How To Get A College Football Scholarship (97% Fail)

Most families think that they can handle the recruiting process alone and that's exactly why most of them fail. 2.7% of families get a college football scholarship. I'm talking about just one single dollar. So that means that 97% fail at getting a single dollar in scholarship money. And so let's talk about the biggest mistakes of why families fail. And so first off, if you don't know who I am, I'm Trent Lauera, I help families get a college football scholarship. So if you're another family that has another sport for their kid, this can still help. But this is football specific stuff so there may be some nuance that I'm missing there. So if you're new here and you want to get a college football scholarship, subscribe, we drop stuff like this as much as possible. And if you are returning, thank you. Let's dive into it and some more stuff that can help you get a college football scholarship. So the first big mistake is playing this wait and see game instead of being aggressive. It's one of the biggest pet peeves and it's one of the biggest mistakes that people make because it's, it's this outdated recruiting strategy of like, oh yeah, newspaper clippings are going to be, you know, getting your name out there and your high school coach is potentially going to get you out there. And that's just not realistic. Nowadays you need to be aggressive. There are a million high school football players out there from freshman year all the way to senior year. And so your competition is active, they are reaching out to coaches, they are getting their name known. And unless you're 6, 5, 2 4, run a 4 4, your skills alone are not going to be enough to get coaches to just randomly come across you. They're not randomly stunning upon your highlights, your huddle video, your YouTube video, your X profile. They need to find it in some way and they need to come across their desk because otherwise you're just going to blend in with everybody else. Because even though the competition is being active, even though our families that we worked with are being active, they're still hundreds of emails and XDMs in their inboxes, there's still hundreds in their feed. And so it, even if you're being active, you're still need to stand out. And so you can't just expect coaches to find you when they already have so much that they can go through that is being directed at them. And on top of that, I mean, we're talking about a limited time window here. If you're listening to this right now. And you're a junior going to be a senior. We're talking about less than 365 days until signing day. And scholarships are being offered day after day after day. Maybe you see it on your X feed, but if you scroll on X and just pay attention, there are offers going out every single day and every single day that you're not one of them, you are missing out on spots that could be you. And so this is the first one. Your fix here is to start taking action. Not waiting behind and seeing what happens or waiting for the film from next year or waiting for you to put that highlight video together. You should have done all this stuff a long time ago. You should have been reaching out to coaches a long time ago. And so I get it. There's probably nobody that told you this case. But now you know that you need to be doing something so that's not no longer excuse and you have to take action. You have to do something to get your name out there. You have to start getting on X which is the main platform for recruiting for college football. You have to start emailing coaches, you have to start going to camps where you're going to get seen. All this stuff is important pieces of the process, especially in the modern recruiting process that is going to actually get you recruited. Not just this wait and cbs. The second thing is inconsistent or non existent. Follow up. So we talked about being active. We talked about sending messages to college coaches. The biggest piece that people make. Maybe you've sent a couple of emails to college coaches and you've sent one and you're like, shoot, we've sent 20, we haven't gotten any responses. Number one, you're doing too little. We send out for our families over 500 messages per week to just get a couple of responses. And if you're not following up on these messages, then your response rate is going to be drastically down. For example, for a single message, the maximum response rate here is anywhere from 1 to 5%. Usually on average going to be somewhere between 1 to 2%. If you're lower than that, then something your message or your film isn't good enough. And so you're missing something there. But that's not the point here. If you follow up, you can get anywhere up to a 5% increase on your response rate up to 5%. That means you could literally 5x the amount of responses that you get just by following up. I'm not joking about this. Um, I don't have any here, but in some of our Campaigns majority. A hundred percent of our responses came from the follow up responses, follow up messages that we sent in the third or even fourth email that we sent or the DM that we sent. And so just by not following up, you're missing out on massive opportunities. So you have to be following up, you have to follow up with college coaches, you have to send more messages because like we talked about, there's a ton of competition out there. And so things get buried, coaches get busy, they get pulled away into meetings and whatever else. And, and so you have to follow up to stay in their inbox, to stay active, to stay top of mind. And even though you may send two messages and you're like, they're not, they haven't seen any, they haven't responded, they may actually be seeing those and they decide to respond the third or the fourth one should, we've even had some respond in the sixth follow up or the seventh follow up. It's crazy, I know, I can't believe it sometimes too. But it's just the truth. And so you have to be following up. You have to implement a follow up system inside your recruiting process. Now the third thing is poor quality of video and social media presence. And so you have to realize what coaches actually want. You have to get inside the mind of a coach. It's, it's a big philosophy of what I did throughout my recruiting process to get the