15 tips to successfully follow up with coaches after a camp or showcase

You’re a youth athlete returning to school after camp, excited for your future. You’ve learned new techniques, improved your skills and connected with dozens of coaches.

It’s easy to feel like you’re on your way to a great career, but your work has only just started. You need to make sure those coaches remember you a month, two months and even a year after you attend camp.

Follow these tips for successfully emailing coaches and staying in touch with them during the fall.

Make a List of Coaches You Plan to Keep in Touch With

Try to remember every coach you met or talked to over the summer at the camps you attended. If you attended a college-specific camp, then this list should be pretty easy. However, it can get quite a bit longer if you attended an exhibition camp with coaches from several regional colleges.

“I would recommend that you reach out to at least 30 colleges,” Fred Bastie from Playced writes. “I realize that sounds like a lot, but if you are organized it won’t take that long.”

Bastie encourages players to develop a spreadsheet that monitors their progress with each college. You can also use this sheet to make notes about the coach, school and your experiences there in order to help you remember specific incidents and things you liked (or didn’t) about those experiences.

Set Dates to Follow Up With Coaches Throughout the Year

A short email after camp won’t help coaches remember who you are for very long. According to Athnet, players should continue updating coaches every 2-4 months on their performance. This might include sending them new highlights as you enter the fall season or sharing SAT/ACT scores that are higher than your initial efforts.

Even if you feel like the coaches aren’t listening (and they might not be), staying top of mind can help when an opening occurs and your coach looks to recruit someone.

Don’t Pass Off Your Communication Plan to Your Parents

Your parents want you to succeed, but asking them to do follow-up emails for you is impersonal and infuriating for coaches. While emailing dozens of coaches is labor intensive, the effort is wasted when coaches realize the parents are behind the communication.

“One of the key foundations to a great email is that it is coming directly from the heart of the [athlete],” Jill Hicks writes. “Having been a college coach, I read thousands of recruits' emails and always saw it as a red flag when I could tell that a parent wrote the email.”

Hicks says she immediately doubts the passion of the athlete and wonders if it’s actually the parent’s dream that their teen plays college sports.

“Contacting college coaches is a lot like hunting for a job,” Katie Andersen writes at GuidedPath. “I tell my student-athletes to be proactive and contact college coaches directly.”

Over the next several months, your goal is to get noticed and recruited. You wouldn’t ask your parents to go to a job interview for you, so why would you put them in charge of your future athletic career?

lacrosse.jpg

Create a Dedicated Recruiting Email

The first step in the college athlete prospect job hunt is to update your email. An email name that might have been funny when you first made it is actually annoying to college coaches or could look like spam.

“The goal is to be professional here, and it isn’t too professional if a coach is receiving an email from [email protected],” Zach at AcademyELITE Baseball writes. “Create a free email account on Yahoo! or Hotmail with your firstname_lastname@website as an email specifically for your recruiting emails.”

Creating an email address specifically for recruiting can also help you keep track of your communication efforts. This reduces the risk of losing a coach's email or missing it in a pile of other messages.

Focus on the Most Important Information

Edward Cartee at Bookacoach encourages players to operate like journalists when emailing coaches to increase the chances of getting their attention. A few of his tips include:

Place your name, grad year, and position in the subject of the email.

Include the most important information first, and explain exactly why the coach should be interested in you.

Recap major points about yourself, including your team, your GPA, and test scores.

Cartee writes that this intro tends to be the same for every email you send to coaches, so you can copy and paste to save time. Just make sure to read over it every time to make sure you’re not sending the same typos every single time.

Avoid Sending Form Emails

While your intro can follow a boilerplate formula, the body of your email should be unique to the coach you’re contacting.

“Any mass email sent by either you or your recruiting service gets immediately deleted,” Bryan Drotar writes at The Recruiting Code. “[Coaches] do not have the time or desire to deal with an email from an athlete that was sent to a hundred other coaches as well. College coaches focus their time on athletes who they believe are interested in their school and program.”

By actually taking the time to draft individual messages and send emails one at a time, you can increase the chances of getting a response and reduce the risk of isolating yourself.

basketball.jpg

Keep Any Video Content Short and to the Point

More players are creating highlight reels and including them in follow-up emails after meeting a coach. While these videos are helpful, they can get overlooked if they’re too long.

“Getting the coach to want to click on your video is hard work,” the team at the Amateur Baseball Players Association writes. “We only need to see 5 swings from side, 5 ground balls, 5 pitches, etc. to form an idea of whether or not we want to see you play.”

