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What Parents Should Know About Sports Recruiting · UNCOACHED

• 0:13
  Brad: Welcome to UNCOACHED. This is a podcast for volunteer coaches and parents figuring it out as we go. Each episode, we keep things simple. Five questions to talk about practical insights that you can actually use with your youth athletes. My guest today is David Hitz.
• 0:28
  He's a mental performance coach for athletes and one of the people responsible for athlete narrative, which I can personally say is one of the best youth athlete recruiting resources that I've ever seen. So, David, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being on. If you give me a quick background, we'll start there.
• 0:44
  David: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Bret. My background is pretty simple. I have an education in people, intercultural communication, conflict resolution, and neuroscience. And all of these things together kind of brought me to one, helping people become better leaders, be able to try and find balance in your life, right, live more intentionally.
• 1:08
  And a lot of that kind of came through some life experience. I lost my my brother several years ago, and it kind of catapulted my desire to treat myself better, right, and to learn how to do that. And that's where neuroscience has been huge for me. And so it was that background that kinda led me to, one, working with athletes on the mental performance side, and two, working with athlete narrative and joining that team couple years ago.
• 1:35
  Brad: That's awesome. That's a heck of a background. Heck of a resume. So you you talk you know, I I hear this a lot in youth sports and just sports in general, but mental performance coach, and you talk about your neuroscience background and some of this really tremendous education that you have that help you support youth youth athletes or any athletes with this type of mental performance. But what does mental performance coach mean?
• 2:00
  David: For me, using neuroscience as a foundation to live more intentionally. An understanding of the brain helps us to see that it's not just the brain that's in involved here, and it's not just the body, and it's not just, you know, our what I call. It's really looking at all of these different pieces that make us a whole and how do we best utilize those to move forward on our best foot.
• 2:25
  Brad: I think that's that's fantastic. And I'll tell you what, as a coach, you know, in this environment with youth and working on, you know, a variety of different sports, we get so focused on the physical aspect of abilities on the field, on the rink, on the court, that I think a lot of time the mental side goes unnoticed. Right? I I feel like we're not doing enough or at least maybe I'll speak for myself, not doing enough to support that mental side. So in your opinion, what's one of the biggest issues you maybe have seen with the mental side of things?
• 2:58
  And let's talk about youth sports in general. What are some things that you've seen? Any trends or, you know, thoughts that you might have?
• 3:04
  David: Yeah. There's there's a couple that kinda come to mind. The first is the idea of results being the indicator. Right? Results are the end all be all.
• 3:15
  If we don't win, we'll suck. That's the that's the narrative that comes through. And so the coaches focus so much on that result that the kids have nothing else that they can look at as a bench. Is the benchmark. And and unfortunately, the more that that is ingrained in them on an early day, the more that carries through with them into those later years.
• 3:43
  And and it's a bit harder to unwind when it comes to the time that Lee, he worked in some of my team. Right? And so that's one of the the things that I see most prominent is that results are, you know, the bench one. The other is the idea that failure is bad. Right?
• 4:02
  And and obviously, those are directly tied, but we don't focus enough on how do you recover from the failure. We don't do enough to say failure is actually part of the process in how you learn how to be successful. Like, you have to make mistakes in order to learn drum bells. Otherwise, then I don't learn anything.
• 4:21
  Brad: It's one of the best resources I think a coach or a teacher has is when the kid is failing on their own because there's no quicker way that they're gonna realize what worked and what didn't work. So I I love your approach there. And I also like you know, when you talk about wins being that the thing that is evaluating success or failure, I completely agree. One thing that I try to do, and I'd love your perspective with with the kids, is getting them focused on smaller things where they're finding more wins along the way. Meaning, if playing a soccer game and you're a defenseman on my team, let's focus on, you know, stealing the ball one or two times from the other team.
• 4:59
  Or if you're a forward on my team, how many shots are we getting? But it's kind of creating a a mini game within the game where we're finding wins along the way, and I'd love your perspective on that approach.
• 5:10
  David: It's a good approach. Often, the way that I put this with people, and I've and I've taken this from different people along the way, you can either look for all the ways that life is happening for you, or you can look for all the ways that life is happening to you. The latter gives you a victim mentality. Like, when you are looking for all the ways that life is working for you and for your benefit, you're able to see those small victories along the way. And so it's on those victories that you're able to build those foundational skills that athletes need directly translate to their physical game.
