High School Coaches Becoming Recruiters

My Belief in recruiting within our school stems from an incident which occured many years ago. An outstanding athlete was recommended to me by a Phys. Ed. teacher. We sent him a letter telling him to give football a try and to come to our meeting. The young man showed up and after the meeting I spoke with him. "Why didn't you try out for football before?" The response startled me. "Coach, no one ever asked me before".
The young man made 2nd team all-league as a senior.

Don't be afraid to ask them to play.

One of the inner-city High schools here has a big population of Immigrant Sudanese kids. The Sudaneses live in the largest public housing project nearby and have several churches that sponsor them to move here to escape the oppression/persecution and war in their country. You would get a resounding "no" from them if you asked that question.
But of the handfull of Sudaneses that have gone out, they can flat out play. Very tall and very athletic, terrible to stereotype but I have about 25 of them playing in my youth program. They can play and are very ferocious, really neat kids with great stories.
Now baseball, thats another story LOL.

Coach:
I believe recruiting is a must to build/sustain a program. We took over a program with the longest losing streak in our state 6 years ago and the first thing we did was implement a recruiting stategy...

Our recruiting program is divided into three categories: immediate recruiting, short-term recruiting, and long-term recruiting. The following is our breakdown to help us build a consistent and solid foundation:

Immediate Recruiting: (Returning Players/On Campus Students)
• Individual interviews
• Strength & Conditioning program
• Team meetings
• Athletes in other sports (Basketball/Track/Wrestling specifically)
• Football players as recruiters (peer pressure/program promotion)
• Correspondence

Short-Term Recruiting: (Middle School Athletes)
• Lincoln Eighth Grade Program
• Little All-American/Pop Warner
• AAU Teams
• Middle School Flag Program
• Jr. High Camp
• Jr. High Coaches Clinics
• Special Game Nights
• Halftime Scrimmages
• ‘Ball boy for a game’, ‘Recruits of the Week’, Varsity sidelines, etc.
• Attendance at football practices/games
• Attendance at basketball, wrestling, track, baseball games/practices
• Correspondence: recruit letters, ‘attaboys’, etc.
• Team apparel
• Game passes
• Newsletters
• Team web site (team recognition)
• Coaching/parental contacts, School P.E. teachers

Long-Term Recruiting: (Grade School Students)
• Future Rails Camp
• YMCA Flag Program
• Basketball, jr. wrestling, baseball leagues
• Attendance at events
• Correspondence
• Game passes
• Coaching/parental contacts


This has helped us turn a perennial doormat football program into back-to-back conference champions and playoff participants. Hope this helps.

Im going to pass the post of the Iowa guy on to 2 HS coaches I know are having problems getting kids, that makes a bunch of sense.

It helps that he has taken a down program to the top. Thats what I can sink my teeth into, premise, how to do it, hard results. Why reinvent the wheel?

I never have a problem asking kids, and now and then you need to be a bit persistent. However, I also don't want prisoners. If a kid comes out only at the behest of someone else "twisting his arm", then you are asking for problems if his experience isn't what he wants. And that is the point: A team sport is for a team, not for some kids' individual enjoyment. The real challenge, to me, is painting a picture for them whereby they are intrigued about wanting to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Not always an easy task in a self-saturated society.

I agree with your statement. Im in a different boat, as a youth coach our job is to get as many kids out for football as we can and to make it fun, teach them sound fundamentals and retain them so they can gain the benefits of playing the game. We want to make sure they make it to the HS level and not drop out like 70% of youth players do. Ive found in coaching kids over the last 15 years and having my own 400+ kid Org the last 9 years the kids have to play on teams that are competing in order to get retention levels at over 90%. So we have invested heavily in making our coaches better and now have them all run a set scheme and practice methodology. Our numbers have improved dramaticly since doing so as we improved our coaching, scheme and competitiveness, our numbers improved dramaticly. I used to have coaches that thought the only way they could compete was to recruit the best players and if they didnt they wouldnt have very good seasons. That was their priority, we moved off that mind set and it has reaped us nice rewards since doing so.

The post "its ALL about whats in the cupboard" in my mind and maybe mistakenly was that the team with the best talent wins
( whats in the cupboard), ALL in my mind means ALL important to the exclusion of other factors. IMHO and its just my opinion based on my personal experience, logic and the experience of others was that there are many factors to success its not ALL about whats in the cupboard. Players are of great importance,however Ive seen coaches with great teams being outcoached and losing including myself. IMHO there are other factors, scheme matters, tech matters, game plan matters, play sequencing matters, coaching priorities matter, community support matters., no one thing is the critical success factor.
BTW there is an EXCELLENT X and O coach here locally, guy is brilliant. He took a team with just 28 kids on it, Omaha South and beat a Huge Private School with Tons of talent, facilities and huge numbers, Creighton Prep running his Veer Offense. But they guy refuses to do any recruiting, so it takes effort in all above areas. He will never have great W/L record until he decides one of the key factors is also getting kids out instead of X and Oing every team to death ( which he does very well). It takes everything and thank goodness coahing matters, otherwise we wouldnt be here and they would let someone from the stands coach the game LOL.

Do coaches play a part in getting players to go hard and play tough? Can players be coached up to do so?

Sure it helps to have a bunch of wrestlers on your team LOL.

My former HS has a HC that refuses to recruit, I give them our mailing lsit and the INDy sheet on every player, his photo, position, demographics etc
They NEVER come to any of our games ( sunday is film breakdown day for them) and I know for a fact they are not contacted with the exception being a letter that is sent out to all incoming 9th graders to come to summer weights.
When I said this coach was a great X and O guy and terrible recruiter, I meant it. His exact words " If they want to come to this school they will come, Im not recruiting them". Some guys are like that, iots too bad because he is a very good coach in the other areas. Man Ive tried to help him out here and he loses so many of our kids because of it.

I am assuming we are all with the understanding that it doesn't matter what the coach knows, but what the players who play the game know.

Players making plays is what wins games.

Players that are equiped with assignments and fundamentals and athleticism are more inclined to make plays than those that are not. Each play comes down to the 11 on the field being better than the other 11 on the field. Players need to be set up for success on each and every play.

A dirt-ball player with no athletic skill needs more tools than the 4.3 phenom.

“Some coaches pray for wisdom. I pray for 260-pound tackles. They'll give me plenty of wisdom.”- Chuck Noll

you can't recruit in your own HS?

Oh yeah, we recruit like crazy in our own school. But other schools, or younger kids from elsewhere, no it's illegal.

tomato, tomatoe

Where I'm from, when we win, the players get all the credit,
when we lose, the coach takes all the responsibility.

The burden of leadership.

The hours scouting, preparation, organization, discipline, teaching, etc is synonymous with coaching.

Same here, as Tyrone Willingham put it to us in DC " If we lost its my responsibility, it is my fault. I will take the heat for any mistake my players make"
We lost for the first time in 3 years this last year and we had a few small mental errors that cost us an OT game that featured some very unusual officiating. I told the players to point at me, that no one but me was to blame for the loss, not them not the officials etc etc and we would learn from it. We did, did us all good.