Step 7 is the one families skip, and it is the one that decides how the whole thing ends. Steps 1 through 6 are exciting: build the list, cut the film, write the emails, go compete. Step 7 is a spreadsheet. Nobody posts about a spreadsheet. But midway through a cycle an athlete may have contacted dozens of programs, spoken to a handful of coaches, been asked for a fall schedule three separate times, and have no reliable way to say which of those threads is still alive.
What that looks like in practice is not dramatic. It looks like a coach who asked for something in the spring and never got it, because the family remembered the conversation but not the ask. It looks like a school that stayed warm for two months, went silent, and was not missed for another two. Recruiting rarely dies from rejection. It dies from threads nobody was watching.
The fix is unglamorous and it works: one record, kept by the athlete, that answers where every school stands and what happens next.
Seven columns, one sheet
A recruiting CRM does not need to be software. A spreadsheet with one row per program does the job, as long as it carries the seven fields the framework asks for: school, tier, coach, last touch, next action, status, notes.
Each earns its place. Tier is your A/B/C grouping, so you can see whether your effort is landing on realistic targets or scattering. Coach is a specific person with a specific role, not a program — recruiting coordinator and position coach are different conversations. Last touch is a date and a medium. Next action is a verb plus a date. Status is one word from a list you define and never improvise on. Notes quietly becomes the most valuable column: what the coach actually said, in their words.
Fill it in the same day, every time. A record you update from memory a week later is a record of what you wish had happened.
No row without a next action date
This is the discipline the whole step rests on. Every school you consider active gets a scheduled next action, with a date on it, before you close the sheet. Not “follow up soon.” A date, and the specific thing you will do on it.
Give the date a reason — new film posted, a tournament coming, a transcript updated, a season finished. A follow-up tied to something real reads as an update; one tied to nothing reads as pestering, and coaches tell the difference instantly. If you cannot think of a reason to write again, that is information: the school may belong in a dormant tier rather than your active list.
A standing weekly block
Put follow-up on the calendar as its own recurring block, separate from the new outreach in Step 5, and work it from the sheet in one sitting. Otherwise new outreach always wins — it feels like progress — and the coaches who already know your name get nothing.
Two things belong in every week: 2 film updates, and 1 gratitude or update note per active coach. The film updates are the reason to make contact. The gratitude note is the part almost nobody does — a short, genuine thank-you to a coach who watched, replied, or gave you a straight answer, with no ask attached. It costs two minutes and it is the difference between a name in an inbox and a relationship.
What tracking can and cannot tell you
Be honest about your instruments. A tracked link that gets clicked tells you the link was clicked — a genuine signal, and Athlete Narrative will show you that one. It is also the outer limit of what any tool on your side can see. Nothing can tell you whether a coach read your email, forwarded it, discussed you in a staff meeting or decided against you. Email sent from your own address goes out and stays out; what comes back arrives in your inbox and nowhere else.
Which is exactly why the sheet is yours to maintain. It is not a feed that updates itself. It is a record of what you did and what you were told, and it is only as accurate as the athlete who fills it in.
Silence is data, not rejection
Most of what you send will never be answered. Step 5 sets the benchmark at ≥30% open and ≥10% reply across a month — another way of saying that most of a good outreach month goes unanswered by design. So do not read a quiet week as a verdict. Read the sheet: a school with several unanswered touches and no engagement of any kind belongs a tier lower, and that time belongs to a school that answered once. Effort is finite and should follow the signal.
Deliverables
- A simple CRM — sheet or tool — with a row per program: school, tier, coach, last touch, next action, status, notes
- A standing weekly follow-up block, worked from the sheet
- 2 film updates a week
- 1 gratitude or update note per active coach
KPI: Every active coach has a scheduled “next action” date — no dead threads.
Kept honestly, this sheet becomes the document you make the biggest decision of the process from — which is the subject of the final step, Visits, Offers and the Decision Process. The full sequence lives on Recruiting 101.