scholarships that I did as well as what we teach within our families that get the best possible results. Coaches do not want these super long videos. They don't want to, you know, full compilation of what you did on, you know, Thursday evening. They want short, simple stuff of specific skills that they need and consistent posts of this that they can easily evaluate throughout the process to decide, hey, is this a kid that we want to recruit or not? Simple as that. And so you have to realize that first impressions are happening all the time online. A bad video, a bad social media presence can immediately lead to you not getting the interest that and offers that you actually deserve. And so that means that that highlight reel that you have on huddle, if it's not optimized, if it's not short and to the point, if it's not having the certain skill sets that coaches want to see in the first couple plays, they're going to click away from you and go check out one of those other million football players out there that are already reaching out to them. And, and same thing with your social media, if your ex profile is sloppy, doesn't have the necessary information that they want to make, they need to make a decision. Then again, they're just going to skip it off and go to someone else. And because they don't have a minute or two, even just a minute or two to go look up your highlight video, go figure out that information elsewhere. They need it all there now. They need convenience. It has nothing to do with talent here. Has everything to do with convenience for the coaching staff because they're trying to get through as many recruits as possible and make quick decisions so that way they can save their time and spend their time on what really matters to them, which is winning football games. And so you need to make sure that your video is quality, what coaches want to see and is convenient for them. And same with your social media. It's a big part of the recruiting process, especially the modern recruiting process nowadays. Now, the fourth one is just not understanding recruiting timelines. And I don't blame anyone for not understanding it because you're probably going through this for the first time. I mean, it's like, shoot, like, what do we even do for tomorrow? Yeah, let alone like this big, you know, next couple years. And so what you have to understand is that generally freshman sophomore year, D1 programs are beginning their evaluations on the top prospects. And so this is why you see some offers get extended to these guys. And then throughout that time they continue to make their evaluations. And then we get to junior year. Now, junior year, D1 decisions are being made. You'll see some juniors, some incoming juniors, 2027s right now are being sended offers, and 26s that are current juniors, rising seniors are being made offers right now. And so power five or power four nowadays is set by the summer going into your senior year. That means that this timeline of February being the signing day date is not realistic. For example, if you're a junior right now, if you're a 20, 26 right now, as I'm recording this in March, then you only have a couple months to get that D1 interest. You do not have D1 interest by the time you go into your season. You can't expect that you're going to get offers during this time. And so you have to get on these boards, you have to get on interest, you have to be aggressive like we talked about. You can't wait. Because if you wait all the way till your fall or even later, which is just crazy, to try and get those D1 offers, then you're not going to make it happen. It's just. It's just not Possible, really, unless you're an absolute stud. And for some reason, you know, again, no one found out about you because you were waiting around. And so you have to get ahead on this stuff. The senior fall is where D2 schools, Division 3 schools, NA schools, junior colleges start to make majority of their offers. About 80% of them happen between September and January. And then that leads us to the senior spring, which really those limited spots remain at this point. So like for example, if you're a 2025 as recording this in 2025 of March, there's not really much left. You know, you can maybe get an NA offer, you maybe get a D2 offer. If you're a really good player and just happen to get missed out on for some reason, you maybe get a D3 opportunity here and there, maybe a juco one, but you don't really have a lot of options to go by. I don't want you to be in that position because I just got a DM from a parent today and they were asking me, hey, my son's got, you know, this opportunity, this opportunity, like, do you think he can get any D1 and D2 offers? And. And I just had to tell him, no, I. I don't, I don't think so. Maybe a D2 offer. But real estate is probably only going to be a walk on and we're not even talking scholarship money. So you can't wait around till that senior spring. You definitely can't wait around to the senior fall. You don't want to be in the junior year with this limited time zone. You want to start as early as possible, ideally a couple months before your sophomore year. Really as soon as you have varsity film as well, those two pairings really come together. And so making sure you understand these recruiting timelines and know how to, hey, when do we actually need to press down the gas? Are we ahead or be behind? That way you have a clear understanding of things and you can just execute instead of guessing. And so that leads me to the last one, which is focusing on exposure without building relationships. Because recruiting at the end of the day, as I continue to go along in this process and work with more and more families, recruiting is just relationships at the end of the day, because at the top, coaches need trust. This foundation of every single offer that I've seen, it's how I got my first offer, it's how pretty much every player gets their first offer is like a coach needs to trust you that you're worth offering tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Dollars in scholarship money to, as well as, you know, the trust that you're going to win games that you're going to put in the time. All this stuff is so important. And so that leads us to communication. You need to show this through your