Recruiting Tips: 7 Ways To Maximize Your Junior Day Visits

Junior days means a lot and nothing at the same time.

Their sole value is in keeping you top of mind to the schools you want to play for come summer recruiting camps.

What this get you in practice?

If coach only were to have seen 2 of your 10 kicks when they don’t know you, a Junior Day and being top of mind might get them to watch 6 or 7 of them more closely. You’ll also get some slight benefit of the doubt.

Think about it. No one wants to appear foolish to their head coach most of all to themselves.

If you made a junior day, it means someone put a lot of time into evaluating you. They will work extra hard to justify their efforts.

That’s really it.

(Again, however, if you lay an egg at these summer recruiting camps it is hard to recover from that and it won’t matter if you did a Junior Day with the Pope, you’re going to get dropped)

But how to maximize one’s Junior Days?

If Princeton doesn’t know Yale is bringing you to your Junior Day you lose some leverage on Princeton.

The quickest way to do this is to send an innocuous tweet: Excited to attend Yale Junior Day on X Date! With a cool graphic and tagging all the coaches.

If you attend a Junior Day but didn’t tweet about it you didn’t go to a Junior Day.

Had a great time at X school junior day!

Pretty simple.

Most people actually prefer a thank you via email, but no one ever said they dropped a recruit because they sent them a short but nice hand written thank you note.

It’s better to err on looking too nice than too schlubby. Golf pants, polo and a quarter zip over the top never hurt anyone.

I can’t believe it must be said but I must: put your phone away for the duration of a trip. As a former teacher I near vomit when I see air pods in with no music playing. C’mon. This is a job interview, not your 10th grade math class.

Recruiting is a grueling process filled with a lot of ambiguity for coaches. Give coaches time to digest the Junior Day and your thank you’s.

I like a communication cadence of trying to connect once every 7 to 10 days.

The core functions of a Junior Day are:

That’s it.

You can attend every Junior Day, but if you have a poor camp showing, it is difficult to overcome that.

Photo shoots, Twitter Glitter and attention is nice, but it’s a means to an end, not the end itself.

That’s all for now,

Brendan

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