This is a year-by-year recruiting timeline that I generally tell parents and players to follow for football, however, it can still be adapted and used for any sport.
Middle School:
- Middle school is about fun and fundamentals. The sooner a player takes their sport seriously the sooner you risk them burning out at a young age from it. Overzealous parents can easily wreck a kid’s love affair with their sport by polluting it with talk of college at a young age. But, also some players can want to be so great at their sport so badly they struggle to simply be good.
9th & 10th Grade
- This when you need to get serious about wanting to pursue your sport in college.
- Effectively, you only have three seasons of high school sports for college coaches to make 80% of their recruiting opinion of you as by the time your senior season rolls around, many teams will be wrapping up their search for your graduation class. This means the 11th-grade film is perhaps the greatest factor impacting the trajectory of your college recruiting.
- 9th and 10th grade should be about three things:
- Get on the varsity field (no coach will watch a film that is not varsity)
- Get as big and strong as you can in the weight room.
- Get command of your fundamentals in your position.
11th Grade
- Summer of 10th going into 11th grade should be used as a test run for kicking at college recruiting camps. Most coaches will not be making decisions on your grade this summer, so you can set about making contacts with coaches.
- After 9/1 your junior year college coaches can openly talk to you via Twitter/email/phone and you should be shooting off messages and following these templates in this link.
- Junior Days - after the season of your junior year, in Winter/Spring programs will run Junior Days which are open houses for recruits to communicate interest in players. These create a lot of sizzle on Twitter for recruits and generate good buzz.
- Summer Camps - This is when it really counts. Coaches will want to see how you perform in person before they offer you a spot. It is possible to do a lot of junior days but have a poor summer outing causing you to get dropped.
12th Grade
- Fall - have a great senior season, get great grades.
- Mid Season Tape - Create a mid-season highlight tape to send to college coaches that you have been in touch with over the summer updating them on your in-season progress.
- Game Day Visits - You should also inquire about taking a game day visit with your folks to see the more actively involved schools that are recruiting you.