A college coach explains why talent alone won't get you recruited. He looks for coachability, how you respond to failure, teamwork, leadership presence, and grades. He's turned down talented athletes who lacked these traits.
Chapters
College coaches aren't just scouting for talent when they're out there recruiting. There's 5 traits they look for that move the needle to that offer, to that scholarship offer. There's plenty of times when I was out scouting at the Division I level that I would pass on a very talented athlete because they didn't meet the criteria of these 5 traits. Number 1, coachability. Are you coachable? Not when everything is going right. No, when things are going wrong. Can you handle— can constructive criticism. Number 2, your response to failure, because you're going to fail and you're going to fail a lot. How do you handle that? Do you break down or do you persevere and you have a lot of resilience in you? Number 3, how are you with your teammates? Do you push your teammates? Do you help your teammates? Do you help the team win and get to their goals? Number 4, do you have leadership qualities? And I'm not talking about the rah-rah talk and all of that. I'm talking about your presence. In your preparation, your practice, your pregame, and then obviously in game. Do you have leadership qualities? And last but not least, number 5, your grades. All right, your academics are very, very important. Again, this goes back to— we would try to recruit so many athletes that were very talented and had these traits, but we couldn't get them into school because they didn't have the grades. Keep your grades up. Good luck.
