A parents guide to basketball recruiting - Navigating Social Media
Remember to claim your free player profile at www.prepbasketball.net
Homer Simpson once said:
And I’d also replace Alcohol with “Social Media” when it comes to HS hoops recruiting.
If this is the first article you’re reading of mine, it’s actually the second in this series about my story as a parent helping my son navigate HS basketball recruiting. You can read the first one here and it goes into detail about AAU.
Social Media…ugh
It’s kind of the worst and the best thing to happen to HS sports, so let’s go over the good and the bad and how, I think, you can use it productively in the recruiting process (and answer the question about running your players page).
Let’s start with the bad. Social Media is a cease pool of horridness. Honestly, it’s filled with a ton of mindless garbage and it’s ruining the lives of so many young athletes. The mental health decline amongst teenagers is well documented and it can be traced back to rapid advances of social media and it’s access through unregulated smart phones. Teenagers spend nearly 8 hours a day consuming content on social platforms. That’s more than a full time job! It’s created some really awful trends as well:
Highlight culture - kids have become convinced that everyone with a mixtape is being recruited or seen and so they end up playing their games to get mixtapes and highlights. My personal pet peeve is the mixtape post after a loss. Highlights might get a player seen, but the recruiting will stop if the tape overhypes the truth
Comparison trap - players are constantly watching to see how other players are being hyped up and then comparing themselves and their views and follows. The dopamine hit is real and the fall off is the same
The offer hype - players posting non committable offers or fake offers to drum up hype to get more offers is played out. The coaches all talk and when you’re posting fake offers, it’s a bad look
The addiction to the platforms is keeping kids out of the gym and on their phones and that’s a massive shame.
The good:
For all the bad to social media, I do think some good can come from using it properly. After all, social media does decentralize your presence across time and space and gives players unprecedented access to information including coach contact information.
Here are my suggestions as a parent who went through this whole thing
Limit access to social media - 16 is probably the right age to have supervised accounts for your athlete. Before that age, it’s all negative. There’s nothing good that can happen before age 16 from a recruiting stand point on social media.
IG is for friends and family, X/Twitter is for coaches - this rule isn’t tried and true but it’s pretty accurate. Most coaches I talked with have personal pages on IG but run recruiting on X. Set up a profile, find coaches with open DM’s. Pay the small fee for the blue checkmark even
Have a plan - there’s a debate on whether or not a parent should run a players social media pages. I think it really depends honestly. If you’re teenager is capable of communicating with adults in a professional way, then help them a template and let them control it. If they can’t, I think it’s OK to send DM’s with them and let them see how adults talk to each other. But they absolutely need to be involved in the process regardless of who does the typing. Our goal was to have coaches texting directly with our son as early in the process as possible so the DM template was short and sweet and included his cell for the coaches.
There’s a reason why point 3 is important I think, because it keeps the kid off the apps and communicating directly with the coach (obviously there are rules on when a coach can reach out so this assumes it’s happening within the rules). If communication is mostly happening through social media, it can become easy to get sucked into the vortex that is the dredge of these apps.
What/how to post on X?
Profile - make sure your profile has a picture and good header image showcasing who you are. The bio should have the information for any coach to reach you and include your NCAA# if possible. Canva is your friend!
Season highlights - AAU and HS team highlights both. Nothing crazy long. Keep the music instrumental. No need to offend anyone unnecessarily. Mix up the highlights. Keep FT’s and warm up clips off. Capcut is your friend!
Don’t tag everyone and their mom - I don’t think it’s helpful to tag every coach you’d ever want to talk to. If you’re in doubt, just don’t tag the coaches.
Sign up for and follow Verbal Commits - They really do a great job of promoting the paid profiles on X. Our son actually had a lot of outreach based on a few posts they did.
Offers - this is a tough one actually. If the offer comes from the head coach and it’s one your player can accept and go play at the school, then I say go for it. I heard a bunch of stuff like “Don’t post juco offers if you want to go to a 4 year” or that kind of stuff. There’s some merit to it I guess, but having a committable offer is a big deal. You should celebrate it! Our son had a few football offers as well and he posted those. Didn’t stop basketball coaches from reaching out. I think it actually helped for coaches to see he was a good athlete. But definitely don’t just try to use coaches to “Stack offers”. It’s disrespectful to the coaches and their programs. Post offers you’re able to and interested in taking.
Maybe the best quote I’ve heard about social media is this (better than Homer’s alcohol quote):
