Coaching Through the Recruiting Process

Much of my day in the office right now is devoted to recruiting.  With a new program and season that doesn’t officially start until 2013-2014 our focus has been on securing the freshman class that will begin to write the history books for Michigan Women’s Lacrosse. Yes, you did the math correctly; the student-athletes we are recruiting are currently juniors in high school.

With so much time spent on recruiting right now, I can’t help but think about just how much this process had changed since I was in high school and the pressures young junior girls now face that I didn’t even begin to feel the weight of until at least the summer after 11^th grade.   Gone are the days of  making your college athletic decisions through senior year official visits followed by commitments and the signing of a National Letter of Intent (NLI) shortly there after.  Today, girls fresh off the arrival of their junior year make unofficial visits to colleges and universities and verbal commitments to these institutions and athletic programs long before official visits or NLI’s are even permissible and prior to even stepping on the field to play their junior season in high school.   Additionally, with the onset of social media and mass communication vehicles and the increased focus on the sport of lacrosse through media and other such outlets, it has become far to easy to know about and thus compare ones self and ones current progress to the rest of the recruiting class across the nation.  Such pressures – self-initiated or brought on by those around these young women – lead to a thought process of who’s doing what vs. where am I which is often compounded by those in a position of guiding these young athletes telling them where they should be. As a result the decision-making process for these young girls can cause quite a bit of apprehension and is far more demanding and taxing than it ever was for me.

As a coach, the recruiting process is something I respect and the timetable is one that I work readily in collaboration with.  But as a coach, I also feel a responsibility to be sure these young women are guided and mentored throughout the entire process.  I hope that they get positive support, advice and direction from those in a position to mentor them such high school coaches, club coaches and their parents. And often they do.  But unfortunately sometimes that support system is absent, insufficient or misguided and frequently this exciting and gratifying time in a young student-athletes’ life can be overwhelmingly stressful, taxing and confusing.

It’s important for any coach to remember that the recruiting process today can often be a scary and uncertain time in any young woman’s life and we should feel a responsibility to help them understand this process as best as possible along the way.  We can do our jobs well in recruiting while still providing the guidance, communication, respect and simple consideration, care and understanding that makes us good coaches in the first place and that all the young women athletes we come in contact with deserve.

Our coaching shouldn’t be limited to when student-athletes arrive on campus or “officially” become part of our team.  It should begin the day recruiting commences.

“Players don’t care how much I know until they know how much I care.” Frosty Westering

Jennifer Valore, Assistant Women’s Lacrosse Coach, University of Michigan, valore@umich.edu. Follow me on Twitter: jvalore