Lazy Recruiting by College Coaches

Thanks, Joan. I'm not doing a disservice to these coaches. I'm just letting them know that it isn't working.

I liked that you said "literate" email from coaches. I got one last year that specifically asked about 4 of my girls, and 5 girls whose names I didn't recognize. I later realized the unknown names were from the next team, alphabetically, in my state. That didn't exactly make my girls feel special. I even let the coach know this, and he responded that he has his athletes write those emails. Delegating that work is great, if they do it right.

I think that you think you have more D3 caliber kids than you actually do.

over seas wrote:

Well, the really lazy coaches just contact their overseas connection and have them send them an accomplished older stud. Then they they pretend they developed the talent when it really bought.

^^^^ This guy clearly doesn't know how much of an actual pain it is to recruit overseas.

Lazy College Coach wrote:

My coach in college made the kids on the team split up the 50 states and look at the XC state meet results for each one. We got the top 25 runners, filled in an Excel document with the name, time, school, address of the school and then we basically sent a form letter but mentioned the time/place at the state meet to act like we really knew a lot about them.

No idea if we ever actually got any athletes from that exercise... most were probably too fast for our team.

That’s ridiculous! Actual coaching takes a maximum 2-3 hours daily. They should spend the rest of that time looking through results and contacting recruits. Recruiting for distance runners is easier because you can follow results year round.

95% mediocre

running commenter wrote:

I think that you think you have more D3 caliber kids than you actually do.

Basing this on the fact that I said I think I have more D3 than D1 kids? I’d imagine every high school program in the nation can accurately make that claim.

There are many D3 program worse than many HS teams, and even HS B teams. I think we all over estimate the requirements to run in college. D1 isn’t full of just 4:00 milers. I ran D1 and wasn’t all that good. I’ve coached HSers who’ve run faster in HS than I did at my best in college. There are D3 teams with 20+ minute 5k guys on the team scoring points. There are D1 teams with 30 minute 8k guys.

If you think coaches have the time to personalize letters for every single athlete you’re crazy. Especially when half of these kids probably won’t be good and just party all the time in college or quit.

malmo wrote:

You don't belong in coaching, "coach."

+1

What does it take to stab a few on the bulletin board and let the students take it from there?

Pendejo 1 wrote:

malmo wrote:

You don't belong in coaching, "coach."

+1

What does it take to stab a few on the bulletin board and let the students take it from there?

My point exactly. Cross country is a student activity, nothing more.

It's not a college coaches job, nor is it physically possible, to individually recruit thousands of students at a time. The coach did as simple courtesy mailer hoping it will find the right hands. These coaches who disagree need to get over themselves.

You guys realize most of these coaches are are already putting in 40 hours a week BEFORE recruiting & often getting paid 20 - 30k for this "full time" work that's going to amount to AT LEAST 60 - 70 hrs/wk if they're recruiting hard (if we're counting time on the road with the team for competition or for recruiting, which every other profession includes) right? I actually agree that this above method isn't all that effective...but I also don't blame them if they're not flushing away what little personal time they have to be at crappy high school meets talking to slow kids when literally every kid there could be "DIII."

Good friend in high school was a hot shot tennis player. His prep coach tossed out all the recruiting letters, didn't think the guy was interested, that he was going to go to the local university. He did go to the local school, but would've liked to have seen his other options out there, even if they were form letters. Don't let the prep coach decide what a student wants to receive or wants to do.

This should be titled, Laziness by prep coaches.

Mediocrity Abounds wrote:

Lazy College Coach wrote:

My coach in college made the kids on the team split up the 50 states and look at the XC state meet results for each one. We got the top 25 runners, filled in an Excel document with the name, time, school, address of the school and then we basically sent a form letter but mentioned the time/place at the state meet to act like we really knew a lot about them.

No idea if we ever actually got any athletes from that exercise... most were probably too fast for our team.

That’s ridiculous! Actual coaching takes a maximum 2-3 hours daily. They should spend the rest of that time looking through results and contacting recruits. Recruiting for distance runners is easier because you can follow results year round.

95% mediocre

If you think all that college coaches do outside recruiting is coach practice a few hours day, you have no idea what their job actually entails. Coaching is like 10% of their job. I agree that coaches should make time for recruiting as a large chunk of their day, but realistically I have many days where I have so much other team related stuff to do that I don't even have much time to respond to recruit emails if they're asking questions and stuff. I have a list of recruit contact info that I need to reach out to and like 20 emails to respond to, but haven't had time yet this week to get to that because of other duties related to my current team. College coaches have to put time into writing the workouts, getting stuff set up before practice, staff meetings, ordering equipment, monitoring study tables and performing grade checks, signing the teams up for meets, making travel and food arrangements for meets which often includes hotel rooms and multiple meals (which all involve forms that need to be filled out to spend money), managing team social media, meeting with athletes, etc. all in addition to recruiting which is a very important part of their job. I agree that just sending a coach some pamphlets and asking the coach to hand them out and talk about the school is kind of lazy, but I can see why some coaches only have time to do that. It would also be helpful to the college coach and students who might be a good fit for that school if the high school coach would respond to those emails and recommend some names of students that might be good fits for that college, so then the coach can reach out to them in a more personalized manor to see if the school really is a good fit or not.

