Why It’s Harder Than Ever to Get Recruited in 2025

The reality in the recruiting process is that it's getting harder and harder to secure scholarship offers. And so today I'm going to talk about three things that I noticed were harder in the class of 2025 than they were just in the class of 2024. Now, if you don't know who I am, I'm Tren Lohrer. I'm a former college quarterback. And now I run your first scholarship where we help families get college football scholarships. And so if you're returning, then you're in for a good one. This is going to be a good one to kind of reset expectations on the recruiting process. And if you're new here, welcome. We post content on how to get college football scholarships. So if you happen to be another sport, you can still check out the content should be helpful to you. But just know I am talking with inside of the college football recruiting process. So soccer, baseball, all that, I kind of know a little bit here and there, but it's not really my jam. We just talk about college football. So let's get into it. So the first thing I want to talk about is just that it's generally becoming harder. Now. I already said this in the intro, but it is just the truth. In the class of 2024, I was seeing kids becoming able to get recruited to much higher levels than I was kind of expecting. Now I will say there was a lot of kids that went FCS that I would have probably expected to go FBS. There's a lot of kids that went D2 that probably I would have expected to go FCS. So the Division 1 level was definitely tougher to crack. But this year all levels were tough to crack. And what I mean by that is that we had some kids that we started working with later in the process that were extremely hard to get recruited to get solid scholarship offers versus the year prior. With the class of 2024, we had kids that we would work with in like February, March, even April that we're just getting scholarship offers left and right. Even that late in the recruiting process. And this wasn't the same case this year. So what this means is that playing the recruiting process earlier, starting earlier and getting things up and running earlier are also so critical. They always have been extremely helpful, but now I think it's even more critical than ever. The majority of offers are going to come in between November and January, but you can't wait till then to really ramp up your recruiting. So with it being harder, again, you have to start earlier, just get ahead on that curve. You Also have to put in more effort. Effort, ultimately to get the desired result that you want. Now, the second part is that outreach is getting harder. Now, this is just the raw reality. As more people become educated about the recruiting process, it's that more people are going to do the similar thing. And so the way to stand out isn't just doing the bare minimum of emailing coaches and DMing coaches a couple times. It's that you're going to have to do more. You're going to have to stand out a little bit more and do a couple more unique things. So, like, for example, this last year, in the year 2024, we sent out 138,000 emails to college coaches. And on average, across everybody, we got a little above 0.5% response rate. The year prior, we were probably closer to a 1% response rate. Now, you could play a lot of different factors in terms of, you know, maybe what schools you were targeting for different kids and depending on what their actual talent level is. But Even with the DMs as well, there's just so much more competition that you have to follow up more, you have to send out more, you have to find unique ways to craft your message, to get more responses back. I mean, the minimums in terms of, like, what you need to do in your recruiting process are just increasing time after time. Again, I mean, back when I was getting recruited, yeah, you could probably send out maybe 100 dms, 100 emails, and maybe you could walk away like a scholarship offer to. That's just not the case anymore. I mean, we're talking. You're going to have to send hundreds a month just to get a couple of responses back. And this leads me to my third point when I'm talking about standing out is that you need to make sure that your brand is strong. With outreach getting harder, with recruiting getting harder, it becomes all about, hey, how can I stand out? One of the best ways to stand out is building a great brand on X or Twitter. If you don't know already, Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it, is the place to get recruited to play college football. It's where all the college football coaches are. For example, Bill Belichick, who was previously on the Patriots and didn't have any social media, created a Twitter account once he became the coach over at University of North Carolina. That goes to show just how important it is for coaches to have a presence on X. When you have a coach that hates social media, have to get on there just because he's a College football coach. Now, the reason have a strong brand is because it has so many different benefits. One of the biggest benefits is the outreach. So, like, if you have a good Twitter and coaches are going to potentially respond back to you, or even before they open your message, I can guarantee what they're doing is they're clicking on your Twitter profile. Because as we all know, if you read that Twitter message, just like you read a text message, it has a little read receipt. It'll say seeing. And the last thing we want to do is like leave a kid on read. And so what they'll do is they check out your Twitter account before they open up the message to see if, like, this message is going to be worth reading. And so that means that your profile picture, your header image, your bio, your pin tweet, your posts all need