How to not get totally scammed during the recruiting process

Sadly, you’re surrounded by people who want to make you feel like you can’t get recruited without paying big money for their help. However, followers of BreakOut Sports know that there is no amount of money that can buy you a position on a college roster.

Planning out how you will spend your volleyball budget is one of the most important and strategic decisions you will make during the recruiting process. Don’t waste your time or money on fakes or scams like…

Big fat all-star trips

When I was in high school, I received several invitations to play on “all-star” teams that would travel to exotic destinations like Hawaii and Australia. The teams were invitation only—meaning that there were no tryouts. When I initially opened the envelopes, I felt a rush of excitement. Upon further inspection, however, I realized that if a coach I had never met was inviting me to play on a team with people I had never met, in a faraway, exotic, and expensive location—this was not a formula for good development or good exposure. Ask yourself, what college coach from the United States would travel to Australia to recruit someone that he or she could much more easily watch at a myriad of other tournaments in the United States?

In the context of recruiting exposure, these offers are bogus and you should avoid them.

Professionally edited film

There are dozens of sites out there that will offer to edit your film for you for an absolute premium. They will include music, some sort of catchy intro, and group together your best plays. In reality, over-edited film doesn’t help you to get recruited. College coaches watch countless hours of film between scouting other teams, analyzing their own team’s performance, and evaluating recruits.

You don’t need music or flashy intros. You need good film. Go out there and create a great highlight film by combining your own great athletic skills and a smartphone.

 Recruiting Services

There are also dozens of sites that will offer to manage the entire recruiting process for you. These sites often appeal to parents who don’t know how to help their athlete figure out the recruiting process and hope that just throwing some money into it will make the problem go away. These sites are expensive. Especially considering that everything they offer is something you could do yourself, for free.

Don’t be fooled. When coaches receive emails from recruiting websites/services, they delete them.

Personalized recruiting websites

I’ve seen a few sites that will create your own personalized website for you. You send them your film, stats, pictures, and other information, and they will spend half an hour plugging it all into the free version of a website builder. Then, they will charge you north of $250 dollars for the service. All of this, for a link to a website that you will still need to email to college coaches in order for them to see your information.

Why not save yourself some money and just send your film, stats, pictures, and other information to college coaches directly in an email? If you really feel like you must have a personalized recruiting website (or you just have an interest in web design), you can create one yourself, for no money at all.

You can actually do this

The scams I’ve mentioned above are actually just a handful of all of the crazy offers you’ll find on the internet. Always remember that if someone out there tries to make you think that you can’t handle the recruiting process without their (expensive) help, they’re lying to you.

Save the money you would have wasted on pointless exposure services and dump it into your development activities like camps, leagues, private lessons, and good books.

Want to read more about how you can save money in the recruiting process? Try reading this article.

You can do this and I’m here to help!