From January 12th to February 3rd, we are in an NCAA “Contact Period” where college coaches are permitted to visit high schools and recruit “in person” but what happens after?
Junior Days
Junior Days are non-committal but nevertheless exciting and important open houses run by football programs. Players who are invited to these are definitely on that team’s recruiting board for the upcoming recruiting class. You can:
Tour the school in person.
Meet the coaches in person.
Tour the facilities in person.
Develop an in person rapport with the coaching staff.
Document your visit on Twitter/X to build recruiting “buzz” in your recruiting class. (More on this in a bit)
But, most importantly, it takes college as a concept in the brain of a 17 year old kid, and turns it into a concrete lived reality.
When kids say “Oh I want to go to Ohio State,” usually they’ve never been there except through some funky pseudo spiritual metaphysical connection they feel they have because they watched the team play on ESPN one time.
Nothing wrong with that - BUT you should get your feet on the ground early and often to schools.
How Do You Get Invited To One?
This question largely depends on what schools your academic, athletic and personal connections will allow you to be recruited.
Academics:
Academically, the higher your grades are, the tougher your courses and the better your SAT/ACT score are, the more admissible you are. Admissibility for the higher academic schools - The Ivy, Patriot and NESCAC Leagues in particular - is the biggest, if not the main hurdle to recruitment.
Your academics will also crack open a lot more merit / academic / non athletic scholarship money that schools can give you. The difference between a 2.9 and a 3.0 is huge - between a 3.4 and a 3.5, astronomical, in the different amounts of money a school can give you.
Ivy/Patriot/NESCAC - You can start the conversation at a 92 average or 3.5 GPA, with hard courses, and SAT starting 1290 or so and an ACT of 30 or so. That’s starting the conversation. More on that in another article I did on Ivy League recruiting bands.
Private schools - Private schools like Boston College, Duke, Stanford, Northwestern will require near-Ivy League level grades to be a PWO. If you are a scholarship player, you need a 2.5 GPA+ usually for these schools.
State schools - State schools have a near 2.0 GPA requirement to get in. But there can be huge differences in in-state versus out-of-state admissions requirements. For example, UNC Chapel Hill requires around a 2.5 to get admitted in-state, but for out-of-staters a near 3.5 GPA and a much higher tuition rate.
Athletics:
Bigger is better. Faster is better. Stronger is better. Taller is better. Farther is better. Higher is better.
You can google the average sizes of FBS college football players. If you are 6’0 230lbs you probably are not a starting OL for an ACC program. But, if you are within the normal size ranges of an FBS kicker - 5’11 195lbs or FBS punter, 6’1 200lbs - you have a good chance.
I saw this great chart by the Head Coach of Choate Rosemary Hall (CT) where I’m the Special Teams Coordinator. It looked something like this:
FBS schools care about
How big you are
How high is your talent
How you play (game tape)
Your grades
Ivy/Patriot/NESCAC care about
What your grades are
Your game tape.
How big you are.
Your talent.
FCS/DII care about
How you play
How big you are
Your talent
Your grades.
It’s not an exact science but do the math. The simple physic of football dictate that unless you weight X lbs, are X feet tall, are X 40 time fast you can or can’t play at certain college football levels. It’s not personal. It’s math.
Personal Connections
A lot of recruiting is based off of geography, convenience and personal relationships between head coaches/staffs and college programs.
When the Yale Head Coach knows your head coach’s dog’s name, you are in a good spot.
When your HS head coach hasn’t had a single player play even DIII college football in the last five years, you’re in trouble.
College coaches will pass over huge swaths of programs in high school when the head coach is not actively courting them and marketing their players to them.
If at all possible, I’d advise trying to get into a school system or private school where the head coach has an excellent reputation for recruiting for their players.
The FBS schools especially, rely heavily on word of mouth and trust built up over years for reliable referrals from high school coaches on talented players to check out and invite to junior days.
What if your head coach isn’t great at recruiting? What can you do?
Luckily, DIII, DII, and FCS programs are much more accessible to players directly.
Most will have public facing sign ups, and be more apt to reply to direct outreach via email and via Twitter/X DM’s.
You can also lean on your private trainer or coach or club coach who will likely have college connections or more than your high school coaches.
