Knowing how a recruit falls into your archetypes allows you to prioritize them better, recruit them better, and convert their interest into commitments when the time comes.
We talked about this last week. If you missed part one, you can read that below ⬇️
Today, we’re talking process.
How do you convert the information of who you should be recruiting into what your process is and how to execute it?
This will differ for you based on roster size and the changes you’ll anticipate there (which we’ll talk about in a bit), but generally speaking you should have three tiers:
Tier 1 is your top group. In our case, this was athletes we wanted to give money to. Generally, “money” as a qualifier meant that they made it far enough in the qualification process to mutually move forward.
Tier 2 is anyone that’s had a conversation. This can be via call, text, DM, or email. Email is an actual back and forth, not mass emails or copy-pastes talking about their upcoming tournament.
Tier 3 is everybody else. Anyone who hasn’t responded to us… contact info we have… no connections and/or potentially observed at an event with no connection. For that matter, any one in the world – they share the same relevance.
Three tiers keeps things really simple:
Tier 1: The ones you LOVE. It’s a gut-punch if they go elsewhere.
Tier 2: They can ascend into Tier 1 with more connection. They may also get forcefully elevated into Tier 1 if you lose out on a bunch of Tier 1s.
Tier 3: This is ultimately where everyone starts. How you comb this beach for future athletes is up to you.
Once you’ve tiered-out your prospective class, you can determine how to rank them within that class. We’d grade each prospect on the criteria most important to us, also including trending interest. The 100-scale number allowed us to rank athletes vertically via positional needs and helped give ongoing feedback regarding who we needed to pursue further.
For you, this might be simpler because your sport is less defined by positions or maybe you are, but you’re position agnostic. As you can see, we’d recruit lots of multi-tool players and move them around to best fit our system once they got on campus.
The “what” is making sense of your numbers to get the most out of your future.
This is my impassioned plea – say no to reactionary recruiting.
I think we've all been there. We've all been in a place where we've waited, we've tried to get PSAs late in the class, or based on what happened in the previous year.
It doesn’t work. If you're waiting to see what happens, you're probably not getting the first fruits of your recruiting class.
Minimally, you need a four-year vision from today. By the time your freshmen are seniors, think where are we going to be? If you want to be able to dig into the future, you've got to understand the past. I suggest (if you can) that you gather the previous four years of recruiting data.
This will give you an opportunity to see where you were, where you're at, and where you're headed.
Numbers tell a story.
In the example above, we brought in anybody with a heartbeat in 2017 due to calendar and scholarship budget restrictions. The team wasn’t very good and we turned over a majority of the class the very next year to get better. That next year, our attrition rate dropped from over 50% to under 20%. Is that good or bad?
It’s good because we had better continuity and more wins on the field. It may have been bad because greater attrition could have led to even more wins through more than nine recruits that season.
The following season, we aimed for 10 recruits and were forced to take 13 by our athletic department.
Why is this information relevant?
The numbers that tell a story don’t lie. There are trends in the data.
Find the trends and they will illuminate your future.
Speaking of illuminating your future, there’s no exercise more important than projecting your roster and recruiting classes over the four years to come. This is the four-year vision I was talking about.
It can be as simple as reverse engineering your class sizes from your optimal roster number. We wanted 36 athletes in our program at any time:
12 on the field
12 that can see the field
12 that are injured, developmental, or potentially ineligible
According to the graphic above, we needed a ten-person class every year just to maintain our number. That’s projecting 6-8 grads and four walking away from the program every year. And while we had two of our players enter the transfer portal in the portal’s first three years, I’d go in and revise that number upward. It’s a different world.
Regardless of attrition, you need to plan.
If you’re a tennis coach recruiting 3 players, this is just as important as the football coach bringing in 30.
It takes one good or bad year to necessitate an adjustment up or down. If you miss the trend, you’ll need two years instead of one to smooth out your roster numbers.
When you have a plan, you become active in the recruiting process instead of simply letting recruits come to you.
Remember, knowing how a recruit falls into your system allows you to prioritize them better, recruit them better, and convert their interest into commitments when the time comes.