Monday, May 16, 2011

The Parent's Role

As the parent of a recruit-able student athlete, your job is to be supportive and encouraging. To be recruited takes work. That work load is best completed by the athlete themselves. They need to be responsible for answering the e-mails, filling out the questionnaires, returning phone calls and providing the extra materials that the coaches desire.
Athlete Recruiting Services helps our clients receive an average of 32 campaign views per athlete. With this kind of exposure, there is a lot of added responsibility and work that the athlete is going to have to manage, while maintaining their academics and their school/club teams. While it is fun to get responses of interest from college coaches, these same coaches can be turned off by a student who takes too long to respond or forgets to respond all together. This does not mean that you, as the parent, should respond in their place, or pretend to be the athlete when responding. This will inevitably lead to future confusion and a possible betrayal of trust for the coach.
So be there for your college hopeful. Help them get their videos filmed, their ACT's scheduled, get to or from practices and games, provide private lessons, or help them research schools from the list of college responses that you receive. But, don't take the responsibility for all the work away from them. Today's youth are more incredible and capable then most people give them credit for. Be supportive and you will likely see them rise to the occasion.

No comments:

Post a Comment