Everyone of you will be communicating via email with a college coach at some time. It is important to communicate clearly and effectively, and to format and punctuate your emails professionally. Coaches evaluate everything from athletics to academics to the emails you send them. You are always being evaluated, so take that in to consideration when you are emailing these coaches. Assume they are evaluating your talent based on everything they see and read in your email!
DO Have Your Own Personal Recruiting Email Address
Don’t mix personal with professional. Separate your personal emails from your professional emails to ensure that you do not miss a coach responding to you. Having an email address strictly designed for recruiting will help you organize when you are contacting coaches about camps and showcases you are invited to and attending. It will also be a place that you know will just strictly be baseball. An address your son uses for his Xbox account may not be a good account to have recruiting emails come to.
DO Use An Appropriate Email Address
Your email address is the first thing the coach sees when your email hits his inbox. Therefore, treat your email address like you would a first impression. When you meet someone for the first time, what is the first thing that you do? You shake their hand and give them your name. Your email address should be the same. Professional email address use a combination of your first name or initial + your last name + maybe a jersey number. Keep in mind that a lot of gmaill address have a display name that pops up in the inbox, make sure it is your full name – first and last.
Proper Email Addresses: jmoyer@gmail.com, jeffmoyer41@gmail.com, johnnyhamilton25@gmail.com
DO Personalize Each Email
The first sign of a mass email is when it is addressed to “Dear Coach” or “Hello Coach.” When a coach receives an email from a player, he wants to know the player contacting him at least knows his name. Always Address the coach by his last name, never his first or a nickname. Take the time to let the coach know you at least looked into their staff and the coaches names. Make sure the email is addressed to the right coach and his name is spelled correctly.
Good Email Intros: Dear Coach Moyer, or Dear Coach Williams,
DO Keep It Short and Sweet
Coaches receive thousands of emails, so keep this in mind when you are contacting them. Coaches do not want to spend 10 minutes reading an email. They want their information and they want to be able to get it as easily as possible. Give them all the information they will need about you in an email that can be read in 3 minutes or less before point them to a profile or video.
DO Talk About More Than Just Baseball
When you email a coach, he already knows that you are interested in playing baseball at his school. That is a given. The coach wants to know WHY you are interested in playing baseball there. Always include WHY you are interested in the program. Always tell them why you are interested in their school. (HINT: you should be telling them you are interested because they have your intended major, and if they don’t have your intended major, you probably shouldn’t be considering that school.)
DO Include You Metrics
This includes Academics, GPA and Test Scores as well as your Athletic Metrics, 60 times, velocities, etc. Coaches use this information to give you a quick evaluation on who you are as a student and who you are as an athlete. Once you have a program interested in you, the first items they will ask you for is your Test Scores and GPA, so its good to include that in your email for their reference.
Do Include School Information and Contact Information
It is important to leave open the body of your email with who you are, where you go to school and what your graduation year is. Additionally at the bottom of your email leave your cell phone and email address as well as the coaches that would give you good recommendations if the college were to reach out. ALWAYS include your high school coach on this email because that is who you play and is around the most. They will always give an honest opinion to a college coach.
DO Focus On Grammar and Punctuation Use correct paragraph structure, sentence structure and punctuation. As I mentioned before, the email you are sending is their first impression, so you want to come off as best you can, and grammar and punctuation is an easy way to do that. So many times I see words misspelled, no punctuation at all (the entire email is one sentence), and there is no structure to the email.