If you have the passion, dedication and drive to play tennis at the college level then let us help you get started and learn what it takes to be find a college program that fits your needs. There are many areas of the recruiting process that student-athletes and families simply don’t know what to do; this is why we have provided you with this infographic, which breakdowns the number of tennis programs and scholarships available at the college level.

Why it’s important to know

Being aware of the tennis “numbers” is an excellent starting point for players looking to score an athletic scholarship. Knowing the amount of college programs and the different divisions will be an excellent guiding tool for student-athletes when they begin to look more closely into colleges they have interest in.

Taking the leap into tennis recruiting

Finding the right college that will be the best fit for you will take a lot of hard work and time. Knowing what you will need in terms of financial aid and scholarship money should hopefully keep you motivated and focused with finding the right college. As indicated by the graphic, 90% of athletic scholarships are available outside of the NCAA DI level. Now that you know some hard facts how will you approach your recruitment? Will you be open to searching out colleges in the different divisions or will you take your chances and limit yourself to only one division and a handful of schools?

Remember that the more college coaches you reach out to, the greater your chances of finding a team.

Through this graphic you will find information on the number of tennis programs offered at each level and the regions of where the institutions are located. In seeing the numbers, this will help you get a better understanding of the amount of work that you will have to put into your recruitment in order to reach the greatest number of programs.

Staying organized and informed about your recruitment, will make the process much easier on you because you will be educated and aware of what you need to get recruited and have the tools to make the most out of your recruitment.

If you have questions about tennis recruitment, we are here to help you along the way. Need help on getting started or staying in contact with college coaches? Leave us a comment with your questions below or connect with us on Facebook or Google+ where we will be able to answer your questions quickly.

Be sure to keep accurate statistics throughout your high school career. Softball coaches will want to know your batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, hits, doubles, triples, home runs, RBIs, runs, and stolen bases. Softball pitchers should include ERA, innings, record, WHIP, strikeouts, and opponents’ batting average. Also, don’t combined statistics from the different leagues you compete in, keep the stats separate from your travel teams and high school teams.

Start researching softball programs to assess specific needs. You can learn a lot by going to the team’s website and looking at graduating classes and incoming recruiting classes. If you are a shortstop, look for schools that are graduating middle infielders and have yet to replace them with their current recruiting classes. If you contact schools that have multiple underclassmen or signees that play your position, it is less likely you will be offered a scholarship from them. Find the schools that are loaded with seniors at your position and have yet to sign recruits to replace them.

Personalize each resume you send by using the information you gathered while researching college programs. Highlight the skills you know will directly contribute to a particular coach’s team. For example, if a coach just lost a significant amount of home run and RBI production, make sure in your introduction to highlight your home run and RBI totals, as well as your slugging percentage.

Softball coaches want to know what travel and club teams you are playing for outside of your high school team. Describe your highlights and achievements from your travel career. If you are playing in any upcoming softball tournaments, be sure to let coaches know. If you have your future playing schedule, organize it in a table and include it in your resume. Give coaches the dates, locations and times of your future games.

How else can you use your resume to generate interest from coaches? Compile a highlight video of your 20-25 best softball plays from your game film. You can generate interest from coaches by uploading your softball highlight reel to a website such as YouTube, and including that link in an email.

Do you have questions about writing a resume for softball? Leave your questions in the comments below or find us on Facebook or Google+.

Coach Matt Thurmond has been the head golf coach at the University of Washington since 2001 and has led the Huskey’s to 8 NCAA Championships in the last 11 years and they were only one stroke from making it last year. While one might not think of the Pacific Northwest as a hotspot for golf, coach Thompson and his program consistently pulls some of the top junior golf talent in the country up north.

In my opinion, one of the Huskey’s secret weapons is the very public and excellent blog maintained by the team and the personal blog run by coach Thurmond. Before Facebook and Twitter, there was blogging, and there is no single better way to let people get to know you onlinethen by blogging.

The golf team’s blog oozes with personality and any potential recruit who spends time reading the articles will get a sense right away if UW would be the right fit for them. These aren’t your stale updates about how the team finished in their tournaments or how former players are doing on tour. These are vibrate fun posts with a personality that would make any fun loving junior golfer immediately want to play for the Husky’s. It’s not the only college team blog out there, but surely one of the best.

Coach Thurmond also runs a personal blog where as he says “ask me anything.” He gives timely and straight forward answers to recruits, parents and interested college golf fans alike. If you are a recruit interested in UW this is great, you get your questioned answered by the coach. For coach Thurmond, he gets to have his answers out there for other recruits who might be too shy to ask on their own.

