Handlers, Private Trainers & Recruiting Services

A quick reader poll:

What moves the needle in recruiting is trust.

Trust between college coaches, and high school coaches for sure, but, especially for a position like specialist where the geographic talent map is spotty, college coaches rely on relationships with local trainers for referrals on talent worth evaluating.

This is a boon for private trainers or handlers. It’s a bit of a chicken or the egg question as a private coach, myself being one. Do good players come to you because you have college connections or do the college connections happen to you because you’ve got good players?

And, if we are all honest with ourselves as coaches, we can’t ethically claim that we or our “service” is the sole reason why a player got the offer over another player. Recruiting is just too complicated a process to because to draw any direct relationship. You might be able to say the results a trainer can lay claim to are correlation, more than causation.

If a player and their family wants to cite you as one of the main reasons for their success, amazing. But, when you are looking at finding a private trainer for your own child seeing that there is some correlation between this coach and results is important.

Can you go it alone and do all the marketing, outreach and recruiting yourselves in house as a family? I think so, but you will probably have a longer timeline in generating some interest from college coaches.

By cozying up to a few private trainers who have preexisting relationships with college coaches you are not only paying for their training, yes, but you are also paying for access to their network of college coaches both directly and indirectly. Directly, in that you are probably going to be a name they refer to their college network. But, also indirectly in that you will pop up on this coach’s social media feeds that are followed by college coaches.

A lot of trainers won’t explicitly say they help directly with recruiting. I don’t blame them. Recruiting is a slog - an emotionally and mentally taxing process (especially if you have misaligned expectations i.e. player/parent believe their kid is FBS while trainer believes player is D2. It’s also somewhat of a taboo to explicitly say you advise on recruiting because “You’re doing it for the money!” as many an anonymous Twitter account DM has told me! (Ironically, the head coaches of many college programs who bash recruiting services as waste of money say this while cashing salaries in the millions of dollars)

Maybe you don’t need a recruiting handler in the mold of a private admissions counselor who will hold your hand and walk you through every step of the way, but I think most families do need some guidance on the recruiting process - at least if only to understand how it works in general, and then knowing that, how it might work for their particular situation.

Are services like NCSA worth it? From a general information standpoint, they’re helpful. But, they will do everything short of picking up a phone and calling a college coach on your behalf which is, essentially, the only way any traction happens in recruiting.

College is a high stakes proposition for families. It’s the last stop on the parenting train. It’s the last chance for a lot of parents to feel like they’ve set their child up for economic, social and personal fulfillment in life. They feel enormous social pressure to not mess it up. When you have this kind of pressure, it’s not surprising to see services like NCSA getting bought by private equity.

But, before you decide to work with a private trainer that you are hoping will help with the recruiting process as well here are a few questions to ask:

That’s all for now,

Brendan Cahill