The recruiting gameplan to get scholarship offers

All right, so today I'm talking about the recruiting game plan, how to think about your recruiting. If you're just starting out, if you're going, even if you have scholarships, you should always be thinking about, okay, what's the game plan here? What are we trying to accomplish? And so I'm going to talk about that. I'm going to dive into that as well as if you don't know who I am. I'm Trent Lower, I'm a former college quarterback. I now run your first scholarship where we've helped over 60, 70 plus families get scholarships and just absolutely crush the recruiting process. So, so let's dive into it. It's going to be unedited rant. If you're listening to this podcast, then audio version. If you're listening on this YouTube, then you get to see me a little bit more. But the biggest thing is you need to first define like, what's your goal? You need to understand, like, okay, what are we trying to actually accomplish here? That's the biggest thing. Because if you don't know exactly what you're trying to accomplish, then it becomes very, very difficult to get to have success ultimately. Like it's, you're, then you're trying to hit the bullseye without actually knowing where the bullseye's at. You're just flying in a blind. And so it's pretty easy to define like a general goal. And that's much better than having no goal at all. I imagine your goal is probably, hey, get a scholarship, get a D1 scholarship, get a D2 or above scholarship. But you want to get more well defined on that. Like, what is a good D D1 scholarship to you? Is it, are you okay with walk ons? Like you want to get a clear idea of like, okay, what is our objective here? And that's the biggest thing because to me, I felt like that's probably one of the biggest things in my recruiting that I was just really good at is defining that objective and then just attacking it really hard. For me, it was, I was open to D1, walk on stuff like that. But ultimately I really wanted a place that I enjoyed, I enjoyed the coaches I enjoyed being at. And that's where I ended up, where I ended up. I mean, I, I had D2 scholarships, I had other NI scholarships, I had D3 opportunities, I had FCS opportunities as well. And so for me, it wasn't necessarily about, hey, how high level, division level I could play at. It was about, hey, what's going to be the best experience for what I wanted, and luckily Morningside matched up with that, and that's why I chose that school. And so make sure that you're clear on that stuff. The second thing is figuring out what's your current situation, because now you have that goal. Okay, cool. We already have the bullseye set. Okay, what is our current situation? Where are we at? And so you want to make sure that you have a good idea of like, okay, how many offers? Like, the big three questions are, how many offers do you have and what are they? And then what interest do you have? Group that by cold, warm, and hot. And then lastly, you're going to figure out, hey, what is the unknown? Schools that don't know about me or I haven't gotten interest from that I want to get interest from. And so once you figure out those three things, now you have the kind of current situation figured out, and now you want to figure out, okay, what opportunities do I have to get this current situation to where my goal is at? And so that's. That's literally it. And so the two biggest ways that you can do this is the relationships, exposure. And so relationships. What relationships are, and what you have to understand about relationships is it's any relationship that we have with a coach, they could reply back once, they could reply back two times. You could have multiple phone call conversations. Whatever relationships you already have, you need to make sure that you're keeping that in check. You're keeping with that because recruiting is all about relationships. Like, using what you already have is so critical in the process. Like, you don't need to go out there and create a bunch of. Of new relationships, because one relationship that you already have could turn into your first offer, could turn into your second offer, turn into your third, fourth, fifth offer, because they've already showed interest. Why would you not use that and leverage that to your advantage? So you need to make sure to look at those relationships, look at the interest that you've already gotten, the camps that you've gone to, the conversations that you already had, the visits, et cetera, the interests, the follows, the likes, and figure out, okay, what. What relationships do I have and how can I use those to my advantage? That's the biggest thing first off, because everybody wants to, like, forgot, oh, coaches aren't noticing me this and that. And then I'm like, okay, cool, what schools are you talking to? And they're like, got five, 10 schools that they're talking to that they're like, yeah, I'd love to get a scholarship from them, but they're not really focusing on them. And so they're focusing on, oh, what new schools can I bring in, blah, blah, blah, and said, make sure that you're focusing on relationships first over anything. The second thing is exposure. And so this doesn't counter my argument against relationships. Relationships should be first. But the second piece is exposure, because exposure is great. I mean, it's. It's amazing. If, let's say you get one, one new school can change everything. Like, you never know where that first scholarship is going to come from. You never know where scholarship's going to come from in general. And. And so with exposure, you want to constantly be generating new interest to coaches. Not only is it like, hey, it can bring up a new scholarship opportunity, but it gives you more leverage later down the road. And it's hard to understand this when you're early on the process, but as you get closer to signing day, you start to realize, cool, I'm in a great position if I have 20, 30 interested coaches, because if one doesn't work out, I've got 29 others, I've got 19 others, versus, like, if you only have five, like, one drops out and you've got four left, you feel really thin. And other people have already gotten ties and relationships with these other coaches, and you're feeling pretty, pretty screwed at that point. And so you don't want to be. At that point, you want to constantly be generating interest. So that way you have a library of like 50, 100. I mean, we have kids that I look at their. Their stuff. They send me over, like, the list of coaches that they're talking to, and it's like, dude, you've got like a hundred coaches that you're talking to. That's freaking awesome. Because it's like, just keep focusing on those relationships, keep generating new interest, because when you come to signing day, it's going to be, you know, you're going to. Some of those are going to turn to scholarship offers. So there's no question. And if some of them don't cool, well, you've got others. You don't have to be worried or stressed about that stuff. And so make sure you're constantly putting time into exposure because it's so, so critical in just generating new interest and building those relationships, because you can't have relationships without coaches actually knowing who you are. And. And so make sure that you're actually putting time and exposure on a daily basis. And so. And if you don't know how to get exposure, the easiest way to think about it is you just want to get coaches to notice you. So there's a lot of ways to do it. Email, Twitter, DMs, posts, whatever. But you just want to think about, okay, how can I get coaches to know about who I am as a player? How can I get them to watch my film so that way I can get interest from them, start conversations and start building relationships with them. So then once you have that, then really the last step is just executing that you actually need to do it. That's the biggest issue is a strategy is great, but if you have B execution, it's not going to work. And so make sure that you have. You're actually executing it to the best of your ability. Otherwise it doesn't matter. None of the action that you actually or none of the strategy that you build out is going to matter because you're not actually doing the thing that is going to get you recruited or which is the actual actions. Because you can come up with this amazing playbook, but if you don't actually run the plays, you're never gonna score touchdowns. And so that is the biggest thing in your recruiting is actually making sure to go and do this stuff. Don't just listen to me talk about it. Don't just come up with this amazing plan and map up your whole thing and then just put it off the side and remember six months later and go, oh shoot, I'm not getting recruited. Cause I didn't do, actually do anything. Or be one of those uncles at a party when you're 45 going, man, I should have went D1, but I didn't send out Twitter DMs, like, don't do that. Just actually take action. That way you can actually get recruited and get scholarships. So hopefully this helped. If this gave you a good sense of direction and you like this stuff, be sure to subscribe like. And if you also want daily insights to your inbox, I send out daily emails. You can check out the link below and I'll send them to you there. Peace.