7 Costly Mistakes With College Recruiting (Avoid These)

Hey, Alex, Here I want to talk about seven costly mistakes that I was making early on in this college recruiting process. And thankfully, I was able to turn this around and was fortunate that I actually had somebody come into my life who was a former D1 coach and player. He was a family friend that helped guide and direct me going through this college recruiting process. And now I've come full circle, and that is what I do. So if you're new to my my channel, my name is Alex Swenson. I'm a former Division I college coach, scout, and recruiter with 11 years of experience. And now what I do is help high school baseball players and their parents navigate this college recruiting process and put them in the best possible position to play at the next level. So if you get anything from this video, please smash that, like, button right down here and subscribe to either my channel or my podcast. Please leave a review as well. Helps me get the word out to get guys to the next level. I had such a great college experience playing at the division one level, and it doesn't have to be D1, it could be D2, D3. These experiences are amazing that I'm just trying to give that back to as many guys as I possibly can. If you're interested in maybe need help going through this, because it's hard to know what you don't know going through this recruiting process. And you want to talk to me and see if this is a good fit, you can visit my website. Right. Right down here. I'll leave it down in the description as well. But let's get into number one. One of the biggest mistakes that I was making earlier on was I was relying on my summer travel organization. All right. It's gotten even worse these days because these organizations, and don't get me wrong, like, there's some good organizations out there for sure, but, man, it's becoming fewer and fewer and now and these tournaments are so massive. So this is a big mistake that I made and a lot of people are making right now. They go out to these tournaments with their travel ball organization. And then, you know, there's, you know, hundreds and hundreds of players in these organizations and even sometimes in the thousands now. So they can't really specifically help the individual players going, but you'll go out to these tournaments. I think Perfect Game had a tournament this past year that was like 400 teams at that tournament. You're not getting any exposure to these college coaches. So you're just relying on just going out and kind of hoping to be found that is a big theme and one of those here of things that you need to avoid is just hoping to be found. Number two is the lack of an exposure plan. College coaches can't recruit players that they don't know about. Right. They need to know about you. They need to be able to see you and learn more about you. So you need to have a good exposure plan going through that. Don't again, just sit back and wait to be found. That is not the way to go about this. Number three, passively hopeful mindset. That is what I am calling it right now is you're basically relying on luck to be discovered. All right? Doing this on your own is about a 7.2% success rate, all right? Those odds are really against you. So if you're just sitting back and hoping to be found, you're gonna get missed. Now, of course, you know, there's this saying out there that, you know, people say, and it's really bad advice, okay? And it is. If you're good enough, they will find you. And the problem with that is, is it's partially true, but it's also partially false because I see it all the time, right? So yeah, of course, if you throw 95 miles an hour, yeah, they're gonna find you. And you hit 15 home runs in your high school season, yeah, they're going to find you. But if you're an athlete like me, which a lot of athletes are, good athletes, not elite. I wasn't elite by any means. I needed help getting exposure. I wasn't just going to be discovered because I wasn't going to wow you with my metrics. I was just a really good baseball player. But I'm kind of undersized. And again, I'm not going to hit 15 home runs. I'm not going to throw 95 miles an hour. I was just a good athlete that could help a team win. But I needed help getting discovered there. So making sure of that. Number four, looking in the wrong places. So there's a couple mindsets on this is, hey, D1 or bus mentality. I started off with a D1 or bus mentality and luckily started to diversify. My schoolism got a lot more interest because if you think about it, if you're only going after the Vanderbilts or the Stanfords, the Tennessee's, the Texas, the Floridas, those are the most competitive. And our athletic standards have to be so high that you could easily play maybe at a division one, mid major level, which is very high competition. D2, very high competition. D3, very high competition. There's a division three school that beat a division one school this past year. 13. Three they run ruled them. They had to stop the game. All right, there's good competition everywhere. So explain. Expand your horizon and don't just have the D1 or bus mentality. On another note, too, you need to start targeting schools that are recruiting your position, because not every school is in need of your position. This is where some people going through the recruiting process. The blind leading the blind. It's hard to know what you don't know. So targeting the right schools that are in need of your son's position is massive. All right, number five, waiting too long to start. There's two things that we're fighting in this recruiting process. It's time and roster spots available. There's only so much time we're in high school, and then there's a window in high school that we can be recruited and most things happen. I suggest that you start going after a sophomore year. You get the ball rolling. Definitely sophomore year. There's some cases where you can get started freshman year. But, you know, there's some schools, like some of the bigger schools are looking freshman year and they want to see a guy progress all the way through. So getting the ball rolling. Don't be late on this recruiting process, because if you're late, you're falling behind. All the people that they have on their whiteboard, all these college coaches, they have big whiteboards. When I was recruiting, we'd have a big baseball field, all the positions, and we would have, like, the players names that we're looking at that we needed to see, that we're going to offer that we needed to see one more time. Maybe all those things we have starred, all those things going through that you want to get on that board earlier than later. Okay, earlier than later, because your spot could be taken. So get the ball rolling going through this recruiting process. Number six, not following up with coaches. This is massive. So people will send out, maybe it's an email, maybe it's direct message, and maybe it's a text. And you get crickets at first. That is pretty common, actually. And sometimes college coaches, they can either be very busy. Some of these coaches honestly are not the best organized. Right. And they need you to follow up with them to ultimately help them be organized. I've seen it time and time again, myself included, going through this recruiting process. When I was getting traction as far as, hey, following up with players, because I remember seeing emails, I'm not getting anything back. And then I would start following up with them finally and start getting traction on that. Second, third, fourth, fifth time I've seen guys in my clients that fifth time following up, it's like, hey, so sorry, I've been meaning to get back to you or hey, been watching you and we're ready to move. Take this to the next step. Make sure you follow up with coaches. Very, very important. Number seven, not creating an online presence. Alright? This is recruiting video and social media. Recruiting video is your best tool to get exposure because you could send a couple clicks as far as sending out emails and now a bunch of college coaches can watch a good highlight video. We want to make sure we have a good highlight video. And then social media, if you're doing it the right way, you can get a lot of exposure there, whether it's on Instagram, whether it's on X. Make sure you create an online presence because it's a very efficient way to get exposure going through that and that is the name of the game, getting your name out there. If you have any questions or you would add anything, please comment down below and I'll see you in the next video. Take care of.