How to Write a Professional Email to a Coach

Writing emails to college coaches can be nerve-racking. You don’t know if the coaches are even going to read it, let alone respond. However, emails can be extremely helpful when trying to first get on a schools radar. My first D-1 offer started with an email. My offer to play Junior College baseball where I won a JUCO national championship, started with an email. With that being said you need to make sure you are sending the right email so that you don’t hurt your chances of getting a response and getting recruited.

· DO NOT LET YOUR PARENTS SEND A SINGLE EMAIL. College coaches can tell when your parent send an email and there is nothing less attractive to a coach.

· Get rid of the flashy videos. Coaches want to see your swing and your defensive actions. They don’t want to listen to your music or look at your cool transitions. All you need is 10-12 swings and 4-5 reps at your position. For pitchers all they want is 15-20 pitches from behind with a radar in the video. It is very important to have the velo in the video so that they know what they are looking at. If you don’t throw hard enough and think they won’t be able to tell in the video or think you can lie about your velo, you're wrong. If they don’t know how hard you are throwing they just won’t respond. Make sure you use a radar gun. Many websites and recruiting services will charge ridiculous amounts of money for a nicely edited video with music and transitions. This is all unnecessary. Coaches do not care if there is background music in your video, they just want to know if you can play. For this, they need a few swings, a few defensive movements, or a few pitches, that's it. SAVE YOUR MONEY.

· Make sure you ask if they are still recruiting at your position. As I talked about in my blog and video about camps, you have to make sure they are still looking for guys at your position. If they are not, at least you have an answer and you can move on to a new school. Use the schools that respond with needs at your position to create your list of target schools.

· Edit before you send. I have, just like every kid who has gone through this process, sent an email to school only to realize seconds later that the name of the school in the email was wrong. There’s nothing like sending an email telling a coach how much you want to come to their school while using another school's name. Make sure you take the time to edit each and every email.

· Keep is simple. Give them a short email with your, name, age, hometown, and short video and ask them if they are still recruiting at your position. That is all you need and all they want. Anything else is a waste of your time and theirs.

If you do these things and still aren’t getting the responses you want, just keep going. I sent emails to hundreds of schools and only received 15-20 back through all four of my recruiting processes. However, you can’t know which emails will get a response and which emails might lead to an offer.