Recruit Night- recruiting football players in the 21st century

In the 21st century, how do you recruit guys to your football program?

This becomes more important every year. Kids have a bunch of activities competing for their time and attention. Most of those activities demand much less than football. Also, coaches at other schools will aggressively (and illegally) recruit your best players to attend their school. Good grief, I even had one opposing coach basically admit to this in pregame one night!  If we THINK kids are going to automatically show up to play football in our program, for most of us, we are wrong. 

We started recruit night at Mason County HS and have continued it here at Mercer County HS. One of the driving forces for me was my belief that if I could get the parents with my assistant coaches, they would want those men coaching their son. 

We model this after how colleges will do recruiting weekends. We invite the families for a small meal of appetizers and we include 3 tickets to the basketball game that evening, which should be one of the best games of the season.

In early January, we send these postcards to prospective 8th graders that will be freshmen in the upcoming season:

front of post card

back of post card

We will also have our coaches call to follow up and invite the kids and their families. Once we get them there, here is our itinerary:

Overall, this has been an effective way to get kids introduced to our program and get them going in HS football. We host it on a Friday Night and call it their first Friday Night of HS football.

If you have ideas to recruit kids to play HS football, IN YOUR SCHOOL, please send me your ideas to coachdavidbuchanan@gmail.com.