Girls Basketball Recruiting

by Patosha Jeffery

In Part I, I gave you an overview of what recruiting is, what it means to play basketball at the next level, the different levels of college basketball. In part II, I want to talk to you about ways to get recruited. How do you put yourself in front of college coaches to be recruited? And so, what I’m going to do is break it down into three ways that you can get recruited.

3 Ways to Get Recruited

The three ways you can get recruited is to go to them, to go to the Internet, or to go to events. In today’s age, I’m telling you, there are so many opportunities out there for you to get in front of college coaches. Back when I played basketball, we did not have the Internet. There were not as many events going on that I can think of. AAU was extremely big, but now, there are so many other opportunities out there. And so, I want to break it down for you on how you can get in front of college basketball coaches, so you can begin to be recruited.

Go To Them

I’m going to show you how to go to the college coaches. And basically, what I mean when I say go to them, contact them directly. Contact them directly, or get in front of them directly; but basically, contact them directly.

So how do you contact them directly? Basically, you mail them. And that’s what I did back in the day, when I was trying to put myself out there in front of college coaches, or in front of specific schools. And basically, this is what you do when you’re trying to get in front of a specific school. Or you may have your top 10 list of schools, or top five list of schools, this is how you can get in front of those specific schools directly.

And what I did, my Dad videoed all of my basketball games. He pretty much videoed all of my basketball games and created a highlight video for me back in the day. We had VHS tapes; we didn’t have DVDs. But he chopped up some of my basketball games, created a highlight tape on VHS, and we mailed it out to different schools, and that’s how I put myself out in front of them. And I sent the highlight tape to them with a typed-up letter talking about some of my statistics and explaining what was on the video. So that’s what I did back in the day. And so, I want to tell you a few options you have to basically get directly in front of them, or directly in front of the schools that you want to get in front of.

Mail

So I basically went over mail. You can mail them. You can mail them a letter. You can mail them a letter just saying who you are, what school you attend, and your statistics. You can put your schedule on there, and just basically mail them a letter introducing yourself: who you are, your address, your stats, your academic achievements, your GPA, basketball statistics, and a schedule. That’s one way that you can get directly in front of the specific schools that you want to get in front of.

DVD

Another thing that you can do – like I just explained that I did – you can mail them a highlight DVD. Like I said, back in the day when I was trying to get recruited, it was VHS tapes. But now, you have DVDs. That’s what people use now; they use DVDs. So you can create a highlight DVD and mail it to the coaches.

Email

Another thing, because of technology, you can email them. You can instantly email them instead of putting the information in the mail; they call it snail mail now. But instead of putting a letter in the mail, you can instantly email them, and that way, you can email more than a top 10. You can have a top 50, and you can email all of them at the same time; create a list within your email system and email 50. That’s the advancements of the technology that we have now, where you can get access to more college coaches than what I could back in the day. So basically, you can email them, introducing yourself: your name, your statistics, what school you attend, your academic achievements, your GPA, and your schedule.

Questionaire

And another thing, because of the advancements of the Internet, when a college basketball coach goes out and sees the different talent and they find somebody that they’re interested in, the first thing they do is send them a questionnaire. And basically, what a questionnaire is it’s an application where you add the information that I just said. You put down your name, your address, your coach information, your statistics, your academic achievements, or academic statistics. If you’re playing summer basketball, they may ask for your summer schedule, or your summer coach information, and your high school schedule.

And on the flipside of that, you receive that when a college coach sees you play. But because of the advancements of the Internet, you can be proactive. And instead of waiting on the college coach to send you a questionnaire, you can go out to their website and fill out the questionnaire online. So that’s another way that you can get in front of them. In this period of basketball, there’s only so many places the college coaches can go. So you can be proactive and automatically send the questionnaire to them. Let them know that you’re interested in their program and what your statistics and information are.

Camps

And all of those things that I just went over, those are ways that you can send information to them. But if you want them to actually see you play – to guarantee that the specific school that you want to see you play – you attend their summer camps. The majority of major programs have their own summer camps. They’re normally run during the month of June. You go out to the website, and you can go look on the website and see the different kinds of camps they have. They run fundamental camps. The new types of camps that are going on now are called elite camps. They’re called elite camps, but anybody can come to them.

Basically, the college coaches will invite some of the players that they’re recruiting to come attend the camps. It’s an unofficial way to get prospects that they’re recruiting onto their campus, so they can see their campus and get familiar with the coach. But anybody can go to these events. So if you want to show these coaches that you can play against players that they’re already recruiting that’s what you need to do. You need to attend these elite camps.

And then, they also have team camps. During the month of June, a lot of the high school teams, and even junior high school teams, are back together. They have a specific period of time where the high school coaches can work with their team, in June, and some of those coaches go to team camps. So you may want to encourage your high school coach to enter your team into the team camp, and that’s another way for a college coach gets to see you play.

So that’s basically what I wanted to go over. I wanted to share with you how you can get directly in front of the specific schools that you’re interested in attending. And just to go over it again, you can mail them a letter introducing yourself with the information that I went over. You can mail a highlight DVD and also include a letter introducing yourself. You can instantly email them directly with information introducing yourself. You can go to their website and find the questionnaire and fill out the questionnaire and submit it to them.

Or I believe the ultimate – because this is how you actually get to play in front of them – is to attend one of their summer camps, whether it be a fundamental camp, or the elite camp. The elite camp may be the best one to go to, or maybe get your high school coach, or even your AAU coach to enter you into their team camp.

In Part III, I will breakdown how to go to the Internet.