Recruiting Must Haves: 2 - Athletic and Academic Profile

In our last post we looked at the first of the Recruiting Must Haves—an honest Assessment of a student-athletes skills and abilities. Have you completed this initial first Assessment step yet? If not, we strongly encourage you to do so before moving forward to Recruiting Must Have #2: Creating an Athletic and Academic Profile.

Now that you know what your skills and abilities are, it is time to develop a platform where you can display them for university coaches. Not that long ago high school student athletes and their families would spend hours sending out physical copies of player profiles and skills videos through the mail, not e-mail, traditional mail. Thankfully, that is no longer necessary. Now you can set up a website in a matter of minutes making your athletic and academic profiles accessible to any coach right away.

Online athletic and academic profiles:

• Enable student-athletes to introduce and demonstrate their skills and abilities to hundreds of university coaches much faster than traditional hard copies
• Are customizable and dynamic—they can be updated very easily
• Allow you to track visitors and engagement with your profile

What should I include in my online profile?

Your player profile is typically your first opportunity to make an impression with a university coach, it should include the following:

• Your contact information (this can be a contact form or email address)
• A picture of you and your physical profile (height, weight, age etc.)
• An embedded version of your skills video or link to it (more on this next week)
• Your academic information (current GPA, Honour Roll awards, Student Council etc.)
• Sport specific stats and highlights
• Your upcoming competition schedule
• The contact information of your references (current coaches)

Online player profiles can also be protected by a password if you feel uncomfortable having this information shared publicly.

Over time you will be able to add more to your athletic and academic profiles, it will be a process, but it's important to get started. Remember, your profile is typically your first impression with a university coach, it should be professional and easy to navigate.

How can I create my online profile?

There are a number of inexpensive tools available today that make creating a website very straightforward, our favourite is Squarespace. Using Squarespace, in minutes you can create a beautiful website to showcase all of your skills and abilities.

If you would rather create a profile as a PDF and email it directly to university coaches, we have outlined the steps and have provided a template to do that in our Official Workbook: The Definitive Guide to Getting Recruited.

Next we're going to take a look at the third Recruiting Must Have—your skills/highlight video.

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