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The Courting Process - A Junior Year Experience

The Courting Process, the time of attracting the right colleges and choosing the one that best matches your interests and talents, can be exciting and even overwhelming. It’s important to know the NCAA’s rules and follow them, but to also be pro-active within those rules to ensure that the coaches know of their desire to play.

During your junior year, create a target list of schools you’d like to attend. Try not to let your athletic desires overwhelm your opportunity to get a great education. Add schools to your list with strong academic programs.

Get a Player Rating from Athelites. Register or contact us for more information at info@athelites.com. Very few high school athletes have access to this proprietary system for measuring an athlete’s ability and potential. Look at this unbiased measurement of your abilities and flaws. Work hard to improve your flaws and turn them into strengths. Re-take your Player Rating (automatically done at the end an Athelites training session) and make multiple copies to be sent to college coaches. Your Player Rating will be posted on the Athelites website where college coaches review high school athletes all the time.

Send a letter of interest to the coach at each school on your list. In the letter, tell the coach that you want to attend his school for academic reasons and also want to play for his team. Make your letter personal. Don’t write “Dear Coach”. Write “Dear Coach Monague”. Add something about the school’s great facilities, athletic record, or another school attribute that will show you’ve done your research. In your letter, discuss the major you plan on pursuing, your leadership skills, anything else that will show you are a well-rounded person, and information about your athletic skills. At the end of the letter, ask the coach if he’d like to see a tape/ DVD of you playing (don’t send a tape unless he asks for it), ask for college literature, ask for information about camps they may offer, and mention that you’d like to come and watch a home game. Include your athletic statistics and your high school schedule in case the coach wants to send a recruiter to watch you play.

With each letter of interest, you should include a player profile. The profile should be a one-page summary of your personal information including: academic record, jobs, interests, volunteer activities, awards, and athletic achievements.

In addition, include a copy of your Player Rating with the letter of interest. College coaches usually have to rely on an athlete’s interest and the opinions of teachers and coaches at the student’s school. Opinions are notoriously unreliable. An Athelites Player Rating will put you on a college coach’s short list by giving him an unbiased assessment of your true ability and potential.

A few weeks after sending your letters of interest, call or e-mail the coach periodically. (We recommend no more than once every week or so unless you really have to. You don’t want to annoy the coach.) Each time you contact him, have something to say or a question to ask. Tell him you’re attending an event or ask a question about his program or college. Because of NCAA rules, he can’t call you until July 1 after your junior year, but he can send you an e-mail.

One neat way to promote yourself is to create a personal website. It gives college coaches an easy way to keep track of you, your latest accomplishments, pictures from your games, where you’ll be playing next, and tournaments you’ll be attending. Add any information about yourself that you think will help sell you to coaches. Include your website address in your letter of interest. Do this, and you never know when a recruiter will be watching you from the stands!

Try to appear in local newspapers as often as possible by asking your coaches from your high school, summer league, or club teams to submit game results and photos to the newspapers in your area. Every time an article with your name appears, cut out the article with the masthead, make enough photocopies for every coach on your list, and highlight your name every place it appears in the article. Mail a copy to each coach along with a handwritten note that says something like, “Dear Coach Hughes, I though you might like to see this article. I look forward to talking to you soon. John Grant.”

Don’t ever let your parents do this work! If the coach notices that it’s not your handwriting, the essays are “too adult”, or something else catches his attention, you’ll lose his interest. No coach wants to recruit an athlete who’s too immature to do his own work.

Related articles:

How To Play Sports In a Division I, II, or III School
The Courting Process - A Junior Year Experience
Recruiting Terms
College Visits
The Clearinghouse and Initial Eligibility
Recruiting Regulations and Rules - NEW!!
How Coaches Recruit Athletes - NEW!!
Improve Your Chances - Coming Soon!!
Recruiting Your Own Help - Coming Soon!!
Sealing the Deal - Coming Soon!!

Learn more about the recruiting calendar, rules and terms like the dead period, click on one of the sports below:

Men's Basketball - Updated 12/11/08
Women's Basketball - Updated 12/11/08
Men's Lacrosse - Updated 12/11/08
Women's Lacrosse - Updated 12/11/08
Men's Soccer - Updated 12/11/08
Women's Soccer - NEW!!
Women's Field Hockey - NEW!!
Football - NEW!!
Baseball - NEW!!
Softball - NEW!!
Women's Volleyball– Coming Soon!!

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