In order to improve your visibility to college programs you need to market yourself to the college coaches. This means you need to sell your abilities and also convince the coach that there is a good match between you and his or her program. There are some similarities to marketing yourself for all sports, and there are other methods that are sport specific. We have put together some tips for marketing yourself in different sports. However, here are some general guidelines:

• Send an initial letter or email of inquiry to the college coaches. We have put together sample letters of inquiry for you.
• Include an athletic resume as well as an academic resume. Remember, a coach needs to know if he can get you in.
• Send a video if the coach wants it. Highlight videos are generally not a good idea, as most basketball coaches joke that every player shoots 100% in a highlight film. Whether you should send a skills tape or unedited game footage depends on the sport. The footage does not need to be too fancy or include special effects. The most important thing is that the coach can evaluate the student athlete's skill level. Birdseye Sports creates high quality game dvd's for students in the northeast. At First Choice, we have been experimenting with putting our student's recruiting video's on YouTube, so we can just email a link to the coach.
• Remember that a coach is recruiting the student and not ther parents. Most correspondence should come from the student and on the recruiting visit the student should do most of the talking. If a coach senses that a parent might be difficult to work with, he make take a student off of his recruiting list.
• Sports camps are a great way to get seen by a college coach. If you are really interested in a school, go to their camp. At the camp let the coaches know that their school is your top choice.
• The best competition in most sports is usually not during the high school season. Make sure you are playing in outside leagues. Also, it is usually easier for college coaches to go visit those other leagues since they are usually not during the college season and it is possible for a coach to see a number of prospects in one game. Read our sport-specific guides to find out what leagues and tournaments you should play in.
• A great way to find the name and contact information for any college coach is to use College Coaches Online. Enter in discount code fcc123 and receive a $5 discount.
• Most college coaches we have spoken with have told us that generally they throw out resumes they receive from bulk mailing services. Some coaches told us that they use those bulk services to generate a camp mailing list, figuring if someone paid $800 to have their resume bulk-mailed, they would surely pay that for a week-long sports camp. The reason they do that is coaches have a limited amount of time, and they do not want to waste it on a player if they do not know his true level of interest. Your best bet is to market yourself using our tips, or to use a service that markets you as an individual (such as us, or Wayne Mazzoni).