• 5:42
  Right? Your example of stealing a ball, soccer with my sport growing up. And for all those haters out there, it's the world's favorite sport. So too bad, which which is like my home. Like, I go I go home, and I'm I'm the one that likes soccer.
• 5:55
  Everybody else is like, ugh. Whatever. And and so I'm hoping that my youngest right now, who's a little over a year, maybe she decides to to play soccer. That'll be great. But regardless, you looked at that drill of, hey, focus on stealing the ball once.
• 6:11
  Focus on being consistent with now stealing the ball. Once that is built in, now it's okay. So how do you what do you eat next? Right? Look at the way I put this is what is the next best move for me to make?
• 6:22
  And so once you steal that ball, what's the next move? You gotta get rid of it. Right? You gotta pass it. You gotta clear it.
• 6:28
  You gotta whatever. And that would I played defense on that. Now they have an official position. It's called the wingback. That's what I played.
• 6:36
  He backed him away. He played. Can buy, dude. Twenty plus years ago, it was he just played up. He were he played defense and he played up.
• 6:43
  Does it? Right? Tinto, the sport has evolved to play official names for some of these roles. But it's building piece by piece on those wings, which is gonna open the door for them to accept that one. Right?
• 6:56
  And it helps them to learn intuitively what are the things that I'm capable of. You know, what are the ways that I can continue to grow now that I've done this? Right? Celebrate the win and keep moving forward and building on that.
• 7:10
  Brad: Yeah. A 100%. And, you know, you're you're you mentioned something there about, you know, focus on that win, but what you what I like that you said is that you also there's a progression to that win. Right? Like, you steal the ball.
• 7:22
  What's the next decision? And so, you know, maybe you start at a foundational level of one action as your win, but then you progress that and you actually help that player think about longer term or, you know, longer term opportunities with that win and turning it into to something a little bit more. And to your to your topic of of positions, I looked at my team when I first started this this club soccer team for my son, and I was putting people into positions. And I I grew up playing soccer too, and I was always a sweeper or a stopper. And those two positions don't exist anymore.
• 7:52
  Like you said, right, you're you're a center back, you're a wingback, what have you. I looked at them and I said, okay. You're gonna be sweeper. He'll be stopper, and they're like, what are you talking about? This doesn't exist anymore.
• 8:01
  David: Like, what is that? Like, what number do you want me to play at? You're like, we never use numbers that. No. I had to Let me pull out Google.
• 8:10
  Brad: I had to learn the numbers. I felt like, man, maybe I shouldn't be coaching this team because I I don't know the numbers of numbers of the positions that I should be telling you kids to be in. So But maybe that's better.
• 8:20
  David: Right. Like, for example, if you are too focused on those details, then you may be missing the pieces of the the players are bringing in the table. Right? If you're pigeonholing on a specific role, that kid, and you don't allow yourself to see the other things that they bring to the table, right, where else you could play them if you need to. And so I'm I mean, I think it's good to learn those technical skills and that knowledge, but at the same time, you either have what it takes to influence kids or you don't.
• 8:54
  Brad: Yeah. I agree. I like I like focusing on connection before correction. That's something I've a mantra I've kinda taken on
• 9:01
  David: my side. I like that.
• 9:02
  Brad: Making sure you connect with that player first before you're trying to correct something, knowing them a little bit more personally before you're trying to give them too much instruction to and change their game. So I know you're
• 9:12
  David: Yeah. Passionate
• 9:13
  Brad: Thank you. So I know you're passionate about helping athletes get to the next level. You're building on, you know, this awesome resume that you have in your background. But maybe let's talk a little bit about this this product, you know, this project that you started and you you've been working on for a number of years now called athlete narrative, which is a fantastic resources for parents, athletes, and coaches when it comes to helping youth athletes find the next level. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that journey and and what that means to you.
• 9:42
  David: Yeah. So I was hired, like, number two probably with AtherNetNarrive. And so I think because I was, you know, that one of those first hires that was I'm not technically a cofounder, but I've been along the whole journey for the the entire ride, basically. Right? Yeah.
