What happens in junior football recruiting from September until May?

As I have always tried to do in the past, when users have questions or suggestions for an article that is possible to write, I try to answer those requests. Recently I had a suggestion for an article regarding what happens during the recruiting process from September 1st until May 1st.

The reason why those dates were picked is because September 1st is when colleges can start sending personal mail to junior recruits and May 1st (Actually a few days before) is the official start of the evaluation period. I will try to go over it for a few recruits but it not the same for all recruits. It depends on a lot of different factors.

If you are a major recruit, colleges will try to impress you on September 1st with scholarship offers on the door that day. But with the majority of recruits, if you are on their radar, they will send you mail about their program and what they are doing. My guess is that early on, these letters will be rather basic.

During their season, the coaches are obviously extremely busy. But if they are visiting high schools to see senior prospects, they may request that your high school coach find a way that you can bump into each other. While they are there for the senior prospect, chances are high that they wouldn’t mind giving you the eyeball test if you are on their radar.

Let me stress that a lot of coaches send out invitations to games to prospective student athletes. I will talk about this more later (How many games you can go to and the number of people that can come total) but coaches try to get invites out to as many prospects as they can. Even if you end up being a Division III player when everything is said and done, they want to make sure that they don’t miss anyone.

Going to these game day visits does not allow you much time to speak with the coaches (It depends on the school) but it gives you a chance to see the stadium, view the game day atmosphere, and get a better feel for the school. If you are close to the school in location, it may be worth the gas money (Well, if things don’t keep going up) to take the visit.

Once your high school season is over and the colleges eventually wrap up, the college coaches will be calling your high school coach to possibly learn more about you. They will also use this time to request game tape and possibly highlight videos. If there are requests, I feel that the earlier you get this done, the better overall.

Once the new year rolls around, the colleges will be working extremely hard to finish up their current Signing Day class of seniors. Some may finish earlier than others but really there is no break in recruiting. As a recruit, you should still be getting mail and now the invites for Junior Days should start coming in.

I have talked about this before (Click here for the older article) but schools vary on Junior Days. Some will try to bring in just about every player in their state who was decent and others try to find the elite prospects that they may eventually be serious about. It really just depends from school to school. If the travel expenses are not too much, I would definitely try to get to a Junior Day.

This Junior Day will give you a chance to meet the college coaches and speak to them. It is about building the relationship there so it is a very important thing to do. If you haven’t already, I would speak to them beforehand about possibly bringing them your highlight tape. If they don’t have it, don’t expect an offer to come.

During the late winter/early spring, this should be a time before the evaluation period that you at least start looking into schools that you want to camp at during the summer. You should have received some camp invites now but I would wait on signing up. Schools like Kansas State send out camp invites to any kid who put on a helmet during the fall so that they can boast numbers.

Some kids believe that they are really recruiting them and I believe otherwise. That is why it is important to write down the camps that you are considering and then see who calls during the evaluation period. This should give you a much better feel of where the recruiting process is.

There are other things that you could do like call the coaches and email with them but I won’t go into that. This is just a brief overview of what is going at times during the year.