Official Visits

The Recruiting process is in full swing across the country. College coaches are making school visits and home visits in order to persuade their top tier recruits to sign on the dotted line. The high school basketball players are taking official visits to figure out what school or program they will fit in the best with. These official visits can be the deciding factor between choosing University X, Y or Z.

After reading several articles over the past week about some of the top high school basketball prospects in the country (Kenny Boynton and Derrick Favors) taking official visits, I was reminded of an article that I recently read about campus visits. What does it take for a program to host a successful official visit?

Mandy Brettigen, the resident sports psychologist at Selling for Coaches, listed six important tips for a successful campus visit in an article on Dan Tudor's website. They are:

1. The Atmosphere: Are You Thriving or Surviving? In other words, when your prospect gets on to campus, are they going to see a program that is hanging on by a thread in terms of the team interpersonal relationships? Or, is it a healthy, thriving team that has great team chemistry. If the answer is anything other than "thriving", you need to begin building team relationships and doing things internally that will improve the atmosphere.

2. Get the Team's Insights. Many coaches use their team for hosting and interacting with a recruit, but then don't use the team to help assess how well the recruit will mesh with the existing team. Listening to your team in this way can help you avoid a bad mix of personalities that can damage team chemistry. Remember...your team's opinion counts when it comes to adding the right new members to the team.

3. Going on the Campus Tour. How long will the tour be? Who will host it? What's the schedule going to look like? Coach, you need to plan out a campus visit in excrutiating detail. Leave nothing to chance. Since it all comes down to a great visit, you need to do whatever you can to ensure that they have a great experience. And it all starts with a master plan that helps manage the experience your prospect has on campus.

4. Be Careful About the Class They Attend. Part of a campus visit usually includes having your prospect attend a class at your college. Here's an important tip: Make sure they go to a class that is discussion based, rather than lecture based. Why? Because discussion based classes are usually full of lively talk and opinion, which is something that they don't usually see in their high school. Most come away with a positive impression with that kind of class, instead of sitting in something that looks and feels just like high school.

5. Let Other Athletes Know You Have a Visitor! One thing that we discuss in our recruiting guides for coaches is how important it is to have your team, and the other athletes in the department, treat your prospect well. That's the number one way they determine whether they get a good "feel" about the college. Here's a suggestion: E-mail your athletes, and others in the department, that you will have a recruit on campus and if they see them with you or their host, that they should come up and say hello. Sounds simple, i know, but the schools that do it report a really great response from their on-campus visits.

6. Make Sure There's Time to Just Hang Out. When we interview student-athletes as a part of our On-Campus Workshops, they tell us that sometimes they feel really over-scheduled during trips to visit a campus. Meeting after meeting, activity after activity...sometimes recruits report that they feel exhausted by the end, and still haven't had a chance to get a "feel" for the campus they are visiting. What should you do? Focus more time on just relaxing. Let them hang out in your host's room. Let them play games, watch movies, and just be a kid. That's what they want.