• 9:58
  All but two weeks. And when I first came on and when we first started Athleanero, it was will help kids understand the world of NIO, to help them position themselves better with social media and all these other things. And and that's fine and dandy. But what we saw is both over and over again, we had that question of, okay. This is great, but how does this help me get recruited?
• 10:22
  And and we didn't have a solid answer other than just build your personal brand. And I know that you know marketing. That helps. It's good. It's great.
• 10:33
  But it still doesn't solve the problem. And so about a year into acting narrative, so this would have been about a year and a half ago when we started talking about how we could actually solve that problem because it kept coming up. And and as dads, we'd be like, gosh. We wanna help these kids. And so that timing actually went right hand in hand with one of our cofounders going through the recruiting process with his son.
• 10:58
  And he was a high level soccer player. He's super fast. And so he's talented. Right? There should be no conversation with coaches.
• 11:07
  He's fully almost junior here, and he starts those those sentences of, like, I guess, I'm not sure. I don't know. Okay. And his dad's like, look, kid. I don't think, you know, know, go pro or play e one just yet, but he's good.
• 11:23
  Right? He I think he probably turned to next level. Goaches had told him that. And and then they also were like, hey. Look.
• 11:29
  Parents, if you wanna help, you just gotta do a bunch of yell, though. And and so we we kinda looked at all the options out there, and Andrew started going down that road of what kind of people might get. And click Google search, brought up a couple options without saying too many of our competitors, NCSA, Sports Recruiting, things like that. Andrew paid for them, tried them, and they weren't working. And and so he came on just hunting his head against the wall.
• 11:58
  And so that's what we really looked a little bit when we stripped down our app to the frame, built it back up, and specifically made it where it is now a tool that helps you to get the other coaches in that recruiting process. Because at the end of the day, it is a it's a numbers game. Right? You have to find the right fit, but if you don't send out enough emails, and if those emails don't have information about you as a person or an athlete, if those emails don't include a highlight appeal. Right?
• 12:25
  And somewhere that they can check out more, either you're gonna miss them more, and you're not gonna be able to make that progress, and we'll play at the next level. And side with that, obviously, is you beat yourself up for as long as you choose to of, I guess, I wasn't good enough. Right? You you become uncle Rico, Napoleon Dynamite. Right?
• 12:45
  It's just that forever story of if coach would have put me in. Right? And so that's what we did is ours. Our app specifically helps you to gain for the coaches. They have a data goals for athletes to be able to reach coaches at all division levels.
• 12:59
  And so all of the major sports for college all over the country, you select by the division, you select state, and then you reach out to coaches. And once your foundation is built, your profile, we call it a radar page. It's like and that takes five to ten minutes tops. Right? If you've got all of these things ready, you can use five minutes and you can go.
• 13:19
  But then it's, like, twenty, thirty seconds per coach. These crank emails out.
• 13:24
  Brad: And that's like you said, that's that's half the battle is and why I love athlete narrative is because it centralizes all of your information in one place, and then it assists you with that email creation and then dissemination of that email. It helps you identify all of the universities that you might be interested in all out of that one, you know, place. And I I think it's great too and something that I don't know that you touched on was that parents are part of this process too. Right? Because every parent wants to help track what's going on without probably overstepping too much.
• 13:55
  And what's what's fantastic is the athlete owns this process and they should, but the parents can be involved and they can track things along the way to help the the youth athlete just stay a little bit organized and help, you know, I think maybe quiet some of their nerves as a parent too to try and track what's happening. Yeah. That's some things that you've seen on your side.
• 14:14
  David: Yeah. So that is a good point. Within the emails that we send, there is tracking that's embedded for hyperlinks and things like that. And so we're able to see, one, who you're sending those emails to, and then two, if they interact with those emails. And so what's really cool about that is within the recruiter of of our app, you can send your parents or your coach or mentor or whoever that person is port of all of your activity.
