College recruiting advice/tips

NCAA coaches can't talk to you until June 15th before your junior year. Most aren't putting a ton of effort into walk on level juniors. They are going after top level athletes. My best advice is to email coaches at schools you're interested and ask what it takes to make the team while talking to other schools that might take a chance on an athlete at your level. Don't put all of your eggs in the big state school in your state, explore some smaller schools at first and see what you like.

Any idea what your potential is? Do you have older siblings? Don't start contacting coaches until you break into the current group or they will never respond. They receive hundreds of messages and they have grad students.sift through them. If you contact a team that requires a 4:10 junior year, your email will get flagged and having already been looked at and eliminated.

it's literally too early under the rules right now. after june 15 you can do it but your times are D3 level and you should save your efforts until they improve. or else as the poster suggests they may put you on ignore as too slow at this juncture, when you have 2 years to work on that. i would focus on XC and wait at least that long, if not the full year, to see if you get better.

however, that doesn't stop you from pondering a major, pondering where you'd like to go, and then researching and informally visiting schools that interest you and fit your general idea of what you want to do and where you want to go for it. even visiting local colleges might give an idea what you do or don't want in target schools -- even if you have no interest in them.

but you wouldn't make many? any? D1s, so don't bother spamming them yet. you can research D1s all you want but asking to join the team when you might be 15 seconds too slow is asking to be ignored when the business end of recruiting arrives -- next spring and beyond.

college XC/TF teams have their meet results all posted on TFRRS. if you look up schools on TFRRS you will figure out where you would fit. you will see why spamming D1 coaches with interest emails right now is a bad idea. unless you are an amazing XC runner you're looking at like 2 flat and 4:25 to walk on at the worst D1s. and well under that to make the better teams. best teams we're talking closer to 1:50 and down near 4 flat.

at your stage i'd just build up a list of schools you're interested in then cross reference that with researching their track teams. or look at wikipedia lists of D1 and D3 conferences and use that to help develop a long wish list. i would not get too focused on too few schools or you turn into the kids who come on here who have applied one place and want to walk on there and don't even have the times that school wants. just brainstorm for the time being.

Jesus man every single post you make is a rambling essay. Are you just using chat GPT?