to be on point. I mean, at the bare minimum, they're going to look at your profile picture, they're going to look at your bio, they're going to look at your pin tweet, they're probably going to check your highlights, they're probably going to scroll a couple posts on your Twitter and they don't see anything that they really like that really grabs their attention. They're just going to skip you and go on to the next kid. And not just on the outreach side. You have to realize that your Twitter profile is also super important because you can get more reach to coaches from your Twitter profile. It is essentially your business card, your resume, however you want to view it. To college coaches, it's the first thing they're going to check out. For example, if they hear your name, they're not going to Google you, they're not going to search you up in huddle, they're not going to search your max preps, they're going to search you up on Twitter. And so having a great Twitter profile that presents you in the best light is the best thing that you can do. Because the thing here is that you get the opportunity to control the narrative of how a coach views you. I mean, of course they're going to ask your coach, they're going to maybe ask your teachers how you come off, and they're going to take a look at the film and they're going to try and get as many eyes out as possible, and they're going to try and get you in as many different lights and viewpoints as possible. But you get to set that tone for what they think of you just based on your Twitter profile. So if your Twitter profile is super sloppy, and it looks like you just don't even care. They're going to kind of think that about you, that you're not a detail oriented guy. You may say, oh, trend, well, it's this, this has no application to football. And that's true. Like if you run a 4:2, it doesn't matter, they're probably gonna still recruit you. But trust me, there's definitely something in their mind when they see that you're not capitalizing certain words or using certain punctuation in your posts that is going to speak to coaches. Like, shoot, this guy's probably not taking his English class very seriously in the classroom either. And I, I imagine if I got him up on a board and asked him to drop a few of his plays, I, I can't imagine that would look super smoothly either. And so these are the kind of things that are going through coaches minds. I mean, they're drunk, they're jumping to extreme conclusions because they've seen it before. So you can't leave that stuff up to chance. You have to take the time to set up your Twitter profile correctly. I see people that do a pretty decent job. And I'll be honest, like the amount of Twitter profiles I see that I go, oh, this is a great Twitter profile. I mean, I'm talking one out of maybe a thousand. I see, I'm talking like once every maybe a couple months. And especially the ones that like aren't working with this. I probably have seen three off the top of my head that I can think. There's this one, longstepper and does a phenomenal job with his profile. Shout out to that kid. And it's gotten him a ton of interest, ton of offers just from that. But like, I'll talk to parents or I'll talk to kids and like, oh yeah, like recruiting's going good, we're doing good with our Twitter profile. I'm like, not really. Like, I can't find any video on you on your Twitter profile. There's a bunch of captions that are just terrible. Just to check out my highlights, check out this workout, check out this thing. And there's not like actual factual information that draws coaches to there. And then on top of it, their views are just super low. They're like less than a thousand views versus like I have a sophomore that I work with who's doing a phenomenal job. He's from Texas, he's from a relatively bigger high school. But when they first started working with us, they were getting, you know, a couple views here and there and now they consistently get 2 to 3k views on every single post. This kid's a freaking sophomore. Like, imagine what's that's going to be in the next year. There's no doubt that this kid is going to probably be a Division 1 guy because A, he has the talent, he has the size, but also B, he's gotten the natural amount of exposure just from his Twitter profile to be able to do that. I mean, imagine if you set up your Twitter profile correctly, your freshman and sophomore year. So that way you can instantly, every week know that you're going to reach 5,000 different people and you know, probably 10% of that is going to be college coaches. That's pretty freaking helpful. And so don't miss out on these huge opportunities because you just feel like, oh yeah, like all I got to do is set up a Twitter profile and coach is going to come find it. That's not the case. You got to do things actively to build that brand, to, to build that reach. And so we can build on top of that over the course of time. So all that to say recruiting is getting extremely harder. There's one thing I'd focus on in the year of 2025, trying to get recruited and that focus on building a brand through Twitter. Now if you're looking to work with someone one on one, one of the best things we do is Twitter. It's our game. It's what I did in my recruiting process despite not being a very talented player or being a five star, four star ranked in any means, or even really being a starter throughout most of my high school career. And so if you're interested in working with us to make sure that you capitalize on your brand as well as making sure that you get seen by college coaches, you can click the link in the description below. You can book a call with a team and see how we might be able to help. Regardless, I hope you got something from this video and see you in the next one. Peace.