This advice can apply to almost every sport. Don’t send a five-minute long video with music, graphics, or slow motion. Just show the best stuff you can do.

Actually Address the Coach You’re Trying to Reach

There’s no excuse for sending “To Whom It May Concern,” emails in today’s age of internet research, the team at Elite College Sports writes. Most colleges have lists of faculty and a quick Google search can tell you the name of the head coach you’re trying to reach. Addressing coaches in such a generic way is a sign of a form letter, proving to the recipient that you don’t actually care who you’re talking to.

Learn When College Coaches Are Able to Contact You

As part of your college preparation plan, make a note of when coaches are able to legally contact you. While this varies by sport, most coaches can’t legally contact prospects until junior year. Furthermore, many coaches might be so focused on next year’s team that they don’t have time to respond to your interest.

“If you’re an underclassman, maybe try to send your info at a different time of year – during the offseason, outside of major evaluation periods when coaches are out of town recruiting,” the team at 1,001 Recruit Tips writes. If coaches aren’t responding to your messages, you might not be emailing at the right time.

Identify When Coaches Are Talking Vs Actively Recruiting You

The team at the National Scouting Report created a useful list to determine whether you’re actively being recruited by coaches or just receiving general forms of communication. For example, a college coach watching you play or calling your school might mean they’re just interested in you or your club. The top three signs that you’re being recruited include:

A coach calls your home more than once.
A coach travels to your home field (or court) specifically to see you play.
A coach invites you to an official visit to meet the staff and spend time with the team.

If you don’t have coaches actively taking steps to communicate with you, then you need to boost your efforts to get noticed and recruited.

Be Honest About What Schools Are Recruiting You

If a coach asks what other schools are recruiting you, answer honestly. Michelle Kretzschmar writes that there are two ways athletes fail when they lie about their recruitment prospects:

They don’t share their schools which means they don’t seem appealing.
They lie about the schools that are interested and overinflate themselves.

If you received a generic form letter from Auburn, don’t tell other coaches that Auburn coaches are actively recruiting you. Focus your communication efforts around honesty and promoting your skill set.

softball.jpg

Know When to Move On to Other Schools

Some players endlessly vie for the attention of coaches at Division I schools, even when there’s almost no chance of playing for them.

“If a college coach does not make an effort to contact you or your coach by phone or email and does not ask you to visit campus, they are not interested in you,” Bill Vasko, assistant softball coach at UMass Lowell, shares. “Do not take it personally—move on and find a program that IS interested in you.”

Stalking a coach at your dream college despite complete radio silence on their end can actually move you further from your dream. You will annoy them while wasting time on a dead end.

Don’t Ignore Coaches Who Try to Talk to You

After all this effort you spent trying to get anyone to reply to you, why would you ignore a coach who has shown interest?

“Silence, especially from a recruit, normally means they aren’t interested in your program and what you have to offer,” Doug Samuels writes at Football Scoop. “While that can be disappointing, it’s also an opportunity to recruit kids that WANT to be a part of your program.”

Even if a program isn’t your first choice, make sure you talk to the coach and keep the conversation going. That university might turn into a great fallback school.

Never Turn Down Coaches Unless You’re Sure About Your Options

Try to always respond positively and show your interest in a school, even if you’re not interested in it.

“The minute you say to a coach that you are not interested in their program, you will no longer be on their recruiting radar,” Nicolae Popescu writes at WeGotPlayers. You should only say that you’re not interested if you’re absolutely sure that you will not attend that school.

Popescu encourages players to have at least three other schools to choose from (with accepted admittance and offers) before turning down a coach. Passing up on schools until you get your dream school means passing up on potentially sure things and taking a higher risk.

Pick Up a Pen and Write a Thank-You Note

If email doesn’t seem to work, consider taking your communications game offline to stand out. Kara Hill, founder of My Recruiting Solutions, encourages students to send handwritten thank you notes. She recently worked with an athlete who posted handwritten thank-yous and impressed one coach who had never received a written letter in the 10 years they had been coaching.

“She was so impressed, she not only extended her an offer, she hung it in her office and spoke about it on many occasions during practices,” Hill writes.

Get Recruited

Youth1’s Recruiting Counselors are on a mission to educate you on the recruiting process - one that's very competitive and starts early. Let us provide guidance through the most important decisions that shape your athlete's journey in sports.

Learn how to become a recruitable student-athlete, find out what colleges you match best with, and get the ability to message college coaches directly with a specialized recruiting package.

Don't wait, schedule a time to speak with a Youth1 Recruiting Counselor. It's FREE!