Why Your Prospect Rankings Need to be Numerical - Not Letters, Stars or Colors
If you're going to accurate rank your prospects, this is proving to be best
Ranking your recruits is critical to success as a college coach.
In all the work we’ve done with coaches and their programs as clients, the coaching staffs who have devised some kind of ordered, numerical ranking system seem to be the most consistent recruiters who are netting student-athletes that are the best fits for their programs.
Why not a system of evaluation based on letters (A, B, C), stars (5-start, 4-star) or colors? Because none of those methods allow for the small differences that seem to matter a lot to most coaches.
For example, let’s take the “B” prospect: That’s the majority of most programs’ recruiting list, populated with good, above average high school recruits. Year to year, you have lots of “B” prospects on your recruiting list. But you, like most coaches, understand that there’s a difference between a high-B, on the verge of developing into an A, versus a low-B, about to fall into your C category.
And yet, both of those of prospects are technically “B” recruits. See the issue?
If it’s decision time, and you need to figure out what prospect to ask to commit, how do you choose? What if they’re both close to that middle-B ground? How do you know if they’re the same recruit?…or, determine which one is a little bit better?
That’s why a numerical system of evaluation and ranking works best. If one prospect rates out as a 46 on a scale of 1 to 50, and the other prospect scores as a 41 on that same scale that you develop, which one should you rank higher and put as the priority for commitment? The 46-rated athlete, of course.
Based on our observations and work with programs that use various types of methods to rank and evaluate recruits, developing a numerically based rating system helps you stick to a recruiting game plan that is always more reliable than other systems of evaluation.
In the next few posts for our Honey Badger Recruiting subscribers, we’re going to teach you how to:
Develop your own customized recruiting evaluation system.
Accurately and successfully work your way down your list in order of their total score, ensuring the best possible recruiting results.
Craft a system for evaluating each recruiting class, year to year, to gauge if your program is getting better, stagnating, or declining.
As we head into a chaotic Fall of 2020 recruiting cycle, organizing and developing a solid foundation for recruiting is essential. This is one of the key aspects to that effort.
One of the other side benefits to this approach? Understanding when you need to stop recruiting an athlete before you lose the next prospect on your recruiting depth chart. To get more of an understanding about the concept of when to pull the plug on a recruited student-athlete, listen to our podcast episode on the topic:
https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/dan-tudor/college-recruiting-weekly/e/68639686
While using #s CAN be more accurate than using a grade or star-system, the key to ANY system is HOW that overall rating occurs.
First, a coach and/or the coaching staff needs to identify which metrics they deem important to measure when assessing a recruit and in building their teams such as 40 yd. speed or free-throw or batting percentage.
Second, once these metrics are identified they need to be weighted* in importance and the weighting may vary depending on what the athlete will be doing in that sport. For example, the 40 yd. dash will likely be more important for a wide receiver in football or sprinter in track than it is for a lineman in football or thrower in track.
Third, once these metrics are weighted* then athletes can be numerically rated on each metric in which they are assessed. If there are 10 different metrics a coaching staff wants to assess each recruit, that recruit will have 10 scores, one for each metric. Then in this example, the total sum of the 10 items is calculated in which the recruit is assessed.
It is THIS number – the total sum number – that can be used to rate recruits and help differentiate between the middle “B” recruits. This is a more reliable and VALID way of assessing and then comparing recruit strengths and weaknesses.
This system DOES have a flaw, however. Numerically rating any observation or physical attribute has limitations. A coach or coaching staff would be wise to not automatically assume that a recruit with a score of 85 is substantially better than one with a total sum of 83 on a 100-point scale. The 85 recruit may be, but they also might not be a better fit.
Using a valid and reliable numerical system that sums the independent variables a coaching staff deems important is a great tool to better advance building the program you want. The measuring error that naturally occurs when assessing those individual metrics needs careful consideration, and points to the limitations associated with attempting to quantify and base roster spot decisions solely on a number.
IMHO using this system gets the coach/coaching staff 90% of the way towards making that decision, the other 10% is what some may call the "Art" of coaching/recruiting.
*Weighting numerically can be done multiple ways.