Over all, this is one of the best uses of social media and blogging I’ve seen by a college program. Of course blogging and recruiting is not the only part to running a successful NCAA DI golf team but letting recruits know what to expect when coming to UW most certainly helps with getting new recruits comfortable right away. Great job UW men’s golf team and Coach Thurmond and good luck this spring!

Are you connecting with the programs you are interested in on social media? Have you added the teams on Facebook or Google+? Remember you can ask your questions in the comments below or join our Facebook or Google+ page.

Here are five tips to creating a great soccer resume.

1) Seeing a player in person is a critical component to any college coaches evaluation of a student athlete. You must have a complete list of your game schedule. However, this isn’t going to get coaches to just start showing up to your games, many coaches like to see video of a player before they commit to making a visit to see them play in person. Make sure your coaches and/or your parents are taking film of your games. Put together a highlight film from your best soccer plays. Upload it to a video hosting site such as YouTube and put the link in your resume. Also, be prepared with full game footage as some coaches my ask for one after they have viewed your highlight film.

2) It is important to accurately show your physical statistics. Tell coaches your height and weight. List your 40 yard dash times, both with and without the ball. Coaches may also want to know your one-mile time, vertical jump, and broad jump.

3) Depending on which position you play, you should include relevant statistics. Offensive players should include games and minutes played, goals, goals per game, assists, shots, and total points. Goalies can show stats for games started, record, goals against, goals against average, shots on goal, saves, save percentage, and shutouts. One thing that is very important is to try and keep separate statistics for the different leagues you are playing in. Don’t group your stats from your high school team in with your stats from your travel team.

4) Another critical component in soccer recruiting is summer camps. If you are serious about playing college soccer you will need to go to camps. Making contact with coaches before you attend camps is crucial, because coaches scout athletes they are already familiar with at camps. Coaches usually do not discover new talent at soccer camps.

5) Highlight your strengths and skills in the cover letter or introduction to your resume. The introduction is your initial chance to sell yourself to a coach and explain why you would be a good fit for his or her program. Tell them about your playing history and experience, and also about future events. Market yourself in a way that encourages coaches to want to evaluate you as a student-athlete.

Do you have any questions about how to write your soccer resuiting resume? Leave your questions in the comments below or connect with is on Facebook or Google+.

1) If you are going to attend baseball camps (and you should) make sure coaches have your camp schedule. Baseball scouts/coaches frequently share information with each other and if they can’t get to a camp you are going to, they may be able to send someone, or talk to a colleague who will be in attendance. Coaches don’t discover baseball players at camps or combines- they evaluate ones they already know about.

2) The same goes for your travel or high school schedule. They may want to come see your games or talk to coaches they know who may be going- just like at camps. Baseball coaches want to see you play live and playing travel ball gives them a great opportunity to do so.

3) Baseball is a game of numbers. Statistics play a huge part in any good resume. Include measurable statistics like home to first-base, second-base to home, and 60 yard dash times, broad jump distance, and max bench-press and squat weights. Include your position statistics as well. Pitching resumes should contain ERA, innings, record, WHIP, strikeouts, opponents’ batting average, and saves (if you are a closer). The most important stats for hitters to display are batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, hits, doubles, triples, home runs, RBIs, runs, and stolen bases. Organize your stats in a table to make it visually appealing to a coach.

*Half a tip: For all of your statistics make sure and include the league in which you were competing and don’t combine two different leagues. For example, don’t combine your high school and travel ball stats, coaches want to know how you did against the different levels of competition.

4) You should discuss your playing history in the introductory cover letter. Take some time to describe your experiences with baseball, and why you are a scholarship prospect. The trick is to try and do this in 2-3 sentences, keep it short and easy to read. The cover letter allows you to set yourself apart from other athletes and distinguishe yourself as a scholarship athlete.

Are you having trouble knowing where to start with baseball recruiting? Leave your questions in the comments below or connect with us on Google+ or Facebook.

Back in early January Shaq Thompson one of the nation’s top recruits received a lot of backlash when he indicated he might be interested in playing for USC really late in the recruiting process. Fans from Shaq’s other schools of interest (Alabama, ASU, Auburn and others) began blowing up his twitter until he retracted his interest with the following statement “I was feeling SC but I’m not liking SC any more. People aren’t going to take me seriously so why go there?…”.

The other side of a reaction is what happened when Ohio recruit 6’5” 300lb OL Kyle Kalis de-committed from Ohio and committed to rival Michigan. He received immediate backlash (go here to see what people were saying) on twitter again and choose to respond differently then Shaq. He challenged his detractors “to come and meet me at my house”. Thankfully no one showed up and Kyle has maintained his commitment to Michigan.

