Previously: Intro || The recruiting timeline + what to consider || What do coaches look at?
Getting in touch with coaches isn’t that complicated but here are four tips from the coaches themselves to help keep your conversations running smoothly.
Don’t email coaches after 4pm on Friday or before 12pm on Monday.
Coaches get a ridiculous number of emails each day (ever wonder what they do all day when they’re not on the water?) so try to avoid contributing to their overflowing inbox immediately before and after the weekend.
Specify time zones when organizing phone calls
Not everybody lives on the East Coast so make sure you know what the corresponding hours are if you’re setting up a time to talk to a coach on the West Coast. Don’t make the mistake of saying “I’ll call you at 11am” but not specifying 11am EST (your time) or PST (their time). Same goes for post-July 1st phone calls when the coaches are allowed to call you – when in doubt, confirm the time zones so you can be sure you’re available (or in some cases, awake).
Don’t ask coaches questions that you can Google the answer to.
We were joking about this the other day because a recruit sent an email asking what time MIT offers campus tours and I wanted to reply with this (and only that). Questions about the team, the school, etc. that you can easily figure out the answer to on your own should not be posed to the coach(es) in an email. Ain’t nobody got time to deal with that.
Related: What questions should you ask coaches during the recruiting process?
Put some effort into your emails
Don’t assume they can’t tell when you’re just copy + pasting the same email and sending it off to multiple coaches. Personalize the emails, address the coaches by name, and ask pertinent questions about the program and school. Yea, writing a handful of subtly different emails can take a bit of time but if that hour or so of work seems too daunting for you then you might want to reconsider this whole recruiting (and college) thing.
Next week: What do coaches want to see in an email?