The Imply / Infer Problem in Recruiting

A coach asks what might keeping his prospects from commiting. Here's my take...

Got a great question from a coach at a college we have a long history with. He’s close to ending the process with a recruit, but something’s not clicking.

To be specific, she hasn’t told him ‘yes’. Which, as you all know, is what a coach wants after recruiting a prospect for a long time with a student-athlete a coach really, really, really wants.

And, as I told him in the exchange I’ll have you look at below, it’s a common issue with coaches at the late stages of the process. Take a look:

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In diagnosing the likely issue, we can eliminate a few things we know aren’t issues for this coach:

• Has the coach done a thorough job evaluating and building a relationship with the recruit? Yes.

• Is the athlete the right kind of fit, academically and athletically, at the college? Yes, she’s been accepted.

• Do we have confirmation she is interested and wants to come to the school? Yes, according to the coach, she has verbalized her interest in doing that.

• Did the coach take the step of asking the recruit to commit to come and compete for him? No.

But, he implied it.

And actually, that’s a pretty common move by coaches.

You know why that’s the case: You’ve spent a good amount of time talking with a recruit, getting to know a recruit, traveling to scout a recruit, inviting them to campus, watching them go through the process and getting accepted…so I get it, there’s a lot at stake.

You don’t want to ‘pressure’ a recruit, so you back off a little. You don’t want to ‘force’ a recruit into a decision, or ‘trick’ them into committing. And, you’ve implied that you want them in your program a few times, so they should understand how I feel about them and know that I want them to commit.

As adults, we get that implication. And, we can act on it fairly easily - you and I would have a conversation about it, make sure we’re understanding each other, and make a decision on what we want to do next.

For your recruit? Yeah, not as easy.

Your prospect needs something different in order to move forward.

Because their mindset is different, they won’t take the same approach towards a