The Life Of A College Coach And Recruiter
In a recent Sports Illustrated’s article, Bruce Shoenfeld wrote an in-depth piece on the life of assistant coaches in NCAA sports. Chronicling entire days of coaches at sporting events, watching film, writing scouting reports, and on the college recruiting trail, this piece gave an exhaustive look at just how difficult the life of an assistant coach truly is.
Assistant coaches are constantly traveling all over the country and sometimes the world to scout and recruit student-athletes. However, this travel doesn’t necessarily come during the off-season, as coaches must scout talent during actual games. As corresponding seasons for respective college and high school sports almost always overlap with one another, a great deal of this travel is done during the college season. This means that assistant coaches are attending to their primary responsibilities (coaching) and secondary responsibilities (scouting other teams) all while recruiting high school athletes. This lends very little time, if any, with family, children, and spouses. Shoenfeld writes that “the travel is not just onerous—it’s unpredictable. If you’re a recruiter, you’ll miss your kids’ birthdays and Little League games and recitals not because your team is playing a road game, scheduled in advance, but because you’re at the mercy of the decision-making process of a high schooler who might have a tough time choosing what to order at Taco Bell, let alone where to spend the next few years of his life”.
Not only is the travel time exhausting and a strain on family life, it also is a logistical nightmare. As Schoenfeld stated above, coaches must plan their recruiting visits around the availability of the recruit, ensuring that plans and coaches must be flexible and changeable. While following a University of Washington assistant basketball coach, Shoenfeld notes that after a recruit’s schedule changes that “two days on the road without even seeing a player is something that a recruiter can’t afford. It’s an untimely reminder of the vagaries of his profession, how nothing is guaranteed”. This situation happens repeatedly on the recruiting trail, requiring a special kind of coach that is able to roll with the punches and handle disappointment with grace.
Life on the road also means an extraordinary amount of time on cramped planes, in massive airports, and in rental cars on unfamiliar roads. Building in time for exercise is thrown out the window and road trips generally mean fast food or terrible eating habits. Needless to say, the “on-the-go” lifestyle becomes extremely unhealthy and sleep deprived. Furthermore, coaches must try to maintain receipts for travel and expense reimbursements, adding to their ever-increasing load of paperwork and forms.
Lastly, and maybe most importantly, coaches maintain a tremendous amount of responsibility by complying with NCAA recruiting bylaws. With over 440 pages of rules and regulations, the NCAA Bylaws present countless traps for college coaches and recruiters. Schoenfeld writes that “the NCAA regulations, though well-intentioned, are a million hoops to jump through—or avoid jumping through—along the way. ‘I’m the most dangerous guy on campus,’ Oregon assistant Brian Fish likes to say. ‘I can bring down the whole program.’ Have a chat with a player’s parent after a game? Violation. Text condolences to a kid who lost a game, or even one of his close relatives? Violation. Tell a reporter that the player you’re recruiting from his town could become one of the all-time greats? They’ll come down hard on that”.
This story lends itself perfectly to the mission and message behind what FieldLevel strives to do. This week at FieldLevel, we were proud to release the newest innovation to our technology as we now are the first to integrate Google Maps into our athletic recruiting software. For the first time, college coaches are able to see their recruiting footprint with the click of a mouse. This enables coaches to easily identify target markets and optimize logistics on each college recruiting trip, ultimately saving staffs thousands of dollars in travel costs.
We continue to strive to offer the best recruiting and compliance software on the market and feel that this is just one of many achievements along our road to accomplishing our goal. Having sent out the press release on Tuesday (June 7th), we already have been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle and Yahoo! News as well as others.
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