Trent Lauren (former college quarterback) explains that college football recruiting requires both on-field talent (good film) and off-field exposure/marketing. Good film alone often doesn’t produce offers if coaches don't see it; athletes should maximize both film quality and coach exposure using channels like Twitter posts, DMs, and emails to increase view counts, gather feedback, and create recruiting options.
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What most people don't understand about college football is that getting recruited isn't just about talent. And so if you don't know who I am, I'm Trent Lauren, a former college quarterback. I also won your first scholarship where we help families get their first scholarship and more. And so what you have to realize is that talent does equal good film most of the time, at least if you, if you're on the field. And then good film does not equal good recruiting. Good recruiting is when you have good film and you have good exposure, because good film in a vacuum doesn't get you recruited. If no coaches know about that film, if no coaches see it, no coaches know about you, then ultimately you're not going to get offers, you're not going to get any interest, you're not going to get recruited. And so really what it comes down to is that you need to have the talent to be able to get good enough film, but then you also need to have the exposure, the marketing to be able to get coaches to actually see that film. Your goal at the end of the day in the recruiting process should be that I am going to get as good a film as possible and then get it seen by as many coaches as possible. The best way to do it is that you get basically every coach to see your film. Hopefully they all watch it. This is the dream, not reality, sadly. And then you have the best possible film to match with that. And so really that is how recruiting actually works. And so with that being said, and I've heard even parents say this to me is like, you know, you can look at businesses, it's not always the best product that wins. It's usually the best marketing. And so you need to be able to market yourself to college coaches, because I know too many athletes, and you've probably seen them too, that are extremely talented on the field. They have great film, but then they don't. Either they don't get any scholarships or they don't get scholarships to the school that they should have gotten to just because they lacked the marketing to get there. They were missing some aspect of that recruiting process. Not, not the on field stuff. The on field stuff was fine, but the recruiting process side, something was missing there. And so I don't want you to fall in that trap. And so with that being said, the exposure is really coming down to I really look at the three big things. If you're doing something else, then you have to. There has to be some reason for doing it. It's going to be Twitter posts, DMs and emails. Those are the three best ways to get in touch with coaches, to get coaches to see your film because again, that's our ultimate goal. Get coaches to see your film, make evaluations on you and then if you're the right fit for them, they'll continue to build that relationship from there. And so Twitter posts are, I'll start for with there that they're a great way to do it. Super high leverage. You can just post your highlights, workout videos, stuff like that and just get attention from coaches from there. DMs, emails. The key with those is that you want to be shortened to the point and include your video because again, I will continue repeating this. The goal is that you get your video seen. It's not necessarily to get a response because if a coach is not interested in you, yeah, it'd be awesome if they told you that they're not interested. But realistically they're probably just going to, you know, archive or delete your email and go into the next guy. So our goal is to get that view count up so that way we know, hey, coaches are seeing this. Okay, I'm just not the right talent level for these schools. I need to adjust my sites and you can make data driven decisions from there. So really, really from there. Once you've done the exposure piece, the recruiting process becomes a lot easier. You're getting feedback, maybe not explicit feedback, but you're getting feedback in some way that hey, I need to focus on these schools or hey, I'm more of this division level or hey, this is going to how it's going to kind of go from here. And too many people just kind of wait and they hope that coaches reach out to them and then they don't get any feedback in the first place. And so they realize too late that hey, I don't even know what I'm doing. We don't even know what to do at this point. And so I recommend that you continue to put yourself out there, increase that exposure. Because the worst case scenario when you increase your exposure, you're doing it the right way, not being annoying, is that coaches just forget who you are and you can just up the exposure again once you have better film or if you just want a second chance. And so the thing with recruiting, again, I'll just do a quick recap is it doesn't come down like, you know, ultimately talent is great. If you're great at football, it's great. But if coaches don't knew about that, you're not going to get the scholarships that you deserve. And so focus also on getting coaches to see who you are, build those relationships from them, and ultimately then once you have that exposure, once you have options, you can pick the best fit for you. And that's the ultimate goal, really, from there. So hopefully this helped. Hopefully this is reframing some things on your side as far as recruiting goes, and hopefully you got something from this. If you like this, if you want more stuff like it, be sure to fall for more peace.
