Cal Newport has a new book coming out called “Slow Productivity”, which essentially makes the case that the best creative work happens, you guessed it, slowly. The Principia by Issac Newton was written over multiple decades. Christopher Nolan makes one blockbuster film every 5 years and then goes into hiding. And, Daniel Day Lewis seems to retire for a decade between Academy Award Winning performances.
Good things take time, but time is the least available resource during a young person’s college recruiting.
From the moment they start looking at colleges they are bombarded with camp invites, annoying (and usually anonymous) Twitter trolls trying to tell them what to do and an all too eager Twitter algorithm serving up endless dishes of FOMO making sure you see everyone being offered a college roster spot but you.
The core problem of recruiting is that Twitter has somehow become the recruiting app where college coaches and recruits make first contact. But, it didn’t used to be this way. College coaches would meet recruits at college camps or on campus visiting their school or just plain old word of mouth would get you “noticed”.
And, I would argue, this is still largely true. The very best interactions with college coaches happen in person when they are visiting your school, you are visiting their school or they have heard through the coaching grapevine you are a dude to check out. The things that really matter in recruiting are not found on Twitter:
How big are you?
How strong are you?
How fast are you?
How good is your GPA?
How much did you study for the SAT/ACT?
How good of a teammate are you?
How compelling is your game tape?
Twitter enhances absolutely none of these things. It merely conveys it to people sifting through your profile.
The more time you spend on Twitter scrolling and DM’ing coaches, the less time you have to spend on enhancing these core, unchanging things that college coaches ultimately care about.
But, if you delete your Twitter how will you get noticed? You can still reach out to coaches via email, leverage your private or high school coaches’ connections to colleges and do so well at an exposure or college camp that you strike up a relationship with a few college coaches. If you hit the size, speed, game tape, and academic metrics coaches are looking for, you’re going to be found - Twitter or not.
Twitter becomes an easy veil to hide your deficits behind: coaches can’t exactly see how big you are, they can’t exactly know how good your grades are, and they can’t exactly know how fast you move, yet. But you can craft an image of a compelling recruit relatively easy that you can then use to go out an network with college coaches with. This Twitter avatar isn’t exactly who every Twitter profile is purporting it to be - we all select what face we want to show publicly - but in some ways, recruits become more addicted to being recruited as a Twitter profile than an actual football player.
They collect offer, after offer, DM endless coaches and spend a lot of time on an app that is solely designed to maximize the time you spend on it. Twitter really doesn’t care about how successful your recruiting is or not. It just wants you on the app.
In an age group that is especially susceptible to strangers’ opinions, Twitter drastically lowers the bar for people you don’t know to give you their uninformed opinion of your situation.
Maybe Twitter has become a nonnegotiable in recruiting. And, if you really need to have an account, just have your parents pose as you to avoid the nuttiness of the alogirthm. Twitter is a valuable first contact point between players and coaches accessible to all. But, you can still get that first contact point via your high school coach, private coach, crushing an exposure camp, crushing a college camp or plain old email/phone call outreach to college offices.
The recruiting market ultimately rewards rare and valuable skills - an 80 yard kick off leg, a 6’9 OT that runs a 4.9, an All - State Texas QB - and the market will always find what it wants, with or without Twitter.