The take home for recruits is to really consider how public you want to make your recruiting decisions. As you should do with all big decisions you want to have a close knit group of people whose opinions you highly trust to help you and that is it. Broadcasting out your decisions is only going to invite more problems in an already difficult decision.

Are you having trouble getting the most out of the recruiting process? If you have questions leave them in the comments below or find us on Facebook or Google+.

In the How to Write an Introduction article I discussed the need to talk about your academic achievements in the introduction of your resume. Coaches are not only interested in what you can do for them athletically; they want to know what kind of student you are. Having good grades and hitting the books hard shows a coach that you are a hard worker. Most athletes love to play their sport, fewer enjoy studying. It’s one thing to put in the extra hours in the gym; it’s another to do it in the library. Putting in the time to study will not only help you with admissions- it will show coaches you are mature enough to handle the rigorous academic and athletic workload that comes with being a collegiate-student athlete.

On your resume you will want to include a section under your cover letter with academic-specific information. You will need: your high school name and phone number, cumulative GPA, desired major (if you have one) and SAT and/or ACT score. If you have already started the NCAA Eligibility Center registration process this is a good place for you to put your Eligibility Center number. It’s also a good idea to list any honors or AP classes you have taken.

By clearly summarizing your academic information in your resume, it allows coaches to easily figure out if you are a good academic fit for their program. There is a lot more that goes into the decision, but by clearly stating this information in your initial contact with coaches they can begin evaluating your academic profile.

Do you have questions about your academic eligibility? Are you having toruble contacting coaches? Leave yor questions in the comments below or connect with us on Facebook or Google+.

It’s important to first know this isn’t the first University to be monitoring athlete’s social media accounts. Mississippi State has been monitoring athletes on Facebook and Twitter for over three years and there are 100+ universities currently monitoring social media in one way or another.

Despite what athletes think this is not a process where people read over all of your pictures, posts and know everything that you are doing. According to Udiligence one of the top monitoring programs for universities they work off of a list of “red flag” keywords that when your account has a post including one of these keywords they are alerted and can choose to take action from there or not. In addition these programs monitor the general social sphere for words of interest. For example, if a post includes the words “ACC Basketball Players” a school could be alerted to check that post encase it includes anything they might be responsible for. At the end of the day, if you don’t do anything that might get you or the University in trouble then you will never know you are being monitored.

Universities did not wake up one day and decide they wanted to monitor athlete’s social media accounts. The NCAA mandates that Universities monitor their athlete’s social media; never was this made more famous than when the NCAA penalized UNC for “Failure to monitor social media.” As a student athlete you have to understand Universities are liable for what their athletes do online.

It might be an uncomfortable realty but the facts are thousands of companies have privilege to your “private” behavior on facebook or any other social media account. As a company we are allowed to send adds to you based on the information you give to Facebook (if you don’t believe me, change your relationship status to married and look at the ads that appear on your facebook page).

My advice for current and future student athletes is, get used to it. Until the rules are changed by the NCAA your Universities and their millions of dollars are going to need to know what you are doing online.

Do you disagree? Have thoughts you want to share? Leave your comments below or find us on Facebook or Google+. 

Start off with your graduating class or for international students your preferred year of enrollment. The best way to list your graduating class is “Class of 20xx.” You want to put your graduating class in the beginning because it will help the coach initially identify if you fit his needs. Be aware, if you leadoff an email subject with numbers it makes your email more likely to get caught in a coach’s spam mail folder; never write your email as “20xx Graduate.”. Leading off with words is always better than starting with numbers.

Next, carefully determine what your best attribute is. Consider the research you did when writing your introduction. If you are applying to a school that has rigorous academic standards, or if you are a better student than athlete, you may want to say something like: Class of 20XX (your position or sport) (height and weight) with a (your GPA) and (your SAT). Coaches look for good academics as much, if not more than athletic ability. If you are a better athlete than student, put your best athletic skills or information in the subject. For example, if you are a baseball player you can say: Class of 20XX Third Baseman 6’1” 185lbs w/ .400 BA / 75 RBIs. Combining both academics and athletics works as well, just make sure you can still keep it short.

If you are struggling to concisely summarize your best attributes, you should keep your email subject as simple as possible. Sometimes just saying you have online video may get your email opened. Say something like: Class of 20XX (position or sport and height/weight) w/ Online Video. If you don’t already have a highlight tape online, you should create one and upload it to a video hosting site such as YouTube.

Don’t be hesitant to try different titles. Not all titles will work with all coaches. Try to tailor your titles to each coach as much as possible. If you don’t get a response from a coach, try a different subject and email them again. Keep track of which email subjects get responses and which ones don’t, because it will help you in the future if you decide to reach out to more schools.

If you are really having trouble with creating an email title ask us for help in the comments below or on Facebook or Google+.