communication because they're not as, sadly, they're not able to give you a trial period in their program. And so you need to communicate with, you know, great responses that show that you care, show that you're mature enough to be on a collegiate program and then also having the confidence, having the confidence to show coaches, you know, what's going on. One of the things that we talk about in your first scholarship is being, you know, kind of doing this whole bragging thing. Humbly bragging. I'm sure you've heard that term, humbly bragging. But there's some good ways that you can do it in terms of recruiting. You can be specific with the certain schools that recruiting you and what coaches are recruiting you so that we can show coach, hey, I'm, you know, I'm getting recruited. And this builds that relationship of like, oh, shoot, like this guy's like legit and he's communicating me effectively that he's being recruited versus, like, other recruits would be like, oh, yeah, recruiting is going well. I'm sure your, your son's probably said that once or twice to coaches. You can, you can check the messages I send back to coaches. Or maybe you've heard him say this before, but he's like, oh, yeah, coaches, or recruiting is going well, I'm getting recruited by a couple schools or yeah, I have some D1 interest. That's such bland responses that coaches hear all the time. And it, it doesn't add anything to your recruiting. You can say that you have D1 interest, but no, no one believes you when you say that. But when you're specific and you're saying, hey, like, this coach from this school is recruiting me, and this coach from this school invited me to a visit in this school and this. And then you're just listing it like that nonchalantly, like, coach is going to be like, okay, like this dude, this dude's a real deal. Like, he's going through this process. And especially if you have film and video to back it up with an elite social media presence, I mean, what is going to stop that coach from saying, oh yeah, we shouldn't recruit this guy? I mean, really, only a couple things, like maybe you don't have a size or maybe you have a limited film in some way and you're Just not able to show it. But realistically you give them pretty good reason as long as you're not super tiny or you know, I imagine your son's a pretty good player. So um, he's, you know, he's got the film, he's got the rest of the pieces there and then he has this communication aspect and just like it's going to stand out to coaches minds. And so you need to make sure that you're building relationships. You're humbly bragging you're being aggressive. You're not just waiting back and we talked about, you know, not waiting just on the macro scale but in the micro of I'm not just waiting back for the coaches responses, I'm asking questions that are going to get me answers that I can do things with, I can act upon and give them correct, you know, video to back up certain things that they may be feeling doubtful about. It's really just creating this unfair management recruiting just by simply communicating effectively and getting coaches to trust you. It's really that simple. At the end of the day, not easy, but simple. And so you need to build these relationships because it's all going to. Well if you have exposure by the end day you get all interest in the world but if none of it turns into an offer then it doesn't really matter. And so you have to be building relationships and focusing on that and aggressively building them as well. So what I want to talk about now is just the solution that we created here at your first scholarship. We've created a solution that just flat out works. I'm not going to talk about many of our testimonials today. You can check out the website below if you want to learn more about it. But we've got aggressive recruiting framework to stop guessing and start executing on a great plan that actually works and gets you results as fast as you possibly could in the recruiting game. I mean we just had a another 2026 Get Ed Division 2 offer today and I don't know if you know, like I said, most of the offers come later in September and so on. And this is March, so super stoked for that family. But they're just being aggressive in their recruiting, going through it in an aggressive manner. And so that leads me to the second one of following up, you know, making sure to follow up. We'll give you the full scripts and templates to cut through the noise and actually get responses instead of just getting ghosted and actually get real interest and real offer something there. Also give you our video and social Media templates. So full templates of like what to post on X. It's one of the biggest questions. It's so confusing. It's like, do we post this invite, we post that visit that kind of seems just like not really getting coaches what they want at the end of the day. And so we'll show you how to caption it, what to post, how to edit it together, all that good stuff so we can actually get views from coaches. And then lastly, we'll give you clear timelines. I went through kind of a general one, but we'll give you a clear timeline for you and what you want in your process, as well as relationship scripts, questions to ask coaches. That way you can make sure to maximize your opportunities and turn actual interest to actual offers by building a trustworthy relationship with a coach to school you actually want to go to at the end of the day. And so really the next steps from here, if you're interested in something like that, first off, you can schedule a free strategy call. So click the link in my bio or click the link in the description below here and you'll go to our page. There's a quick video on there if you want to watch that because more in the detail of what we do as well as you can book a call with our team. And then on that call you'll get a customized timeline of kind of what you need to do, as well as what it will look like to actually work with us. Then from there you can just implement those steps whether you work with us or not. But I definitely hope that you want to work with us and hopefully get to talk to you soon. So again, you can click the link below. It'll take you to the site, kind of walk you through from there. Regardless, wishing the best. See you soon. Peace.