• 14:40
  Brad: It's very cool. Those reports are are pretty key, I would I would imagine, at the back end for for both the parent and the coach. What's now through this process, and and I'm sure you've learned so much more about this recruiting process than your average your average person that's, you know, investigating what the recruiting process is like. Is there something that surprises you that people maybe don't know? Maybe some kind of unique tip that you could give folks or an insight that you found that's unique to the recruiting process that maybe isn't talked about broadly?
• 15:11
  I
• 15:13
  David: think one of the misconceptions is that that you I mean, one is the whole idea of d one or bust. This needs to go out the window. In the landscape of today, unless you are a five star recruiter, you probably aren't gonna go d one. And even if you do, there's not a lot of places I'm gonna play a freshman. Right?
• 15:35
  So in that journey of finding the right fit, open up that that vision of where you could play because it's about finding the right fit. And the best way to find the right fit is to get the most emails out there. And so one of the things that, I guess, surprised me was, you know, when I think or I guess, originally, when I thought of a lot of emails, I thought ten, eighty, 20. Right? I was like, yeah.
• 15:59
  Just it's a computer. Chunking email. Right? When I was applying to grad school, I I applied to, like, 10 schools. And so kind of a similar concept.
• 16:08
  You apply to a bunch and you see where you get accepted. And and so that idea of a lot of emails being, like, 20 is is a joke. Right? On average Yeah. It's about 37 emails to get a response is what we're seeing.
• 16:25
  And and so you have to have a system that supports that. If you wanna have 10 or 20 responses again, this is average, but you could blow it out of the water or you could, you know, all your find yourself on the other side of that. You're gonna have to, you know, 10x those efforts. Yeah. And so if if if you want ten, three hundred and seventy emails.
• 16:48
  Right. On average. And so that's one thing that people don't realize. And the amount of time now that goes into that, if you're doing it on your own, just goes through the roof. Like, if you're the parent trying to help your kid and you're trying to personalize these emails for the school or the coach and tailor those, like, holy cow.
• 17:06
  That's a lot of time. And the time to find the coaching email and all those things. And so those were literally the problems that we ran up to as parents and said, have to solve this. And but that was one of the things that surprised me the most was the amount of emails actually have to get out there before you start getting those responses and consistent responses.
• 17:24
  Brad: I think that's a really good insight. Because if I'm sitting here as a parent and I'm trying to help my youth athlete get recruited, you know, and I hear you saying, hey. Let's send out 500 emails. In my mind, initially, I was like, you know, well, I surely I'm gonna hear back from a a good chunk of these schools, and do I have the ability to sift through, you know, a 100 different schools if they get back to me? But when I hear you saying, it makes complete sense, is the odds of that actually happening are pretty slim.
• 17:50
  Right? You're like, you're gonna hear back from Yeah. Percent, and that's a good problem to have. Like, let's let's get as many people to respond as possibly can for our youth athlete, and then let's handle that challenge later because that's a great problem to have.
• 18:01
  David: Right. Yeah. And if you're an expert, you will have a like, if you're putting in the word, you know, and you're doing the right things and you are really doing a good job of trying to find the right goal, you probably will have more responses. And you may get quicker responses. Right?
• 18:14
  Depending on the timing of that with the in season, out of season, things like that. I don't love throwing this out there, but I do at the same time is we've had kids fear overnight from a vote. Literally, you know and this was Christmas time. It was just after football season. It's a football player, and one of the athletes on the app literally stops Fortnite from the middle of their game and starts questioning him.
• 18:39
  How many emails have you sent? Like, you're complaining that you haven't heard anything, that you're never gonna play and blah blah blah, but what have you done about it? Paul was like, what's that? Like, 30 emails, dude? And he's like, he literally was like, how many times do I have to freaking tell you about this?
• 18:54
  Yeah. And and so he literally wouldn't keep playing the game till his friend signed up. So his friend signs up, starts reaching out. He I think he made up seven ten emails, but he's like so took twenty minutes. Like, built his profile, get it all dialed by, know, and he'll send email.
• 19:08
  Yeah. And the next morning, he get a DM. So he goes, hey. Is this real? Yeah.
• 19:13
  That's a coach responding game. Jump on the phone with him. He's asking if he can give him a call.
• 19:18
  Brad: Oh, that's fantastic. I love that. So pretend you're a parent that knows nothing about how to get their athlete found. What's what's a typical process? I know we talked about the number of emails to send, but, like, what's your recommended process for somebody that's just like, don't know where to begin.
