Begin To Think Like A College Football Coach
Knowing up front how the coaches at the next level think and what they consider important will go a long way towards making your quest for a college football scholarship a successful one. You want to make it easy for the college football coach to consider you as a potential recruit.
Of course, you must have above average talent, but there are literally tens of thousands of athletes that have good even great talent, how do you turn your talent into the athletic scholarship you are after? Knowing ahead of time what they are looking for will enable you to mold yourself into that standout recruit that is able to catch the coach’s eye.
These are a few things that you can begin doing now and continue to do to over your high school career to make sure that you have every chance to be recruited when the time comes:
Train For Good Stats – Make yourself aware of the stats the coaches are looking for at your position, and then do everything in your power during the next few years to either meet or exceed those stats. The coach, depending on his program, receives between 5,000 and 25,000 recruiting packages each year.
From these players, he is looking for the ones that have minimum stats to play in his program. Here are the stats of the perfect Division I football player:
Quarter Back
- Height – 6’3″
- Weight – 200
- 40 Yard Dash – 4.6
- Bench – 260
- Squat – 425
Wide Receiver
- Height – 6’2″
- Weight – 185
- 40 Yard Dash – 4.5
- Bench – 235
- Squat – 315
Running Back
- Height – 6’0″
- Weight – 210
- 40 Yard Dash – 4.5
- Bench – 315
- Squat – 415
Tight End
- Height – 6.4
- Weight – 240
- 40 Yard Dash 4.7
- Bench – 300
- Squat – 400
Offensive Line
- Height – 6’4″
- Weight – 280
- 40 Yard Dash – 5.1
- Bench 320
- Squat 450
Linebacker
- Height – 6’1″
- Weight – 220
- 40 Yard Dash – 4.6
- Bench 315
- Squat – 445
Defensive Line
- Height – 6’4″
- Weight – 250
- 40 Yard Dash – 4.8
- Bench – 315
- Squat – 450
Defensive Back
- Height – 6’0″
- Weight – 185
- 40 Yard Dash – 4.5
- Bench – 260
- Squat – 385
Defensive Back (Safety)
- Height 6’2″
- Weight – 200
- 40 Yard Dash – 4.6
- Bench – 270
- Squat – 405
There are exceptions, but if you know what the coaches are looking for, you will be way ahead in your recruiting process. How do you measure up now? Copy these stats and put them where you can refer to them. They give you a goal to shoot for.
Maintain Decent A GPA – Today, academics play a huge role in whether you get recruited or not and they are yet another quick way that coaches eliminate players they are not interested in. Imagine, the coaching assistants sitting down to evaluate five to twenty-five thousand possible recruits, they absolutely must use quick methods to narrow down their pool of potential recruits, and one way is to use a minimum GPA.
Think about it from the coach’s point of view, if you won’t qualify to be admitted to his institution, why should he bother considering you for his program? Here are the preferred grades for D-I college football recruits:
- 3.0 GPA
- ACT score of 24 or higher
- SAT score of 1000 or higher
Keep Your Nose Clean – You are just beginning your career, it is really up to you to maintain decent behavior. College coaches are not looking for trouble and will typically pass over a potential recruit that is know for bad behavior.
Contribute To Your Community – Again, coaches are impressed by recruits that are known in their communities. If you are the type of person that participates in your neighborhood activities, then you may have the qualities of a leader or good team member. It may sound corny, but the idea is to be a good citizen.
The idea is to make yourself as you progress through your high school career an ideal candidate for the recruiting process. Do well in academics, be an asset to your team, meet the stats for your position, and contribute to your community.
At this point, you haven’t made any mistakes that can’t be corrected. You know now what the college coaches look for, make of yourself that person.
Ten Study Habits of Successful Students
Many bright students get to high school (or even college) without learning HOW to study. They breeze through school getting good grades and find it pretty easy. But sooner or later students run into a class or as assignment that’s not so easy. Now what do they do.
The answer is to use some of the study skills they have learned and practiced over the years. What study skills? So if you didn’t need them before you need them now. We will be reviewing several in the upcoming months. You will need them in the same way you need basic skills in football.
Below are ten study habits you should have to be successful. Work on any that you currently don’t have.
Financial Aid Facts That Can Save You Thousands
1. Some Colleges Give More Than Others
Most schools use the same financial aid formulas but there are huge differences in how much they award in grants, scholarships and other financial aid.
The older prestigious colleges and many other private universities offer higher financial aid amounts because they have large endowment funding.
Endowments come from donations and over the years can become enormous. Public colleges and universities, on the other hand, rarely have significant endowment funds.
2. Look Beyond the Amount for Tuition Published for Colleges
A year at a state college or university may cost $20,000 – $35,000 (tuition, fees, room and board, etc.). A private school may be more than $55,000. So the state school will be cheaper to attend, right? Not so fast. Private schools use their endowments to meet 90-95% of their financial aid. State colleges meet about 50-65%. You may end up paying less at the big private school.
