How to set up a visit when coaches can't talk to you.

Hey 🙋‍♂️Brendan Cahill here

Happy Saturday morning to 506 smart, motivated, and really good-looking subscribers.

Here is one short tip on how to get recruited.

Today’s article takes about 5 minutes to read.

Enjoy

---

I'm going to explain to you how you can set up a team visit when coaches can't talk to you as an underclassman.

Visits are Twitter gold in getting your name out there, helping you experience what a college football atmosphere is like, and helping you understand where you want to go when you graduate.

Unfortunately, most parents and players don't attempt visits, because, frankly, it's a confusing process.

Visits are confusing

Parents and players fail to take early visits for these reasons:

• They don't know how to get started

• They don't know who to talk to

• They don't what to say

• They don't know how to respond

But, don't worry: I'm going to explain to you exactly how you can overcome all these roadblocks on your way to your first college visit.

Here's how to step by step:

Step 1: Create a list of schools

Give yourself a starting point by selecting 4-5 dream, good, and safety schools.

Make sure you have a blunt academic, athletic, and personal level of honesty with yourself on these. If you are not a brainiac, you might not want to waste time looking at MIT. If you hate the city, you might not want to look at an urban school.

Step 2: Find your facilitator

Until after 9/1 of your junior year of high school college coaches cannot directly communicate with you about recruiting, only about their summer camps. So, you will need to find a third party to facilitate your visit. This will typically be your high school football coach or your private coach who has connections there.

Here is a script you might want to use with your coach:

Coach, not sure if you might be open to it or not, but I'd love to try to facilitate a visit before 9/1 my junior year. Is it OK if I list you as a point of contact for a college coach to connect with? Might you be open to calling a few schools on my behalf to set these up?

Step 3: Find your point people

Ideally, your private or high school coaches have contacts that you can reach out to, but if they do not, you should look for coordinators, analysts, and graduate assistants with open DM's on Twitter. Typically the further down the ladder the more easily accessible these coaches are.

Step 4: What should you say?

This is the script you want to send:

Hello Coach {{INSERT NAME}} my name is {{INSERT FIRST LAST NAME}}. I am a rising junior at {{INSERT SCHOOL NAME AND GRAD YEAR}}. I am razor focused on playing at a very high level and wanted to reach out early to get on your radar. I would love to come visit {{SPECIFIC NAME OF THE UNIVERSITY}} if that's possible. Thank you for reading my message, I look forward to meeting you.

I understand you can't respond to me due to my age so I would love for you to message one of my coaches below to set up a visit, if possible:

{{COACH NAME CELL EMAIL TWITTER}}

Will this work? While it is not a guarantee this action is more likely to yield a visit than the alternative of doing nothing. You are at least acknowledging the awkward position the NCAA puts coaches in with talking to recruits and you're giving them direct contact info of the coaches who can help.

It's important to note you can still do all this communication and still have a visit fall through.

Step 5: The visits

Get the exact report time and location for your visit via your third-party facilitator.

There is somewhat of an ebb and flow to practices so build in some "getting lost" or confusion time. As much as your HS or private coach helping set the visit may try to make sure things go smoothly, there is always a small chance it might not. Be flexible and understanding.

Closing

Recruiting is happening earlier and earlier every year as teams jockey for talented players. It is important to remember that all these visits do is get your name a little higher on the coach's mental list of recruits to evaluate. You still need to physically show on tape you can play at that level and, more importantly, get admitted to their school.

That’s all for this weekend. 1 short recruiting tip.

If you find these tips don’t help make recruiting faster, easier or simpler, please consider unsubscribing.

I won’t mind and there are no hard feelings.

Conversely, if you’re enjoying this newsletter, a referral is the best compliment you could pay me and I’d love for you to share this is one person who you think would benefit from it.

See you next weekend! 👍

Brendan