I don’t know where everyone is getting all this “50-60 hr” workweek nonsense about D1 coaching. I have been coaching for a while and even when I was an assistant at a P5 we didn’t work THAT much. The actual coaching really isn’t time consuming. Writing plans isn’t hard if you know what you are doing. Staff meetings don’t happen that often. Seeing your sports supervisor doesn’t happen that often. If you suck at writing emails and managing your budget it can take a bit of time, but work on those skills and it is very easy. Recruiting isn’t even 24/7 because you locate who you need and wait for them to respond (can’t do anything if they are in class for that portion of the day). I think a lot of college coaches BS how much work it takes. From being an assistant at a conference championship P5 school to running a conference championship mid-major program, we really do have it easy. Half the time we just shoot the sh*t around the office anyways. If you are really that pressed for time as a coach, seriously consider getting better time management skills.

Relating to the topic, I personalize every email and letter I send to the kids I’m interested in. It doesn’t take that much time if you know what to write. You don’t have to be long winded (like my current post right now). Then again, props to D3 coaches because they are in a tougher spot for recruiting. At my P5 school it was easy to recruit. Less volume to deal with and more dog fighting it out over a few kids. We had a recruiting coordinator but I never trusted them. They mostly aided sprints.

You must be bad at time management. All of the things you listed aren’t everyday occurrences and don’t eat up much time at all. If coaching is only 10% of the job you’re doing it wrong.

-Registering your teams for meets takes a few minutes on directathletics

-writing weekly workouts takes a few minutes for distance group

-getting set up for practice? A wheel and cones can be done while the team warms up

-you order equipment once a season

-grade checks aren’t daily

-meeting with athletes- you meet with them everyday at practice and tell them the workout

-staff meetings- 30 minutes max

Didn’t we just talk about this in another thread? Back to the subject

Im a male and I was recruited by a d3 school back when I was in high school. I had run a few decent but shitty sub 18min times for a 5k in XC and one of the d3coaches talked to me on the phone. It definitely made me feel good.

Now i know there are elite d3 teams out there but this was not one of them. I ended up attending a d3 school and I was the team’s number 1 xc runner at a couple of the xc meets as a freshman (not a good thing since I was just an average Hs varsity xc kidnand not even fast in high school). As u can imagine We sucked. We had guys on our xc team who barely ran a step over the summer, who didn’t take XC seriously at all and who took acid on occasion , partied all the time, and seemed mentally challenged. I still remember how one of my teammates crumpled up his bib number at the start line into a ball and laughed before pinning it back on his singlet. He ran like 35min for 8k and was a drugged out POS. These turds would run like 32-38mins for 8k’s in XC (excuse me if that offends)and it felt more like intramurals/Rec league than any division of NCAA athletics so I transferred to another program (happened to be a d2 program).

Piling onto this comment and the one from the guy who talked about "fishing," if you go by the guidance office at many, if not most high schools, you'll see a bulletin board with many fliers from various colleges tacked up. That's not lazy recruiting by those schools. It's just getting their names into the heads of as many students as possible. It's the same thing schools that advertise on billboards are doing and it's the same thing a college track or cross country coach is doing when he sends those brochures to high school coaches.

The coach undoubtedly knows that most of those flyers will end up in the trash but that maybe one kid in a hundred or more who had never heard or thought of the coach's school will get a bit interested. And sending out flyers does not mean that the coach doing so doesn't also identify particular runners that he does recruit personally.

My name was returned on one of those "lazy" recruiting forms decades ago. The form also asked who might be academically able to handle such a college. It worked for me and I received an education that most can only dream about for pennies on the dollar.

As a coach I have routinely filled them out. I also fill out and return the ones from crew coaches looking for talented runners who appear to be "too big" to run successfully in college. Over the past couple of decades, there have been a "boatload" (pun intended) of runners from the northwest who have gone on to be All-Americans and even Olympians in rowing.

Right on!

I am a D1 assistant, there is not enough paperwork etc. to work the 60-70 hrs. some of these guys are talking about. They must be including hanging around and talking to their other coaching buddies on the phone as actually working. Or maybe they spend half their day on social media. But, coaching recruiting, paperwork, planning does not take 60 hours.

Spamwich wrote:

running commenter wrote:

I think that you think you have more D3 caliber kids than you actually do.

Basing this on the fact that I said I think I have more D3 than D1 kids? I’d imagine every high school program in the nation can accurately make that claim.

There are many D3 program worse than many HS teams, and even HS B teams. I think we all over estimate the requirements to run in college. D1 isn’t full of just 4:00 milers. I ran D1 and wasn’t all that good. I’ve coached HSers who’ve run faster in HS than I did at my best in college. There are D3 teams with 20+ minute 5k guys on the team scoring points. There are D1 teams with 30 minute 8k guys.

I'm convinced there are only 5-10 'good' D1 programs in the US. Looking around at results (every year), I see exactly what you're talking about. The overwhelming majority of D1 programs are overall slower than many of the high school teams the kids came from. Part of it, I'm convinced, is that runners show up as big fish, then got tossed in that pond and aren't that special. They check out. Some of the lesser kids stick around throughout, and there you go.