I am concerned about the Recruiting process for Gridiron Dynasty. I have a Division III team and I invested over $45,000 in recruiting this season, and I only recruited within a 250 mile range from the campus. I had fifteen Scholarships to fill and was only able to sign 6 players.

I spent $2,315 to recruit a Wide Receiver that comprised of the following activities:

Assistant Coach Phone-Calls – 5
Head Coach Phone-Calls - 6
Home Visit – Head Coach - 1
Scouting Trip – Assistant Coach – 1
Guaranteed % of Plays
Campus Visit
Scholarship Offer



The following emails were received for this player right before recruiting ended:

Coach,

I'm close to reaching a decision and I'm leaning your way. I just need a little more time to make sure I'm making the right decision.

We should probably take the next step with Miguel King. He loves us. He loves Pittsburgh, but I don't think he has any other preferences

I can't believe you are interested in me playing for you, Coach. Just say the word, and I'll be there.

This is the last email I received I received on February 10^th, at 9:05 PM
Miguel King called this morning and declined our scholarship offer.

This is the scenario of how most of my recruiting went this season. What is your opinion on this?

You need to study this:

https://www.whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?topicID=444561

Thank you for your post bjschumacher. I actually have a printed copy of that.

Cross first off do not battle for anyone at d3. Second it will take a couple Camps Visits(CV) normally in order to knock off a SIM. Also remember that you must have a face to face in order to be able to sign him. We all mess up sometimes as example my class last season at Camp. Feel free to ask a a few of us that have been around for a bit if needed.

Since you asked, my opinion is that this is another example of the recruiting process not being intuitive to new coaches. The consensus response will be that recruiting is absolutely great, even though you will also hear that you should ignore every bit of interaction with a recruit till the actual offer because it is misleading and/or meaningless (can both of these things really be true?). You may also hear that you should have sent tons of coach visits right off the bat, even though the recruit may continuously reject them all. You will be told that you wasted the budget battling sims and that you should have chosen targets from the wealth of undecided recruits, which usually will amount to 1 or 2 useable ones at each position in your vision right now with so many sim teams in each world targeting players. If you are lucky, they might have average potential and attributes and no other human coaches in your area will have noticed them. My opinion, which doesn't amount to much, is that you will read up on recruiting and it will certainly help, but you will also inevitably be frustrated by how confusing recruiting is for new coaches in the current game, and how oblivious established coaches seem to be to this struggle. Keep at it though. It does get easier!

Hey Cross, did you lose him to a sim or human? Either way, one campus visit isn't going to get it done at any level unless he's an undecided. The fact he's 'leaning your way' means you're fighting SOMEONE. Secondly, if your status changes from leading the battle to behind in the battle you'd normally get an e-mail to say so giving you three hours at least to throw more cash at him.
You've probably wasted a ton of cash against sims or humans as $45k is a lot in D3. Happy to lend a hand if you like, sitemail me if interested?