A short YouTube talk by Trenton “Trey” Luera explaining the college football recruiting ‘behind the scenes’ and advising recruits not to overthink coaches’ internal processes. He emphasizes focusing on controllable inputs—playing, academics, making it easy for coaches to find and evaluate you—rather than obsessing over dates or what coaches might be thinking.
Chapters
One of the biggest mysteries going through the recruiting process is what's going on behind the scenes. What are coaches thinking? What are they saying? What are they thinking about you? And so I'm going to talk about that. Why you ultimately shouldn't get too caught up in it and how reality actually is so you can better understand the process and just make it ten times smoother. And so if you don't know who I am, I'm Trey Laurier. I'm a former college quarterback. I now run my company. Your first scholarship. We help families get their first college football scholarship and more. And so I've got a Fresca here. We're just going to chop it up for a little bit and talk about it. So the, the biggest thing first off I want to say, and I kind of hit on this a second ago, is just don't get too caught up in the behind the scenes. I think a lot can go wrong when you start trying to get into this mind of someone else on what they think about you. And you can only do that so much before you just drive yourself crazy and stress out of your mind about, about decisions that you can't control. So let's go behind the scenes and talk about what actually happens. Because I, I just got off the phone with a friend that he coaches at the FCS level and he was just gonna talk about their recruiting process. And I'm like, it's hilarious because people think it's this super in depth thing and it as at some schools, but at most schools it's not. And so you have to understand two things. It's people. At the end of the day, recruiting is just people. And so a lot of people try to think about how can I get my way into this system. They think it's like this super ironclad system where like, how do they not know who I am, everybody should know who my name is and that all these coaches know every single high school football player in the world. That's just not how it works in reality. It's just people at the end of the day, people trying to do their job and do it to the best of ability. And it's a really hard job to recruit kids, 16, 17, 18 year old kids and guess how they should end up and potentially be, you know, college football players at a high level as well as, you know, who is actually worth recruiting and how to find them in the first place. It's not an easy job. And so you have to understand that a lot of this comes down to psychology and just human nature rather than, you know, super ironclad systems or just like this super kind of, I don't know. People think it's like this machine that recruits. It's not. It's recruiting coordinators who is one person, it's recruiting assistants who are another person is offense coordinators, defense coordinators who are just people at the end of the day. And so instead of coming at it from the frame of like, you know, what is the process going to do to me? Instead come to the frame of how can I convince people, how can I show people that I'm worth recruiting over everyone else as well as you know, why they ought not offer me, are they going to offer me all this stuff? You just have to get inside the mind of people and understand why they're doing certain things or what they might be doing. And so let's first talk about what this FCS coach told me about their program. So right now where we're at December 1st of 2024, transfer portals opening up here on the 6th of December, if I'm not mistaken, maybe the 9th. I can't even remember off the top of my head because it just doesn't matter really if you, you don't need to get too caught up in dates. But really they're figuring out who's transferring. They got post notifications onto every single transfer post that's going on. And so they're hyper aware onto that. And so high school isn't necessarily super top of mind right now. And so when you're not getting responses from coaches, instead of thinking that they hate you just realize that they've got hundreds of other kids that they're thinking about while also we just had Thanksgiving. They're thinking about their own family, they're thinking about their own jobs because they may be getting job offers to other places. And so don't get too caught up in the behind the scenes stuff. Cause most of the time it's a mess and they don't even know what's going on half the time either. And, and so instead focus on the inputs that you can do. You can follow up with a coach to make sure that hey, at least they see your message. You can send out your film so at least they have it to reference to. You can fill out their questionnaire so that way you get in the database of their school. You can post on Twitter. So that way you can also be a part of that noise and hopefully stand out amongst the crowd. I much rather focus on that than rather focus on what are these coaches Thinking there's definitely an aspect to that, that's how they go higher level. But don't get too caught up in it as well as with the dates. Like don't get too caught up in the dates because don't try to time things up. Put yourself out there, focus on the inputs and the outputs will come. Because if you consistently put in the inputs, the timing doesn't matter. The timing will always be right if you do the right stuff. Because no matter what you want to do, you can't force things to come earlier. I wish there was. You can definitely move conversations faster, you can definitely make things happen a little bit faster by having some more exposure. But to think that you can force a coach to offer you early just by doing X is wrong. I hate to break it to you, there's no magic pill to that. And so really just focus on the inputs rather than, you know what, what's going on behind. Like, don't focus on uncontrollable stuff, focus on the controllable stuff. Because just like on the field, you can't focus on your 21 other people on the field or your 10 other teammates. All you can focus about is you. And if you can do what you do at the best of your ability, all you can do is just hope that everything else works out and know at least you can rest safely knowing that, hey, you put everything you could to do your side of things. And if the cards lay out that hey, it wasn't meant to be to do whatever, that is what it is. So focus on the inputs. That's the biggest part of this. The behind the scenes is, is messy, it's crazy. And then day is just people that are trying to do their jobs too, just like you're trying to get recruited. And I'm sure you're not doing the whole recruiting process perfectly. And they're not, they're probably not doing their, their jobs perfectly. But at the end of the day, your job really as a recruit is to be the best football player you can be, the best person you can be, the best student you can be. And also just make it really easy for them to know all those things about you. And so don't get too caught up in much other than make it really easy for them to make a decision whether to recruit you or not. Make it really easy for them to find you. If you do those two things, trust me, you'll find the right home for you no matter what's going on behind the scenes, because someone will see that, notice you and realize, hey, we gotta bring this kid in the program. And that's the biggest secret thing. Biggest secret to recruiting is just make it really dang easy for coaches to recruit you. And they will recruit you if you are someone worth recruiting, which I hope you are. And so hopefully this helped. Hopefully. I know this is a crazy time of year where this is all for season now, December is. And so the best way to maximize it is, again, just make it real easy for coaches to find you and recruit you. And if you can do that, you'll put yourself in a good position. So hopefully you got something from this. If you did, feel free to like and subscribe. See you in the next one. Peace.
