You need to be both talented academically and athletically AND wisely leverage social media to, at the very least, generate your first touch points in college recruiting.
Nothing will make a college coach recruit you faster than seeing their conference rival recruit you first.
The question is, though, how do you get that first one - that very first college coach interested in you?
When you are starting your recruiting there is no substitution for quantity.
You simply must send out wave after wave after wave of email and Twitter DM bursts until you eventually, and inevitably land on a few coaches who will start to show you interest.
Once you’ve got that first interest “beach head” established, then you simply start documenting everything on your Twitter.
If a coach sends you a graphic inviting you to a junior day or camp, no matter how generic, post it.
If you had a great conversation with a coach on the phone, no matter how inocuous, post it.
If you do a junior day visit, take a photo of yourself and then post it.
My answer 99.99% of the time when a player asks “should I post this?” is YES!!!!
Is it normal to feel a bit fraudulent or weird tooting your own horn? Yes. Football as a sport rewards humility, and hard work, not the loud guy. But, football recruiting is a different sport than football itself.
If you truly believe you can help a coach win more games and score more points, then you actually have an ethical duty to tell them that. It’s not obnoxious if it isn’t true.
If you are hyper inflating your stats, and “fluffing up” a coach replying to you via DM as an “offer” to another school, then OK, yes, that is bad. Don’t do that. Some recruits are like a guitar string on a blues player’s guitar - the note might start out as an A, but a skilled blues musician can bend that sucker all the way up to a C sharp.
The Twitter recruiting bubble has one single purpose: to generate a first contact with an interested college coach. That is it. This bubble is immediately burst the second you step foot on the field to perform for these coaches, too.
So, do optics matter in recruiting? Yes. Optics get you the initial connection. But, REALITY gets you the actual offer.
Brendan
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