Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

The college recruiting process is not as complex or daunting as it seems. We’ve studied the recruiting processes of 50,000 athletes over many years, and we’ve found success is quite simple. In fact, it comes down to just 3 simple steps.

Follow these steps, and you no longer have to deal with the nagging questions that haunt student-athletes. Follow these steps, and you’ll know the answer to questions like “Where do I start?” or “How do I find a school?” More crucially, you’ll have an actionable plan to make your dream a reality.

Important caveat: This doesn’t mean recruiting is easy. It’s not. It requires you stick to a regimen and practice it regularly. Achieving your collegiate dreams requires hard work, dedication, and perseverance. But chances are, you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have these qualities within you already. These traits are the hallmarks of elite athletes.

Click here to watch a recap of our webinar, The Simple Recruiting Plan: How to Get Recruited in 3 Steps

If you take the process one step at a time, you will be successful.

Step 1: Go Where College Coaches Already Are

Several years ago, the online recruiting profile changed the way collegiate recruiting was done. Millions of high school athletes signed up for recruiting profiles at the promise of instant exposure. Student-Athletes in Southern California could be seen by college coaches in Northern Maine, and everywhere in between. Geography – which was once the largest impediment to an athlete’s recruitment – suddenly wasn’t so important anymore. The internet could provide exposure.

That was the promise. However, it left out one critical detail. A profile has no value if no one sees it. And because hundreds of sites popped up providing “Online Profile” services, college coaches had no centralized location for finding athletes. There was no Facebook for high school athletes. Rather, there were MySpaces, Friendsters, and hundreds of other social networks so inconsequential we’ve never even heard of them. The online recruiting profile couldn’t deliver on its promise.

But Facebook’s value has very little to do with the profile, anyway. Facebook’s 1.87 billion active users don’t check Facebook everyday to go to individual profiles. They go there for connection – to world events, to sports, to photos and videos shared by their friends and families. Individual profiles used to be the main reason people joined the social network. But Facebook realized early on that to provide true value, they needed to provide connection.

The athletic recruiting profile gave athletes a presence. But it solved the wrong problem. Athletes don’t have a presence problem. They have a discoverability problem. And discoverability is the key to college exposure.

Connection is the holy grail.

Key Takeaways

To get seen, put your profile in front of college coaches. To do that, you need to use a recruiting platform that provides 2 key elements:

1. A Connected Profile.
2. Instant connection to all college coaches. If you can’t quickly find and message any college coach you want, then you’re not solving your biggest problem.

Neither works without the other. But together, it’s like magic.

Steps 2 and 3

We’ve only scratched the surface on the issue of simplicity in recruiting. We will cover what student-athletes should do with this in the near future. Rather than waiting, watch a recap of our free webinar, The Simple Recruiting Plan: How to Get Recruited in 3 Steps, to:

1. Find out how to leverage the power of a recruiting profile via an exposure platform
2. Learn the next 2 required steps to commit to your dream college, on our free webinar recap.