This is where you might be the expert and know more than your future coach! 🤣
BEWARE! Your social profile is very important in your brand.
Coaches in Canada do not have any restrictions to using social media to make contact with prospective recruits. As many people now days have cell phones - most also have a social media presence.
GRAB YOUR PHONE - DO A EXTENSIVE THOROUGH REVIEW!
DUMP/DELETE ANYTHING THAT COULD JEOPARDIZE YOUR CHANCES WHERE YOU ARE NOT SEEN IN THE BEST WAY.
👀 Tip: If you receive an offer from a school, you can attempt to capture the attention of other coaches by posting about it. Keep it simple—mention how grateful you are for the opportunity and be sure to tag the coach or athletic program you received the offer from. However, never, ever invent or inflate an offer just to get attention. Coaches will do their research on you, and they will find out eventually if your offer is legit. This kind of behaviour can eventually leave you with no offers.
The second key way coaches use social media in recruiting is to get a better understanding of a recruit’s personality and character. While inappropriate content will not only deter coaches from recruiting you but also cause coaches to rescind offers, positive social media posts that align to the school values can make coaches even more interested in recruiting you.
While you may be trying to impress your friends and classmates with your posts, and likes, understand you may be turning a potential coach off and sending away a scholarship opportunity 💸
Regardless, if you wrote the message or not - a RT is just as bad. Use good judgment. Perhaps you need to take some time to go back through your accounts and "clean them up again"....we'll wait here for you to return.
Remember: players are representing the "brand" of the school and the program; what you say online can't be deleted. Choose your words - wisely!
While your first instinct might be to try and hide all your social media accounts from coaches, in fact, the opposite is true. Coaches know that most—if not all—recruits have at least one social media account and they will search for it. If they see your profile is restricted, they will assume that you have something to hide. To eliminate that uncertainty, make it easy for the coach to find you.
👀Tip: To go the extra mile in transparency, send your social media handles to coaches in your messages to them. This way, they can easily look you up—because they likely will anyway—and they know you have nothing to hide. An added bonus: The coach/school may start following you on social media to keep up with your progress.
Keeping tabs on your favourite teams via social media is a great way to get alerted when the team wins, loses, gets an award or something else noteworthy takes place. These are all helpful conversation starters to use when you’re emailing, texting or direct messaging a coach. Coaches want to know that you’re genuinely interested in their school, and having insider knowledge about their program is a great way to show you’ve done your homework. You may even score a follow or like back from the program!
👀Tip: Try following the program’s strength and conditioning coaches, trainers and some current athletes, in addition to the head coach. Most recruits’ will default to only following the head coach—which is a great—but you might get important information by following other staff members. They may post workouts you can try or give you insights into the athletes’ day-to-day schedule.
In most cases, coaches are looking 👀 for:
In addition, they evaluate:
