<p>Do coaches usually respond to those?</p>
<p>Is it a good first step towards contacting college coaches or should you email them personally?</p>
<p>Yes and no. We have had the most luck just emailing the coaches directly.</p>
<p>But if they write back is it because they are at least somehow interested?
What if they tell you they look forward to hearing from you soon and that they’ll answer you any question, what should you tell more than you have in the actual questionnaire and how should you address the actual problem (if they want you on their team)?</p>
<p>Whenever my children initiated contact, they started with online recruiting forms. In most cases, we received prompt responses from college coaches. How quickly a coach gets back to you may have more to do with the coach than the athletes qualifications. A couple of the weaker teams took months to follow up and some the the best programs in the country contacted them in as little as a few hours.</p>
<p>I view these forms as a means to introduce yourself and nothing more. Once a dialogue is started, I would answer a coach’s questions as promptly and directly as possible.</p>
<p>i see, thanks</p>
<p>Every school and coach is different. Some coaches take a day to respond some take 3 weeks. Its the craziest thing.You don’t know if you are being rejected,stalled or the coach is a bad communicator. Just when you think its all over they say they love you. Then you don’t hear from them. What’s up with this.There should be a better system.</p>
<p>After filling out an online recruiting questionnaire, email the coach to let them know that you are interested and that you filled out an online questionnaire. Being proactive is key to getting attention from college coaches.</p>
<p>I think the online forms were a waste to tell you the truth. Direct email with complete stats were fine.</p>
<p>D did both online questionnaires and email. Emailing directly was far more successful.</p>
<p>stalkermama and lilmom’s posts are very interesting and surprising to me. I would have thought the online form creates more of a permanent record / database and initiates a more formal workflow and a trackable process for eventual contact with the freshman/novice coach. As opposed to e-mails which can so easily just get lost and buried in one’s mailbox.</p>
<p>The online form (at least for rowers) asks a million questions. I’m sure my D would rather not have to fill one out if we can avoid it.</p>
<p>Ya know, I wonder what the online forms look like for other sports. Should take a look just out of curiosity.</p>
<p>I think a lot of coaches delegate the handling of the recruiting forms - and it’s done with varying degrees of competency. Direct email to the coach proved much more effective in our case.</p>
<p>D did submitted online forms to a wide range of schools starting Junior year. It amazed us that most of those schools did reach out to her after July 1 – some she had even forgotten she had filled out. However, she also did berecruited, personal emails, and more. You cannot rely on only one method of contact.</p>
<p>Recruiting forms are more useful for swimming, track and other sports where past performance can be quantified. Since many online recruiting forms ask the same questions, it only took my youngest daughter about an hour to cut and paste answers into a dozen forms. She also sent follow up emails with additional information and kept coaches updated throughout the year. Every school responded eventually and I believe ten offered Junior Days, Official Visits or both.</p>
<p>GolfFather wrote–</p>
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<p>I don’t doubt that that is true! However, my son and I found for tennis that the tennis questionnaires tended to ask the same questions, so he saved his answers and was able to cut and paste them. I would be careful not to encourage my child to think that legitimate questions asked by a coach were somehow not worth his or her time to answer.</p>
<p>My son completed the questionnaire for each college in which he was interested, then emailed each coach to say that he had done so.</p>
<p>The online form (at least for rowers) asks a million questions. I’m sure my D would rather not have to fill one out if we can avoid it.</p>
<p>This response puzzles me. Every D1 school in every sport has an online questionnaire. Seriously? Kids would avoid this because it’s a pain in the a**?? Coaches are doing these for kicks?</p>
<p>There’s not a D1 coach in the country that’s interested in anyone who is looking for shortcuts or not willing to make a 3 minute time investment.</p>
<p>It’s not that hard. Seriously.</p>
<p>My son is a sophomore, and his sport is tennis. He has his top college choices listed on tennis recruiting along with the SAT II’s and AP score results that he took last year. </p>
<p>He can see which coaches are following his tournament results. Should he also be contacting these coaches directly to show even more interest? If the answer is yes, when should he start? He is our oldest, and the high school tennis coach has never had a player play in college, so he is not going to be any help at all in this process.</p>
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</p>
<p>:rolleyes:</p>
<p>Have a nice day.</p>
<p>The recruiting questionaires took just a few minutes to fill out, and some of them would auto-fill once she started typing which made it really easy. My D spent a couple of hours one evening last September and cranked them out for all of her top schools. After she submitted the questionaires she sent personal emails to each coach expressing her interest, etc and she also attached a pdf of her unofficial transcript (9th-10th grade) along with her resume. In retrospect, the transcript and resume may have been overkill, but all in all this approach worked well for her. Additionally, since her goal was to verbally commit early to a D-1 non-ivy school, taking the ACT in September of junior year turned out to be a good decision.</p>
<p>By the way, if there is anyone who thinks that I, just like any other parent, wouldn’t do as much as possible to help my child, they are high on crack.</p>
<p>And I’m sure, when the time comes, my daughter will comply with any reasonable requirements presented by current or future coaches.</p>
<p>It is completely erroneous to assume that my tongue-firmly-in-cheek comment was based on a desire of avoidance of effort. C’mon, I wrote “a million questions.” Some people took that seriously!?</p>
<p>It’s been all over the place for us. D filled out a bunch of questionnaires online but only some got back to her. Some coaches found her through berecruited; some were at her champ meets and saw her swim; some searched collegeswimming.com looking for certain times/events and found her. She emailed a few personally because she was interested, and some of those had not responded to the online questionnaire, but all of them replied and were interested.</p>
<p>Overall I suppose emailing the coach directly has had a 100% yield; however, some coaches did ask to make sure that she had filled out the online form.</p>