A majority of people believe the Saturdays between September and December are the most important for their favorite college football teams. In actuality, all the minutes, hours and days spent recruiting make the difference when stringing bowl wins together. A day after National Signing Day, the XOS team would like to reflect on the status of the recruiting and scouting industry, and what impact XOS has had on it in a relatively short period of time.
While dozens of recruiting websites and scouting organizations distribute top high school player rankings from across the country, coaches have their own lists written on dry-erase boards in offices across the nation. Each school has its own tactical preference for securing the best athletes for its programs. However, the common thread between almost all coaches and scouts is the use of technology in making the recruiting process as efficient as possible.
As technology has evolved, so has the process of recruiting top-tier talent. Coaches still take to the road and the air to visit sought-after recruits and to scout their games, but they are now able to do so with more information than ever before. For example, recruiting and scouting organizations have started offering a full background dossier on student athletes as a service. Coaches find these dossiers invaluable as the critical blueprints for profiling athletes of interest.
One such service is XOS Digital’s PlayerOnDemand™, the industry leading recruiting and scouting software used by more than 175 teams in the NCAA, as well as by ESPN for reporting. PlayerOnDemand allows coaches to search through 3,000 of the nation’s best players and teams. Coaches simply access a web portal to review player evaluations from leading recruiting and scouting experts, along with full games and cutups filmed by professional sports videographers.
More than 95 percent of players featured on the ESPN 150, a detailed list of the nation’s top recruits, can be found on PlayerOnDemand. If a coach searches PlayerOnDemand for these players and many others the coach would find all the contact information for his school, his high school football coach, his detailed measurables, a cutup of his 2012 high school season and an XOS-expert evaluation.
Thirty-seven college programs successfully recruited at least one player from the ESPN 150, and 35 of those 43 schools use PlayerOnDemand, including the first nine schools that ESPN ranked as having the top recruiting classes for 2012.
There’s no doubt that a number of factors have contributed to the necessity for increased competitiveness in the recruiting and scouting of high school football players. XOS has invested an extraordinary amount of time and energy to ensure that PlayerOnDemand is the best product on the market. The company continues to strive for increased efficiency, information and participation among high school athletes who want to ensure they are recruited by the best schools in the nation.
Please share with us on Facebook some of your best practices for recruiting and what tools you use to get the most out of your available resources.