You're Standing In The Wrong Line

In Washington DC, lobbyists pay professional line-waiting services $125 to hold their spot for Congressional hearings. Someone shows up at dawn, holds the place, and the lobbyist waltzes in right before the doors open.

Should access to our government be something you can buy?

College recruiting services work the same way.

You're paying a former player or college coach for access to their private roster of relationships. You're paying to skip the line of DMs, emails, and highlight reels flooding every coach's inbox.

After a decade in recruiting, something about charging for these services never sat right with me. I couldn't articulate why until I read Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational.

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Ariely describes two value systems that govern human interaction:

Market Values: → Everything is for sale → Life is zero-sum → Sports are played to be won → Winners and losers

Social Values: → Some things are off limits → Selling certain things cheapens their value → Life is not zero-sum → Sports are played to be played

College recruiting is the perfect collision of these two worlds. And no one realizes it.

Your son or daughter has spent their entire life in a social values environment. They played high school football for the fun of it. Coaches played them not just because they could help win games, but because they liked them. Teachers, coaches, counselors—every adult around them was mandated to be their champion, morally and legally.

Life was supposed to be fair, logical, and objective.

Then they step into college recruiting.

College football is anything but objective. It's zero-sum, dog-eat-dog, and absurdly subjective. Coaches need 18-22 year olds to keep their mortgage secure. There may be nice slogans on the walls and inspirational posts on social media, but make no mistake: even at the D3 level, this is a market values environment.

A coach might move on from your kid for something as simple as a limp handshake.

Families become disenchanted when coaches don't follow back. When they take too long to respond. When they offer another kid for some inexplicable reason.

But really, these families are experiencing culture shock. They fundamentally misunderstand that they've left a social values environment and entered a market values one.

All recruiting services sell is the ability to cut the line.

You're paying to access someone else's preexisting relationships. To get your name leapfrogged over hundreds of others. To grab a coach's limited attention for a fair evaluation.

That's it.

The coaches who are worth playing for will still do their own due diligence. They'll evaluate your height, weight, speed, game tape, grades, and test scores. No amount of line-cutting changes those fundamentals.

College coaches are looking for monikers of status—labels that make it harder to say no. Think of it like a video game where you collect power-ups:

Before you hire anyone, understand what they cannot do:

No service will make your kid taller, faster, or stronger. No service will improve their game tape. No service will raise their GPA or boost their test scores.

A good recruiting advisor does something different entirely.

A good advisor takes stock of all your academic, athletic, and personal strengths. Then they find the overlap between four critical questions:

I help families navigate recruiting to high-academic programs—especially the Ivy League, Patriot League and top D3 schools.

No hype. No generic advice. Just honest strategy based on your kid's actual profile.

When you’re ready, consider booking a free discovery call to see if we might be a fit to work together here.

Coach Cahill