an early dec-- there's a regular decision deadline [audio distorts] really has no start or finish, then things can be a lot more subjective.
10:43
If there's a coach who has only coached successful tight ends who are over six, it's gonna be hard to let-- it, that, it's gonna be really hard for that coach to break out of the mold and say, "Okay, I want a six foot three tight end now," or, "I've always had punters that are six foot two,
10:59
and they w- they all been All-Americans, and they've all had NFL tryouts." It's gonna be hard for that coach to wanna look at a punter who's only five eleven.
11:07
So recruiting's a lot more subjective, and it's really important to keep in mind as you send these messages out, you could very well be doing everything right, but despite those best efforts, a coach might not get back to you.
11:18
So you have your recruiting questionnaire done. You have your Twitter profile set. You have your Hudl set.You kind of have a list of schools you're interested in.
11:26
What you then start doing is you start identifying the head coach, position coach, or regional recruiter that's after you.
11:33
Most-- I think the bigger schools, the Ivies, the, the Patriots, most recruiting is nationally based now. Coaches will kinda be able to find players. It's a little bit of both.
11:42
In the past, recruiting used to be regionally based only, then everything was pretty online and remote with COVID and with internet and stuff. But now, as AI pops up again, I think coaches kinda do a little bit of both.
11:54
I think they're always on the lookout nationally for talent in their position group, but a lot of coaches still do have dedicated geographic areas that they are responsible for recruiting and, and actually hitting boots on the ground with in the NESCAC, Patriot, and Ivies.
12:09
So I would identify who the regional recruiter is and who your position coach is, and then send them a message. Short is always better.
12:15
Kids always write messages that are too long, and well-meaning parents who are running their kids' Twitter accounts, yes, it's a thing that happens, probably do an episode on it later, um, they always write too much.
12:25
Short and sweet is better. A message you might send to a coach for an initial outreach is, "Coach, if possible, would love to potentially-- Coach, would love to play for you.
12:35
My name is John Doe, twenty-eight, six foot two, two hundred and five pounds, three-six GPA, thirteen-twenty-eight SAT, and here's my link to my Hudl account. I've already filled out your recruiting questionnaire.
12:47
Would love to come see campus." And, like, that's it, and send it off. You don't have to go crazy.
12:51
You're basically copy and pasting your Twitter profile into that initial message, and you send it off, and you wait four or five business days for a reply.
12:59
If you don't hear anything in four or five days, you send this message, and nobody sends the follow-up, which they should, and that is, "Just bumping this to the top of your inbox. I know you're busy."
13:09
And then that's it. Nine times out of ten, coaches don't get back to you because they're, they're just too busy.
13:14
So you will need to follow up two or three times with the same coaches before there's some kind of traction.
13:19
Coach might love you, and they just don't know what they're doing for your position group yet, so they're not gonna reach out and waste your time yet. Or there's-- they're just doing way too many things.
13:29
So you send those out, and I would still recommend sending email. I know it s-sometimes it's old school, but I find
13:37
the middle-aged to older guys in, in the Ivy League, Patriots, and NESCACs, they still do respond to email quite well and quite often.
13:43
So you send the DMs out, you send the emails out, you send the follow-up out, and then if you still haven't-- if the follow-up does not work, I would put that school in a back burner list that you don't touch for two or three weeks.
13:56
And then after two or three weeks, you send a second follow-up saying, "Coach, it looks like you might have moved on from potentially recruiting me. I know you're busy.
14:03
Would be glad to connect if anything should change in the future." And that last message usually will get a coach to move and reply and say something.
14:11
Um, and if they don't say anything after that, sometimes no reply is the reply, and you should move on. The goalposts are always going to move as, as you start your recruiting process.
14:20
You might think you're a Division I guy, but shoot, it's the D3 schools that-- in the NESCAC that are really jumping off for you and really want you and are excited about you. Then maybe you pivot in that direction.
14:30
Or maybe you thought you were only a NESCAC guy, but you're getting a lot of attention from some Patriot League schools now.
14:35
You just won't know until you start rolling your sleeves up and getting in the muck to get your recruiting off the ground. And I think the, the market will more or less tell you what level player you are.
14:47
It's really hard to miss on guys in twenty twenty-six. It, it does happen, but not as, not as often as it used to.
14:53
But you zoom out, and you say, "Okay, how do I create a scenario where it would be unreasonable for a coach on any of my lists to not reply to me? Have I filled out the questionnaire?
15:05
Do I have my Twitter profile lined up? Do I have my Hudl tape set? Do-- Am I sending out the messages to the right people? Am I sending these messages out to the right level?
15:14
Am I exploring D3, D2, FCS, Division I schools across the board? Or am I hung up on only these big-time schools?"
15:22
And so if you do that, you kinda create a situation where the, the floor is tilted in your favor to start getting at least some kind of response after doing it for, you know, a couple weeks.
15:33
Some kids, they get traction in three days, and some kids it takes, it takes three months. But generally speaking, if you're a junior right now, you wanna be, you wanna be doing this.
15:41
You wanna be sending these messages out, and you wanna start making contact with these college coaches. So I hope this was helpful. Please DM me, email me.
15:49
Really enjoy interacting with players and parents and hearing your questions and seeing if there might be a way to work together. Thanks.
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