Trent Lauer (former college quarterback and founder of Year For Scholarship) advises recruits and families to be proactive in college football recruiting rather than passively waiting for coaches to respond. Using an anecdote about a talented Wisconsin recruit who received a noncommittal reply from an FCS coach, Lauer recommends repeatedly pushing for next steps, pairing outreach with game highlights (e.g., week-one tape), and respectfully persistently contacting programs until a clear yes/no is received. He frames persistence as active daily work—showing coaches why a recruit belongs—rather than passive patience, and contrasts this with the risk of getting lost among many recruits.
Chapters
This is why you can't just wait around in the recruiting process and expect things to happen if you want to go to the best school possible for you. So if you don't know who I am, I'm Trent Lauer. I'm a former college quarterback. I now run year for scholarship where we help families get their first scholarship and more to play college football. And so I just hopped off a call with a new family I'm working with. They're from Wisconsin. The kid's a stud. He's a 20, 26. He probably should go FCS bare minimum. And so I just got off the call with him, but the recruit was telling me about situation that he had with an FCS school, very high level FCS school of he sent them an email asking about, you know, hey, I'd love to come to the game sometime, blah, blah. And the coach replied back and kind of just gave him a run around of, you know, hey, we'll, we'll check in later. Which you don't want to hear as a recruit. I'll tell you that never usually turns into anything good if you just wait around. And so he asked me, hey, what should I be doing? Do I just wait around and wait for them to get back to me or what should I do? And I told him this. And it's just the truth is what you need to do is push for next steps. You can't wait around. And I don't blame anyone for waiting around and thinking, oh, I don't want to annoy this coach or, you know, they know best and they'll let me know when they want me and all this stuff. And I totally get it because I was in those shoes too. I too once thought, you know what? I don't want to be that annoying guy. Like I'm the right guy that they're looking for. If they, if they can figure that out, then, you know, they'll see that and they'll recruit me and they'll offer me a scholarship. The sad truth is that does not happen. Coaches do not just figure that out randomly. They don't just go, wow, this kid's been super quiet and super good and super patient. Let's offer him a scholarship. That is just not the truth. And so you need to believe that, hey, I am the right kid for this program. I'm the right recruit, My son is the right recruit for this program and we need to show them that. And now you don't do this in a disrespectful way. You don't Go. Coach. What the hat count? What the hell? You're not offering me or you're not inviting me to the game day physics. No, you. You just keep showing up day after day, just like you do on the field. Like, you don't go, you know what? I'm a really good player. I'm going to show that by being patient and waiting around and not putting in the work. No, you go out there every single day and you put in the work day after day, and then you get that time to show it during game day. And you put your 100% effort, you put your 110% effort into the field. The same thing as recruiting. You show up every single day to show coaches why they should recruit you. And if they don't want to recruit you, fine. And you don't do this in a disrespectful way. You do this in the most respectable way possible. But also, you know how talented you are, you know how much you are worth the program. And you show that time after time again. That's why we push for the next steps. And so I told them, hey, like, this is how we're going to craft the message. This is how we're going to do things. I'm going to do this right after your week one, so we can pair that with some week one highlights and show them, hey, like, you're not just asking this. You're also showing them, hey, this is why you should let me go do this, because you need me on your team. And if they don't respond to that, we're gonna do it again and again and again and again. And as long as we have to, do they respond and either tell us, no, no, we're not. We're not interested in you, which is cool. We can just shift that focus elsewhere and we can cross one school off the list, which is awesome because there's freaking 800 of them out there. Or they say yes, and we get closer to our ultimate goal, which is a scholarship. And we do that for every freaking school until we get to signing day and we have multiple scholarship offers. And so that is why that works out. Because let me play out the other scenario. Being patient is the coach isn't going to remember that email that DM to get hundreds, and they're worrying about hundreds of recruits. And so you just get lost in the mix. And that is not going to lead to anything other than disappointment when you never hear back from them. And then you realize too late that, shoot, I should have been doing. Making their job easier by putting myself out there. And so that is what you need to do and why patient doesn't work out. And hopefully this is a good reminder because oftentimes we don't need to learn anything new. You can probably compare this to a lot of things. This is why being patient when you're trying to date someone isn't gonna work out. Because if you be patient, they're just gonna forget about you and move on, go find someone else. Um, same thing with. I already gave the football analogy. It's just. You can't. Being patient is like. Is a skill. And you do need to be patient recruiting on a much larger scale. But in the micro, in the. In the small moments, you have to be aggressive. You have to be moving things along, because otherwise things aren't just going to move by themselves unless there's some magical force out there that I do not know about, but I don't believe it exists. And so you need to be your biggest advocate, your biggest promoter. Not in the way of bragging about yourself, but just trying to show coaches what you're doing. Not lying, but showing them the truth. Which. The truth is that you deserve to be a part of the program and serve scholarships because you're the kind of person that they're looking for. And if you truly believe that, then you will continue to do that until you get to where you want to be or where you deserve to be. And that's. That's the way that. That this should work out. And so, again, we don't always need to be learning something new. Sometimes we just need to be reminded. And hopefully you've learned this lesson before and you just need to be reminded of it. Or maybe I taught you something new, which is awesome as well, and hopefully you can learn from it. So if you like this, if you got something from this, be sure to like and subscribe. And if, yeah, hopefully you'll. You'll see me in the next one and have a good one. Peace.
