Trenton Luera breaks down how college football coaches evaluate recruits in seconds, forming snap judgments from highlights, messages, and campus visits. First impressions stick hard. Athletes who deliberately show what they want coaches to remember—speed, strength, grades, specific plays—have a real edge, and visiting campus early matters more than most realize.
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Okay, so if you're going through the recruiting process and you're trying to get college football scholarships, one of the most important things you can do is understand how college coaches think. So that way you can put yourself as something that they want. If you don't know who I am, I'm Trey Lohr. I'm a former college quarterback. I run your first scholarship where we help families get their first scholarship and more. And so today I'm going to be sharing how coaches think. Just from my observations. I've never coached college football, so I'm not saying this is how I think, but this is also just under the basis of human psychology. So I like to think that it's pretty close to correct. Of course, if any college coaches are out there, feel free to correct me because I'm too young to not learn. So let's dive into it. So, number one, the first thing is just referring back to human psychology of these are two things or really one thing that you can package it all into. And so the biggest thing to me is you have to understand that first impressions are so big. I know that everybody says that, but especially with coaches, because they're going to, you have to understand their, their what they're going through in the first place. They're going to see so many other recruits throughout their entire process, whether it's on their Twitter feed, camps, visits, etc. They're going to shake so many hands, see so many different faces. And so first impressions matter so much because you only are going to get five seconds to really show them what you're about. And whether that first impression is on a highlight video, a message, an email or an in person thing, you need to make all the time that you get with them count. That's what a lot of the things that I do and I think about are all about. Because if you don't make that impression count, if you don't impress them, then they're immediately going to turn it off. If it's video, if it's a message or something like that, that's immediately going to get put away, they're going to go to somebody else. Because There are over 100,000 seniors looking to get recruited. This is just for football I'm talking about. And so if you're just one, they're going to go to the next guy, the other 99, 9, 199,000 out there, and they're going to go to the next one. And so you have to make every single moment that you get count. So don't Take that for granted. At the same time, don't let that paralyze you because at the same time, there's a lot of recruits that they're going to see. So if you try once and you fail, that's fine. You can always try again because they're probably not even going to remember who you are. So don't look at it like, I have one chance. Look at it as like, okay, I have a very small window to get their attention. If I fail, I can always try again. That's the way I look at it. Because again, they're probably just going to forget. It's either going to be remember and recruit or forget and that's it. And then. So you can always have that option of trying again and seeing what you can get. Now with that, I will go more into the recruiting stuff still, and then we'll transition a little bit more to like, once again on campus. But you have to remember that everybody bridges things between associations. This is kind of how the mind works. Think about some of your friends. You associate with them. You even associate yourself with things you probably associate yourself as. Maybe not a student, maybe a student athlete, maybe you associate yourself as. As a football player or a chess player, a video gamer, whatever. And so you have to remember that coaches do the same thing with you. So whatever they're seeing of you, they associate you with. If they see bad plays from you, they associate you as a bad player, and that's normal. If they see you run really fast, they associate you as a fast player. If they see you do things that they associate with really good players, that's what you want. You want to do things that make coaches think. That make coaches associate you with the kind of player that they want on their program. That's why I talk about things like good grades and strength, numbers and body weight and all that stuff. Because that stuff says to a coach, I am a kind of player that you want to recruit. They've recruited players in the past that look like that. They've turned out to be really good. Thus they want to recruit more of them. And so you want to be exactly that. So remember that. Now, going back to the first impressions, and this is going to be my final note before we hop off. But the big thing about first impressions is when you get on campus, because now you've chosen a school and of course you can enter the transportal, but you want to make this really count. And so you have to remember that first impressions are so big. Because I noticed this a lot of times in the fall camps that I've been in is these freshmen come on campus, and they're not. I don't want to say cliche and say locked in. They're just not. They're not understanding of the opportunity at hand. They just immediately come in and think, I'm good. Thus, I should start. And that is incorrect. Incorrect to believe that. Instead, what you should be thinking about is, I am good. I just need to show the coaches that as soon as possible. Because if you set the first impression that I can't remember plays by misremembering one single play, and that's the only opportunity that you get, you immediately become the guy that coaches think, this guy can't remember plays. And so it may be frustrating because I've gotten tagged as plenty of things before I've gotten tagged as. It's funny, because at Santa Barbara, I got tagged as not really athletic. I wasn't very fast. But then I went to my new school, and suddenly I was a decent enough athlete to run all these different plays that nobody else could run. And so it's interesting to see that firsthand. And you'll experience that as well, too. Just try to make sure that you get the good first impressions. I was. I was categorized as very smart in Santa Barbara because I had high GPA and I took a bunch of different classes. But. And that was a good impression to leave on, and coaches trusted me and all that stuff. And so you want to leave those same kind of impressions to the coaches that you're with when you first step on campus. You just have to find a way to do it and do it as fast as possible. Because the thing is, if you mess up, even if it's not your fault, right away, you get tagged as that. And, yes, you can fix it. You may think, like, oh, I can always fix that in the future. Yes, you can. But it's gonna take even more effort to fix it than just doing it right in the first place. So I just want to share that with you because I think there's a couple important things to keep in mind throughout recruiting and also just your football journey. And so hopefully this helped you out. If you like this and you want more stuff like this, be sure to like and subscribe. See you in the next one. Peace.
