Don’t Count On Being Recruited By Nearby Colleges

High school athletes who assume nearby colleges and universities are always an option are often wrong.

Families who buy into this faulty logic aren’t looking closely enough at teams’ rosters. College rosters frequently include few athletes from close by. They usually come from out of the region, if not out of state. Some even hail from foreign countries.

Start with this truth:  Most college coaches are not from the area in which they are hired to coach. They moved in from somewhere else, where they already established reliable, recruiting connections. To expect them to drop those alliances and start up news ones is unrealistic. They may make inroads with other resources in the future, but during the first few years, coaches normally track down prospects in their previous hunting grounds.

As the old saying goes, they like to “dance with the one that brung you.”

Even if a coach is well-established on a campus, you might ask why they don’t recruit prospects down the road or in the adjacent town or county? The simplest answer comes from two of National Scouting Report’s more experienced scouts, Susan Cagle and Larry Perrin.

“It could be that the coach doesn’t want the parents, relatives and friends from home within short driving distance,” Cagle said. “They could cause an athlete, especially during the critical freshman year, to be distracted.”

Adds Perrin: “A coach doesn’t want athletes to be tempted into going home after practice or every weekend. The more time spent away from campus is the less influence a coaching staff can have over a player and the player’s time. To coaches, less is more when it comes to visiting home during the academic year.”

That advice leaves parents and athletes in a tough spot if they don’t know better or are listening to people disconnected from day-to-day recruiting.

The hammer really comes down when signing dates come and go. Families are left to wonder why they didn’t explore every option that may have been available to them away from home. The problem is that taking this approach pushes them out on the proverbial creek without a paddle.

It often tatters their athlete’s dreams.

That is why NSR prospects and parents are continually educated on how the recruiting process works, how to navigate it successfully and when to drop outdated perceptions. Moreover, that is why more than 95 percent of NSR prospects receive college offers, mostly from outside their immediate geographic areas.