How To Get Invited:
Fill out teams’ recruiting questionnaires. They are a formality and may never really be looked at per se, but they are how you become an official data point in their system.
Find your position coach and area recruiter and then send them an introduction email “Coach, I know your busy, but my name is John Doe 25’ K/P 6’1 190lbs 3.7 GPA John Doe HS CT and I’d love to play for you. I’ve attached my academic, and athletic information below. Here is my personal number if you’d be willing to connect sometime after 7pm this week that’d be great.”
Then, repeat the same message on Twitter/X. Find/follow these coaches and DM them when you can.
Be on the lookout as well for announcements of these junior days. Usually they will coincide with spring football dates. Teams up to FCS level will have public facing sign ups.
But, you should also want to be invited as a warm invitee who is expected to be there versus showing up “cold”
The Actual Junior Day Itself
Make no mistake, the atmosphere will be friendly but this is ultimately a job interview. Dress and behave appropriately. That means, in no particular order:
Dress nice, business casual totally works. Phones should be off and definitely away. Be sure to shower, shave, smell nice, brush your teeth etc.
There is typically a lot of tension between kids and parents about college in general, but especially when you throw recruiting into the mix. This tension is normal, but by golly, keep it under wraps on the visit itself. There is no faster way to get dropped than to have something boil over on a visit with coaches watching.
Mom/dad should be “guides on the side” versus leading the show. It’s totally OK for them to ask questions and be active, but they shouldn’t be baggy, overpowering or domineering. These are all red flags for an overinvolved parent. If you want your kid to ask a few questions, prep them the day before with those questions.
Conversely, players need to be utmost respectful to their parents (in general!) but remember they are also your financiers and investors paying for the whole dang operation! Sit down with your parents prior to a junior day and ask them what they are hoping to get from it all - you will shock them. Find out what questions they would like you to ask, what information they would like you to find out with the coaches.
Grumpy, disrespectful interactions again, are all red flags.
The best way to come off as an interesting and intriguing recruit is to ask interesting and intriguing questions:
Coach I noticed in your bio you’re from X area - what was that like over there, and how does your family like it here?
What can a recruit find here that they won’t be able to find anywhere else?
What’s your training and development philosophy like for players once they are here?
What are like 2-3 habits you see from your most successful freshmen recruits who come here?
What’s your recruiting timeline roughly like? I know the decision making process can be quite an art form.
How has the portal impacted how you approach recruiting and retainment these day?
Shoot, even just asking chat GPT for 10 interesting questions to ask on a junior day visit will nudge you over the top sometimes.
To found interesting, you must be interested.
How to Document Your Junior Day on Twitter/X
If everyone can have something, nobody wants it.
If no one can have something, everybody wants it.
No one really gets excited when a state D3 college offers them because that’s relatively easy compared to when a name brand D1 program offers them.
You need to convey the idea on Twitter/X (and reality) that you are actively being courted by name-brand schools in such a way that another coach in that same conference will look at your profile and say “If our rivals are recruiting this kid, we definitely should take a look”
And, so, if you don’t document your junior day, it effectively did not happen in recruiting land on Twitter/X.
Here is a great and simple example of Kieran Corr 2024 K/P committed to Harvard and how he documented a visit he took to UPENN last year:
Had a great time back @PennFB learning more about the program and watching practice! Thank you to @CoachMetzler for having me out!
@CoachPriore@CoachDupont@DanSwanstrom
Apr 19, 2023
If you want to make it a formula:
Have a photo of yourself on the field, or in front of the college logo.
Bonus point if you take it with a college coach.
Say “Had a great time at X school. Excited for next steps!”
Be sure to tag all those coaches at the school as well as your private coaches and any 247 reporters or recruiting guys who follow that program. Retweets can be rocket fuel.
Does a Junior Day Mean You’re Getting Offered?
Definitely not.
Junior days get you on the recruiting board but summer camps decide the order of the board itself.
Probably the line you will hear from most coaches will be that you need to perform at their summer camps before they evaluate you for an offer.
A junior day ultimately does these things:
Gets you noticed.
Get you interest from other schools.
Gets you top of mind to be evaluated at summer college camp.