What is junior day for football recruiting

And, unless you are in the 99.99% of talented high school football players, you should opt to not expect a coach to say I love you with a college football offer until after the first few dates, at least.

Knowing what these key first dates are and how to prepare for them won’t guarantee that a college coach will say yes to you, but it will certainly make it more likely than if you meandered through your recruiting clueless of their existence. Just like in dating where there are unwritten no-no’s and well-known but unspoken customs, the same is true for college football recruiting.

But, probably the most important of these first dates is what is called a Junior Day. I’m going to tell you what they are and how you can make it more likely a coach will invite you to one.

Freshmen & Sophomore Year

You should have three immediate goals as underclassmen in the recruiting gambit: have fun, get great grades and get as good as possible.

Most college will not evaluate your tape unless it is of you on varsity, and even in high school it is really difficult for an underclassmen to see time on the varsity field unless you are a blue flame talent.

Too quickly, too fast young players with well-meaning parents and coaches dive too deeply into trying to get Nick Saban to evaluate their son as just freshmen. And, of course, while there occasionally are freshmen who receive non committable verbal offers from major FBS programs, odds are that is not going to be you.

When you get too serious too fast about a sport, it is easy to suck the fun out of the experience. This isn’t unlike that cringey freshmen couple who just started dating and are all over each other during lunch time (Not sure how you can profess your undying love for someone you just met at age 14, but ask Romeo and Juliet, but I digress…) You can want to be so great so badly that you struggle to even be good. Or, even worse, you burn out and leave your sport.

Academically, freshmen and sophomore year just are not going to get any easier for you. If you are sporting a 2.0 GPA you have no business attending any 7 on 7 camp or college camps. No coach ever said that they were upset a player’s grades were too high. Your immediate next steps should be to:

Email/call your teachers in the classes you are struggling in to identify what needs to change to turn your grade around. YOU are the person who needs to make these calls not you parents.

Show up to extra help, tutoring and ask for redo’s on assignments knowing you won’t get back full credit. An 80% in the grade book beats a 65%, no?

Set up a brief 2 minute check in every week with your teachers to go over any questions you have. Like coaches, I’ve never heard a teacher complain that they had a student who was too organized.

Athletically, 80% of your real work is going to occur in the weight room during this time. Your freshmen and sophomore years are your biggest growth years in terms of strength and size. And, while you can always decide to starting lifting seriously, you can’t decide to get these critical development years back. In middle school, you may have been able to get by on talent alone, but in high school everyone is bigger and faster, and in college, everyone is even bigger and even faster. You become a college football player while you are still in high school.

The takeaway:

• Most underclassmen falsely believe they need to get on college coaches’ radar as freshmen or sophomore which is not true. Unless you have varsity tape, it’s not even worth thinking about reaching out to college coaches. College coaches cannot directly speak with you until 9/1 of your junior year.

• Instead of worrying about college football, worry instead about (1) having fun, (2) getting great grades and (3) getting as good as possible.

Junior Days

Junior Days are pseudo athletic open houses for football program to communicate their interest in starting the recruiting process with a player. It doesn’t mean that a school is going to ultimately end up inviting you onto their team, but it means they will take a serious look at you.

How do you get invited to a junior day? The process is simple, but not easy and is sometimes downright mundane.

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have varsity tape to put into your highlight reel. If you don’t have varsity tape, it’s unlikely any college coach at any level is going to look your way. So, win your starting spot on your high school team, be the best teammate possible and get the best grades possible are all excellent starting points.

The next step would be to fill out each team’s recruiting questionnaire. This is boring, and most teams have very similar recruiting questionnaires which can make them repetitive (although it would make way more sense for every college football team everywhere to have one single Common Recruiting App, but that would make too much sense)

Once your information is in this recruiting questionnaire, your information gets sent to your area recruiter and position coach. Sometimes these coaches are the same person, but usually they are not. But, just because your information was sent somewhere, doesn’t mean that it actually goes somewhere.

Your next job is to email directly your area and position recruiters, and then follow up by finding and, when possible DM’ing them on Twitter.

At this point, you’ve covered all your bases with making it as most likely as possible that a coach is going to look your way.

If you are looking to be an FBS type of recruit the road is somewhat different. These teams do not have public facing recruiting questionnaires, so your best bet is to try to find someone low on the totem poll who is combing through Twitter for potential recruits.

This is usually going to be the quality control, assistant, analyst, or graduate assistant of your desired side of the ball. Your goal is identify who these people are, friend them on Twitter and hope that their DM’s are in fact open. Usually they are. If you look long and hard enough, you will usually be able to find at least one coach on the staff of an FBS program who has open DM’s.

The Takeaways:

• The formula for trying to get invited to a Junior day for D3-FCS programs is mundane and predictable: Fill out each team’s recruiting questionnaire, email a follow up to area recruiter and DM/Follow that coach on Twitter. Repeat.

• Junior days are not do or die. If you do not attend one, it doesn’t mean you can’t play at that college, but they are very helpful in getting you on a coach’s short list to evaluate at summer camps which really count.

• Junior days do not mean you are being offered to play at that school. They mean you are going to be seriously evaluated and looked at by these schools.

In closing, Junior Days don’t make or break your college recruiting, but they can be quite helpful in getting the recruiting flywheel spinning in the right direction. All it takes is a few schools to express their interest in you for other schools to jump on board with interest. Getting interest from school number three and four is twice as easy as getting initial interest from schools one and two.

The greatest ROI of Junior Days are going to be them getting you on a college staff’s short list to evalaute during summer camps. Which I discuss at length here:

Please consider subscribing for free or sharing this article with someone you think might enjoy it. Referral is the best compliment.

Share