What to Consider Before Your Next Recruiting Outreach

Fred Marshall
May 14
5 min read

An honest conversation for athletes navigating the college football recruiting process.

You are putting in the effort. Sending messages, sharing film, reaching out to programs you have dreamed about. And you are hearing nothing back. Before you send another message, consider these factors. Not because you are not good enough, but because how you are approaching outreach may be working against you before a single coach ever watches a frame of your film

1st Consideration

Timing

When you reach out matters as much as what you say. Coaches in season are focused on their program. Targeting the right windows increases your chances significantly.

2nd Consideration

Who You Contact

The bigger the program the more filtered every contact point becomes. Knowing who to reach out to at each level is where most athletes get it wrong.

3rd Consideration

Fit

Every program has a size profile they are building around. Volume to the wrong programs is not a strategy. Targeting the right fit is.

6 Things to Consider Before You Reach Out

Consider the timing
- Understand that reaching out to a college coach during his season comes with a very low response rate. His attention is locked in on his current roster, his opponent, and his program. Your message is not a priority in that window. If you already have a relationship with a coach, staying connected during the season is fine. If you do not, temper your expectations and target a better window. A coach's bye week is an opening if a relationship is already there. The summer camp season is one of the most productive outreach periods of the year because coaches are in evaluation mode and actively looking. The spring contact period after the February signing day is arguably the best window of all. Coaches are on the road visiting high schools and attending events with recruiting as their primary focus. That is when your outreach has the best chance of landing in front of someone who is actually paying attention.
Consider who you are actually contacting
- This is where a lot of athletes spend their energy in the wrong place. At the Power FBS level and the Group of Five FBS level the staff runs deep. There are recruiting coordinators, player personnel staffers, analysts, graduate assistants, and student assistants whose entire role centers around the recruiting process. These are your starting points. Start at the bottom of that food chain and work your way up. Those lower level staffers are the ones with time to watch film, flag prospects, and move names up the board. At the FCS level many programs carry a similar structure. The same approach applies. As you move down to D2, D3, and NAIA those off field positions decrease. At those levels look for whoever carries the recruiting coordinator title. That is your first contact. From there you move to the position coach who actively recruits your area, then to the head coach if needed. Contacting the right person at the right level immediately increases the weight your outreach carries.
Consider the email reality
- Email is still a legitimate outreach tool but you need to understand what you are working with. At the FBS level what you will typically find publicly listed is a shared staff email address, not an individual coach's email. That address is managed across an entire staff and your message is one of hundreds coming in. Use it with realistic expectations. At the FCS level and below if you find an individual coach's email listed publicly, understand that address is likely pulling double duty as his internal university communication as well. Recruiting decisions do get made through that email but factor in the volume he is receiving. Your message needs to be tight, specific, and compelling enough to stand out in a full inbox. Keep it short and make it easy for him to act on immediately.
Consider what your message actually says
- An intro message should be short, specific, and make a coach's job easier not harder. Address the coach by name. Hey Coach Marshall, not just Hey Coach. That one detail tells him immediately that this message was written for him and not copied and pasted to a hundred other coaches. Include your graduation year, height and weight, GPA, a film link that works and goes directly to your best footage, and your contact information so a coach can respond without having to search for it. That is your intro message. Everything else can come later once a conversation starts. A long first message with too much information does not make you stand out. It makes a busy coach move on.
Consider who is actually doing the outreach
- This one is for the parents reading alongside their athlete. Do not run your athlete's social media accounts. College coaches are watching those pages and paying attention to how an athlete carries themselves, how they communicate, and whether what they see feels authentic. A parent managed account reads differently than one run by the athlete and coaches notice. The athlete is the one being recruited. Their voice, their personality, and their communication matter to the programs evaluating them. Let them own that process. Your role is to support it, not run it. The athlete who handles their own outreach and their own social presence with maturity stands out in a way that a parent managed account never will.
Consider whether you fit what that program is building
- Every program at every level has a size profile they are working from. Coaches know what they need and they are building their boards around those measurements. If you do not match what a program is looking for at your position, the most polished outreach message in the world is not going to move the needle. There will always be the outlier, the player who does not measure at what coaches are asking for but is so elite in other areas that he gets offered anyway. That player exists. But he is the exception and even in his case it is still the coach who decides who gets offered and who does not. That decision belongs to them. Targeting programs where you genuinely fit the size profile at your level increases the chances that your outreach leads somewhere real. Volume to the wrong programs is not a strategy. It is a way to stay busy without making progress

"Outreach is not about how many coaches you contact. It is about contacting the right person, at the right program, at the right time, with the right information."

Every one of these factors works together and getting them right increases your chances of being seen by someone who is actually in a position to offer. That is the process. Own it.

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