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By: Chad Wilson – Editor – GridironStuds Blog<\/strong> Whoever said good things come to those who wait definitely was not a high school football player hunting for a college football scholarship.\u00a0 Many a college football recruit has done damage to themselves by waiting too long to make a very important decision.\u00a0 For some,\u00a0 waiting is best,\u00a0 for the majority,\u00a0 not so much.<\/p>\n I’ve told the story on my Instagram account (@GridironStuds) about the time I took a recruiting visit out of high school to California Berkeley.\u00a0 It was the biggest of my handful of offers and I was not a rated recruit.\u00a0 In 1990,\u00a0 it was a whole lot harder to get ranked and recognized as a high school football player and with only one good season of playing under my belt,\u00a0 no chance.\u00a0 With that in mind,\u00a0 I had no business making a school like Cal in the Pac-10 wait for my commitment.\u00a0 However,\u00a0 I lacked guidance in the process and pretty much flew by the seat of my pants in the World of recruiting.<\/p>\n It’s a little bit harder these days to not know but on a topic like this,\u00a0 many don’t really understand how waiting works against them.\u00a0 I am keenly aware of how much attention recruits get nowadays.\u00a0 In this day in age you can be #223 out of the Top 250 and have a steady stream of phone calls and DMs permeating your digital devices.\u00a0 Go look up permeating,\u00a0 it might be on your ACT.\u00a0 \u00a0Getting back to the matter at hand,\u00a0 this constant attention can leave a recruit confused about his place and the amount of time he has to make a decision.\u00a0 Year after year,\u00a0 I have seen recruits wait to pick a school only to have the decision made for them.\u00a0 How is the decision made?\u00a0 It’s made by the schools dropping the recruit and shrinking his options.\u00a0 Of course,\u00a0 nothing will make a school seem like the one like them deciding they no longer want you.<\/p>\n The trick to the game in recruiting and in life is to create options for yourself.\u00a0 You did the work in creating the options by playing well and performing in front of scouts, media, etc.\u00a0 Don’t undo that work by failing to know your role and have those options disappear.\u00a0 The best thing to do is make your decision when you have all of your options on the table.\u00a0 You can’t decide which service station stop at after the car runs out of gas.\u00a0 If you are not one of the top 10 players in the country,\u00a0 you may not want to wait until signing day to make your decision.\u00a0 That may sound crazy to some of you because you see a ton of national signing day announcements every February.\u00a0 What you may not know is that a lot of those youngsters made their decisions long before that,\u00a0 informed the school and kept it a secret until National Signing Day.\u00a0 However,\u00a0 not everyone can play that game either.\u00a0 Perhaps if you are in the Top 50,\u00a0 a top flight college football program will be willing to take a chance that what you told them in secret in January will hold up on the first Wednesday in February.\u00a0 Some schools will continue to recruit other players at your position while you’re keeping your secret and if they are successful in landing someone that they feel is as good or better than you,\u00a0 those phone calls and DMs will dry up like crazy glue on a broken fingernail.<\/p>\n If you are not Top 10 overall at your position,\u00a0 I would strongly recommend that you make your decision prior to signing day.\u00a0 I would even recommend that you make your decision prior to the New Year unless there are some special circumstances surrounding your recruiting.\u00a0 Those special situations could be a possible coaching change, waiting to meet NCAA academic standards, etc.\u00a0 I understand the need to feel like “the man” and keep the suspense until signing day.\u00a0 I understand that it’s a great feeling for an 18 year old to have ESPN cameras or local TV cameras on them as they announce to the World their choice.\u00a0 However,\u00a0 the pain of missing out on the school you want is rarely worth it.\u00a0 It can affect the course of your life.\u00a0 If you want to make memories and be a star,\u00a0 make your decision after you have carefully weighed your options.\u00a0 When you have come to that conclusion,\u00a0 inform the schools.\u00a0 \u00a0After that,\u00a0 bust your ass to make the school you chose feel like the best thing they ever did was give you a scholarship.\u00a0 If you do that,\u00a0 I can guarantee you that you will get more attention than you ever thought possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By: Chad Wilson – Editor – GridironStuds Blog Twitter: @GridironStuds Whoever said good things come to those who<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,767],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-high-school","category-recruiting-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3679\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nTwitter: @GridironStuds<\/strong><\/p>\n