Welcome back!
Recruiting really starts with scouting, and the first thing to know is that there are lots of minefields in scouting. It’s easy to waste time, money, and effort. Most of the successful D3 programs are drawing primarily from D1 and D2 scouting pools. You access those from any scouting page by selecting the division in a drop down at the top. Remember to do this for any action. Ignore the D3 pool, in general. There’s enough talent in the D2 pool that you can live there and build your program up to consistently advance a couple rounds in the NT with some experience, but you’ll probably need to land some D1 pool talent to be championship level. This is my process for scouting, linked directly to D3. As you’ll see from the discussion, it isn’t the only way to do it, but it’s a good way.
As for recruiting, at D3 unless you’ve made the mistake of scouting the D3 pool, you’ll need to wait for recruits to be willing to sign with you. Think about this in terms of real life. There are no “D1” pools in real life, there are just basketball players who want to play college hoops, looking for programs that are good fits. The vast majority of players are not “diaper dandies” are not thinking realistically about the NBA and such, they just want to play ball at the next level. Looking for a coach and a program to show some love. For some that are ranked nationally, but not getting that love, like say the #100 PG in the country, he might potentially be available to you. Maybe he has some deficiency that is keeping higher division schools away, like low starting physical cores, or he can’t pass well. But he is still thinking he might do better than D3 because he’s ranked, you know, so you have to wait. He won’t sign with you until the last 24 hours of recruiting. This is called “the red light”. This was implemented during beta to give higher division teams who lost out on battles a chance to nab these guys before they dropped down to you at D3. But many of them will still fall through the cracks, because so many higher division coaches spend all their resources on just a few players and don’t really bother with backup options much. So he might eventually fall to you. But you have to be patient, just like real life. If a D1 school comes calling, there’s a good chance they will take him, and there isn’t a lot you can do. Even if you’ve invested a lot, you’ll probably just lose it. Poof, gone. Risk v. Reward.
A lot of times you’ll see sims on those guys, and like I said in another thread recently, the way to think about sim recruiting is that they strike around kind of blindly looking for something that bleeds, like little sharks. You want to knock sims down as fast as possible with your own effort - but with AP and promises; don’t waste visits before the late session (after the season) if you can help it, because of above - if you can get them down to very low, they generally just move on. I say generally because that’s not universally true. What’s really happening is that if sim sees blood - ie, if they see an opening, a path to overtake you - they will start putting in effort again. So if they’re at very low, and you drop effort down to a point where they might still have a path to victory, they might hypothetically take it. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, that’s when you see guys coming in to the forum and complaining about the sim doing things it wasn’t supposed to do. Anyway, sim doesn’t recruit very strong, usually, and is generally predictable. But you also need to know when to back off. Don’t try to knock down a C level D1 sim as a C level D3 team unless you have a *lot* of juice (ie scholarships, and awesome preference profile). It won’t work out well for you, and they will bleed you dry.
The best thing to do at D3, IMO, is spread out your recruiting effort among a good number of targets early. Organize them well by color code, whatever makes sense to you. I like to organize by priority, in terms of highest (blue) to lowest (red). At D3, don’t go too heavy on anyone early. You want to see what the bigger fish are doing before you try to stake a claim. I like to initially target about 5-6 guys for every scholarship I intend to fill, and after 3 cycles or so have that pared down to 2-3; a primary, and a couple backup options.
Attention points are cumulative, so they stack on top of each other. Every cycle counts. They are all adjusted by how good your preference profile is, too. You can give a guy 12 one cycle, none the next, then 20 the 3rd. You will have given him 32 total at that point. At D3, you’ll be somewhere between 1/3 and 1/5 of the way to a scholarship offer for most realistic AND good D1 pool players for a team in your position at that point, FWIW. He won’t mind not hearing from you any given cycle, but keep in mind others may be accumulating while you’re looking elsewhere.
Good luck, feel free to reach out to chat if you want. Lots of other guys willing to mentor, as well.
1/2/2021 2:02 PM (edited)