In high school athletic recruiting, how can you really know a college coach?

The recruiting process goes two ways – the coach wooing the athlete and the athlete choosing a coach.  But everything is not what it always seems during the recruiting process.  Time and time again, we see the same story repeated.

How do you know, then, what a coach is really like when he or she is recruiting you?  Hmmm.  Well, you can ask other coaches and administrators, of course, but does that spill all the beans?  Probably not.  Coaches and school officials are selling candy when they are recruiting athletes.  They know what athletes need to hear, so many times they put the same sugar on the table as everyone else and hope that the packaging will seal the deal.  Yet, if what they were told during the initial recruiting process changes once the athlete is on campus, why do so many recruits transfer after their freshman or sophomore years of college?  It’s because the athlete didn’t ask themselves some simple, but tough questions:

• Taking away all the fluff and glamor, the hype and the attaboys or attagirls, that is, when I watch this person coach at practice and during games, can I really play for him or her?  Can I work that hard, or work that little?  Can I take that kind of intensity or lack of it?  Can I deal with being treated like everybody else instead of the star?
• When I talk to the players, do they share my idea and values of what college athletics should be about?  Are they focused or careless?  Are they going through the motions or putting their hearts into it?  When the coach isn’t around, are they respectful or disrespectful?

Why those questions?  A coach surrounds himself or herself with the type of people they believe will make them successful and with whom they are most comfortable.  That goes for the staff they hire and the players they recruit.  If they hire upstanding citizens as coaches that work hard and follow the rules, that’s who that coach is.  If their assistants are disorganized and short on offering players support, that’s who you will be playing for.  If they recruit players that party at all hours, talk trash about the coaches and don’t go to class, then that’s who that coach is.  If a coach has a lousy graduation rate with his former players, that’s who that coach is.  If assistants drop off a coach’s staff year after year, that’s the coach.

Look closely.  Go where you fit.  Choose coaches and teams that you will meld with easily.   Don’t make college athletics hard on yourself.  It’s there to have fun, to get an education and to compete with people that you love playing alongside and for coaches that you want to work hard for every day.