Survey: Top prospects give recruiting advice to coaches
College coaches spend a lot of time giving prospects advice on how to be recruited. They talk about keeping a professional image on social media and playing hard at all times. There’s usually a line about “culture” and “body language.” The whole song and dance is familiar to anyone that follows college basketball.
Rivals.com has turned the tables on the discussion. Over the course of the last couple weeks, we asked top-flight prospects what advice they’d give college coaches on how to become better recruiters. Their responses addressed various topics and can be found below.
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2022 Rankings: Rivals150 | Team | Position
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The advice: “The biggest advice I’d give them is to care about what the player is doing on a daily basis. You can’t just call and ask them about basketball all the time. Check in on their family, too. You have to let them know you care about them as a person.”
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The advice: “Some of them like to blow up people’s phones. And it’s like, ‘Can’t you guys chill?’ There were times when I’d get called by the same guy three times a day. Obviously, it’s still a blessing to be recruited, but chill guys.”
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The advice: “Be patient with the players you recruit. I like to take my time with decisions – not just this one, but all decisions. So when coaches want players to hurry up and decide, it can hurt them. I feel like they sometimes try to rush guys.”
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The advice: “I’d tell them to chill on the food. On these visits, all you do is eat. We eat and eat and eat and I can’t eat any more. I’m not joking. Sometimes you feel like you need a break from eating when you go on these visits.”
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The advice: “I think they should understand how important it is to get really close with every member of the family. You have to balance between sounding like a coach and sounding like a friend, too. Nobody wants them to be too much like your friend, but they still have to be friendly. I’d say that and get close with their parents.”
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The advice: “I guess I’d tell them about their time with the kids. With high-level guys like myself, you get a lot of calls. Sometimes I’d talk to like 20-25 coaches in a day and it gets exhausting. I think a coach being confident enough to take his time and not always blowing you up works a lot better than they think. They think they always need to be calling, but that sometimes hurts.”
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The advice: “You have to keep it real with the player. Don’t start selling some player a dream that you know isn’t possible. Keep it 100 with them about what they need to work on and what their role is going to be when they get there. You can’t lie about the role and them have them get there and find out it’s different than what you said.”
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The advice: “Give the players some space. Sometimes, they over-recruit. It’s a good thing that you have people calling you, but sometimes they overdo it. I’ll get out of practice some days and have, like, four or five missed calls from the same person. That’s too much.”