Senior year is often times the biggest moment in your high school track career. It is when years of hard work finally pay off, just in time for your body to catch up with your drive to win. The state championship meet, and even the outdoor nationals become the ultimate proving ground. Athletes like Masai Russell, Abby Steiner, and even Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, all dominated those events during their senior years. After that they all went on to the University Kentucky where they would dominate the NCAA. But if you are a track and field recruit, who is hoping to catch the eye of a college coach, I’ve got a secret to share with you. College coaches, do not care about your senior year performances. I don’t mean that they don’t want to see you win. However, it is a bad decision to wait until your senior year to try to impress them in recruiting. It likely won’t make a difference in helping you get recruited for track, and this is the real reason why.

The myth about senior year

The idea that you can dominate senior year and get recruited, doesn’t come from the real world. It comes from television shows and movies. It makes for a great story. It’s just not actually the truth. I’m not saying that there has never been a senior who suddenly gained recruiting interest from their dream school. But it is very unlikely because the college admissions process is already ongoing by that point.

Consider that outdoor track and field is a spring sport. Most colleges have application deadlines that are no later than January or February. But track meets that actually matter won’t happen until months later in May or June. There is simply not enough time for a college coach to make any decisions that would get you accepted by the college in time enough to compete. So the end of your junior year season is for the most part, the final entry on your recruiting resume. This information alone, should influence every decision that you make in recruiting.

College sports recruiting is simple. It is about getting a coach to show interest in you, building a relationship with them, and eventually convincing them to offer you a spot on their team. It is then, and only then when you can actually accept an offer. Junior year is the key to all of this because it is when your athletic powers will be at their peak in high school, but still early enough for a coach to notice you before it’s too late.

Track and field exposes this more than most sports, because recruits are growing and maturing throughout their high school years. College coaches are aware of this. But track and field is also measured on the clock. Coaches scout talent early at the national invitational track meets, but that’s only because they want to know which recruits are head and shoulders above their peers. An athlete like Noah Lyles was easy to spot by the time he was 15 years old.

Those recruits will be targeted by just about any coach with access to the internet, and a full scholarship slot available. The irony is that these recruits may not turn out to be the best in the long run, because developing early is often the reason why they got much of this attention. Gabby Thomas is an NCAA champion and Olympic medalist now, but in high school she was nowhere near as fast as she ran later on. What I’m saying is college coaches are pretty aware that athletes take time to develop. That is why your junior year is the best time for them to see if you can truly perform at a high level.

Remember by junior year season, just about anyone who will make varsity should be on the team. College coaches assume that the best athletes will prove themselves when the cream rises to the top at the state championship meet level and beyond. The idea is that they can judge by now, with good accuracy who are the best athletes in the recruiting class. It is also the last full season you get to compete in before college applications have to be submitted.

Junior year is the key to recruiting

The secret to junior year is that if you can win enough, even if you are not on a coach’s radar, but prove yourself against a recruit who already is, you can take their spot on their recruiting board. Verbal offers that are made to any recruit before senior year really don’t mean that much because it’s exactly that: verbal. It can be pulled back, especially if the recruit shows a serious decline in performance. But after junior year, coaches at all levels have to make offers, because without it, your application won’t even get reviewed in time for acceptance. For this reason senior year is not as big a deal as you may think.

In my college coaching career, I targeted all my recruiting efforts on identifying athletes during junior year. The only way to get a jump on them in recruiting was to figure out who I wanted, before they were officially seniors. The truth is that much of high school is  a time when athletes are growing physically. But junior year to senior year, even for a high school boy, normally doesn’t make that much of a difference. Basically whatever you were doing last year, probably won’t change that much. You compete with the same physical toolbox as a senior most of the time. But that’s not true from freshman to junior year. Another way to think of it, is if I think you’re too slow by the end of junior year, you’ll probably be too slow 365 days from now, because nothing is going to change in your high school training, meet schedule, or anything else that would actually matter.

If you are looking to get recruited by a school and they don’t believe in you enough to show interest by the end of your junior year, I wouldn’t hold out hope that will change. Any coach who doesn’t believe in you by that point, isn’t really interested in you, or developing you. The only time a big name school goes after somebody new during their senior year is really when another recruit they really wanted turns them down. And if a coach tells you as a high school junior, that if you run faster times, and win more meets, they will keep an eye one you… what they meant to say was “if you were someone else we would want you”. The coaches who believe in you through your junior year are likely the ones who are more concerned with what you are going to do in the future, in their uniform, than what you have already done. And those are the coaches who will be most likely to develop you further as a college track athlete.

The Bottom Line

My advice is that you let your junior year performances speak for themselves. Contact schools yourself through recruiting questionnaires to see which schools want to make you a priority in recruiting. Most schools outside the high D1 level don’t have the resources to find every athlete who could be a good fit. Those who do, normally aren’t shopping for diamonds in the rough. They are looking for them at “high end diamond retailers” like the MileSplit first team national elite list. If you have to scrap and fight just to get the attention of a coach as a senior, you will likely have to do the same when you get on campus to keep it. Recruits who are the last to be offered, are also most commonly the last to get an opportunity on the track. So my advice is that you let your junior year show you who really wants you. It is always best to be somewhere that you are wanted, and the transfer portal is filled with athletes who ended up in places where they were not.

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