How College Coaches can Predict a Recruit’s Playing Time… Why the Plan Matters

When dreaming in color, every recruit should look for a program where they will fit into the team’s long-term plan. Recruitment season is exciting for the current student-athletes on a team because they get to interview their potential teammates. Just as coaches make up their minds about which players they want, teammates also make these same conclusions during an official visit. We would constantly try to assess the personality of a recruit, along with their talent level, to determine whether we could see them helping our team move forward. A typical college athlete’s career will last four years without a redshirt. As a result, we would start projecting outward amongst ourselves how we saw a recruit developing in their future career. The plan was simple, you fit in one of four categories. You were either on the 1-year plan, 2-year plan, 3-year plan, or not in the plan.

The 1-year plan was for recruits who we felt could be a contributing member to championship aspirations immediately. These recruits can even be threatening because they might be as good as some of the best players on a team already. The 2-year plan is most typical for recruits who by end of sophomore year should start to become major contributors. In fact, I was on this plan during my career. The 3-year plan is a long-range attempt to work with a recruit who may turn into a competitive athlete in the future, but is to be expected to need great work, patience, and commitment. However, if you project to take more than three years to contribute to a program, then you are “not in the plan”. You might be able to walk on under this designation, but no college program with championship aspirations will likely recruit student-athletes who are not in their plan. Quite simply it is a bad business practice.

The funniest thing about dreaming in color is that most recruits are oblivious to how coaches and programs view them. This distortion of self can psyche a kid out from an otherwise great opportunity. While hosting one of our many recruits, I recall a potential student-athlete who when asked “what other programs are you looking at joining” listed North Carolina State amongst other small conference programs. Each of my teammates looked at each other in disbelief. We knew that if this recruit was barely on a 2-to-3-year plan for us, there was no way a major conference program in Division 1 would be actively recruiting him. He might have been looking at North Carolina State, but it was highly unlikely that they were looking back at him.

There is this misconception that you can work your way up the team’s pecking order in the college athletic world. This is not to say that there has never been an athlete who has earned more playing time across their career. But in most cases coaches know more about the future career of an athlete than they do. When a coach recruits they are investing time, energy, effort, and resources into an athlete. Any recruit who tries to buck the system, especially walk-ons is messing with the coach’s plan for the team. Essentially a coach would have to admit that they were wrong to invest resources in another athlete through recruitment in order to start playing someone else who was not originally expected to do so. Coaches are real people and they tend to not like being “wrong”. So unless you find a college coach who has made it clear that you are part of their plan, it is unlikely that yours of becoming a star for their program will work out.

This excerpt is taken from the book “Winning the Ship: How to Win the College Athlete Recruitment Game” by David “Coach Rob” Robinson.

KNOW THE GAME. WIN THE GAME.

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