• 19:35
  I don't know where to start. I'm stressed, but I want my kid to go on to the next level.
• 19:39
  David: Yeah. I I should probably preface this with you can do every basically, everything that we do on your own g one. It's just gonna take a lot of time. Right? Yeah.
• 19:49
  One of the things, though, that that goes with that is because you can do it on your own, we encourage everybody to have 10 of some key elements. And so having a profile of some sort is really helpful, even if that's like a Huddl account, a place where you can showcase yourself well. And so that's one, is that profile. Having a Google highlight video is really important. And what we found is depending on the sport, you wanna have the highlight video that showcases yourself, but also if you have full game bridge, depending on, again, that sport, some of the coaches are gonna say this is fantastic.
• 20:27
  Now let me just watch the whole game. I wanna see what you move or how you move when you when I'm not just getting the highlights. Right? And so having video footage of yourself, both the highlights and if you have any sort of long game typical form, that's better. And then it's putting in those reps of the emails.
• 20:45
  And so finding the contacts and getting yourself out there. So those those things of profile, highlight video, and email as many as you can are really the peak. Like, that's where to go. That's where to start. And and, again, we we just made it really easy for people to do this, but you can do it on your own as well.
• 21:04
  Brad: Yeah. I I can't imagine. I'm thinking here right now what I would do, you know, with a with a ninth grader, with an eighth grader, and how I would even begin this with access to the contact information, even just the list of universities. Right? You've I think you probably feel like you know the universities, but it's probably the big ones that pop into mind.
• 21:23
  The d two, the d three schools that are offer also offering things. I couldn't name, you know, probably 15 of them.
• 21:30
  David: No. Okay. And then that's probably the gospel of our country. Right? Like, we talk to people.
• 21:35
  They're like, oh, no. I hopefully, If you know so much, then can you just rattle off 10 junior colleges within five states?
• 21:44
  Brad: Yeah. No. I can't.
• 21:46
  David: No? I couldn't. I mean, I I could probably get close to that only because of using my own app and and then understanding all that. Right? And seeing all of those.
• 21:55
  But, yeah, right, I knew of one Canadian college building up. Yeah. And it's probably Was it?
• 22:02
  Brad: Close to you. Right? Where it's Yeah. Fairly competitive with the people in your area that are trying to go there and things like that. So expand the opportunity and and give yourself the best shot possible.
• 22:12
  David: Exactly.
• 22:13
  Brad: I wanna jump back a little bit to to the mental side and and your mental professional side. If you could leave every coach or every parent that's listening kind of a golden tip for athletes regarding the mental side
• 22:26
  David: of things, what would that golden tip be? That's a good question. I would probably go back to I'm gonna make a decision to plans actually. So you'll have to forgive me. Sorry, not sorry.
• 22:40
  But the first is to take enough time and attention to build space where you can really reflect and find opportunity within yourself, within your sport, whatever that is. Create the space where you can look within to be able to then move forward. And so then that goes into the second, which is really having more or less ever present that question of what is the next best move that we can make? Because it's about the recovery. Right?
• 23:12
  And you're going to make mistakes. We are all human. We're imperfect. That's how God designed us to be. That's period.
• 23:18
  That's it. We have to learn, and that's the way to learn. Agree. And so as you stumble and make those mistakes, you move on quickly. Right.
• 23:27
  Reset and move forward. And so having that space that allows you to reset and then the ability to take that next move, I think that's what's gonna help really drive things forward for you.
• 23:38
  Brad: Yep. David, thanks so much for being here. Love tapping into your expertise both on the side of mental performance and on the side of recruiting. I'd love to have you back on sometime because I think we just barely touched the surface of some information that I think you would be able to share to our audience and help them out. So thanks for being here today, David.
• 23:57
  David: No, man. Thanks for having me. I I love to be here.
• 23:59
  Brad: If this episode helped you out, share it with another coach or parent who's figuring things out too. You can find UNCOACHED and this episode wherever you listen to podcasts. You can watch the episode on YouTube, and make sure to follow the coaching dad on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook. We'll see you next time on UNCOACHED.