3. Middle Class Families Can Get Generous Grants, Scholarships and other Financial Aid
Recently, colleges and universities have sought to help upper middle class families far more than in the past. But you can’t get financial aid if you don’t apply. A recent study showed over 50% of eligible families did not apply – leaving millions on the table.
4. Grades Have Little To Do with Financial Aid Awards
In the current economy, all families need help paying for college expenses. There are two types of scholarships, those based on financial need (how much money you make) and those based on merit (GPA, test scores, etc.). About 98% of the financial aid funds available are NEED based. More families qualify than in the past so make sure you apply.
5. It May Matter WHERE You Save for College
The financial aid formulas count college “savings” differently. Generally money saved in the student’s name will hurt you more than money saved in the parent’s name. Check carefully to make sure your assets give you the best chance.
6. Graduation Rates Are Not All the Same
Most people think of graduating from college in four years. That amount of time used to be pretty standard. But only 50% of students from state schools finish in four years now.
There are many reasons. Private colleges have about an 85% four-year graduation rate. Keep that in mind in thinking about how much college is going to cost.
Do You Have Wild Confidence Swings?
Most athletes that have not reached the ‘best of the best’ ranks experience the entire gauntlet of confidence possibilities. They can go all the way from being a mental marshmallow to being a confident tiger from game to game. Or we often see the evidence of lack of self-confidence exhibited from quarter to quarter within a single game.
How do the sports superstars overcome this problem so common to all athletes? How do elite level stars like Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Sydney Crosby continue to display awesome mental toughness game after game and do it seemingly with no effort?
Most great athletes, regardless of the sport they participate in, know the importance of mental toughness. During interviews, they talk about how important this component is to their game, but, if you think about it, how they actually accomplish their calm under fire is not a secret they usually reveal publicly.
So how do today’s ‘mega stars’ achieve the ability to hang tough when the going gets rough? The truth is they have internalized a simple, automatic formula for maintaining extraordinary mental toughness when they are under the gun. This means that the formula is easily available to them, it is really a part of their total game skill set, they do not even have to think about it to bring it in to play. With this formula, their ability to kill fear is silent but deadly.
To see an athlete crumble under pressure is a sad thing to see. The stadium may be filled to capacity with tens of thousands of spectators watching intently as a quarterback folds under pressure. It is so compelling that even the fans get a knot in the pit of their stomachs? Typically, when this happens, the game goes south quickly and the outcome is a loss.
How can you as a athlete hoping to land a college football scholarship master the ability to have amazing confidence when the pressure is on? How do you develop the ability to consistently feel unstoppable instead of being gripped with paralyzing fear?
Change Your Thinking – Begin to be aware of how you are thinking. Your doubtful thinking leads directly to a self-confidence slide, and a lack of self-confidence leads directly to poor performance.
Examples of fearful thoughts are: “What if I screw up?”; “Super, I am up against their best lineman”; What if I get hurt?”; What if I fumble? These are all the kinds of thoughts that put your play in the toilet.
Have Six Positive Affirmations Ready – Create meaningful positive affirmations for immediately turning fear into massive self-confidence. These simple phrases should be written down, and verbally practiced until they are easily available to you at anytime things start getting stressful during the game or at practice.
Examples of positive affirmations that will do a U-turn on paralyzing self-confidence are: “I have trained for this moment”; “I can do this and more”; I am ready, bring it on”; I love taking the ball when the game is on the line”; “I run the plays and focus only on my job on the team”; “Give me the ball, I can run it in”; “I play my best under pressure”.
Having six positive thoughts readily available in your head allows you to fight negative thoughts. It puts you in the driver’s seat. It stops fear in its tracks, but the key to success is you must first be aware of your negative, doubtful thoughts, and then you must quickly toss them out of your mind by replacing them with one or several of your prepared positive affirmations.
These affirmations should be ones that you know to be true about your play or that could reasonably be true. Putting this formula to use is a very simple, quick and effective way to get control over your doubtful, confidence robbing thoughts.
The Importance Of Looking Good On Paper
If you a shooting for one of the top twenty five football programs in the country, you should be aware that these top programs receive around 25,000 athletic profiles and DVD’s from aspiring football recruits every year, and the lesser programs receive about 5,000. Common sense should tell you that the coach does not have the time to either read these profiles thoroughly or view all these videos.
So how does the coach narrow down his recruiting list to the top 25 or so recruits that he may be interested in signing? He evaluates them first on paper in about 30 seconds to quickly see if he even wants to look at their highlight video.
- This means that your athletic profile must show that you are recruitment material and should include easy-to-see information about your statistics including position you play, weight, height, bench press, 40 yd time, vertical, and squats.
- You must also show your academic information including your GPA and SAT/SAT scores. The coach does not want to recruit someone that won’t even be admitted to the university.
Coaches use the top page of your athletic profile to see if you meet their minimum recruiting cutoffs. If you don’t, your recruiting information packet gets thrown in the trash. Knowing this ahead of time should let you know that if you want to be considered at all, you need to make sure that your stats and academics are up to snuff and that your profile can be easily read.
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