There I was on the side of the road, waiting for a tow truck, and thinking about recruiting.

My wife's car, which had been showing signs of needing some minor tune-ups for several weeks, had suddenly overheated.  I heard a hissing sound under the hood as I stopped.  Ruling out the possibility that a family of snakes had taken up residence next to the washer fluid thingy, I deducted that whatever was once minor was now major.

And I was stuck.  Plans for the day ruined, all because I didn't take an ounce of prevention when it came to some simple auto repairs.

With nothing to do but sit in my overheated hissing car, my thoughts turned to recruiting.  "There are lessons for coaches here," I thought to myself.

The parallels are real.  How?  Try these on for size:

• Many coaches ignore the warning signs.  That little hissing under the hood of your recruiting plan?  It's going to turn into a big problem if you don't get it fixed.
• It's going to cost you more later.  Not fixing your recruiting message by tuning it up now is going to come back to bite you later.
• When it crashes, its going to cause a mini-disaster.  For me, it was a few hours of my day.  For you, it might be that position player that would be the difference between a mediocre season and a conference championship.  You might not lose your job over that kind of a season, but it's going to put pressure on you.  All because you didn't pay attention to the little signs months before.
• Things grind to a stop.  Bad recruiting plans mean very few prospects, very few phone calls, and very few "next level" athletes at the end of the process when you're really looking for a good recruiting class.  It's hard to make that happen when your recruiting plan is stopped on the side of the road waiting for help.
• You lose control over your coaching life.  This is the end result of all the consequences I just listed, and it's the one that we deal with most during our On-Campus Workshops.  Coaches who ignore the recruiting part of their job (or at least don't approach it as seriously as they do the coaching part of their job) end up relying on chance and luck to sign a lot of their recruits.  They choose, in many ways, to let fate and their prospects run the process rather than controlling it themselves.  The result?  Very little control over your coaching life, because successful coaching starts with successful recruiting.

So what's the recommended tune-up for a sputtering recruiting plan?  Of course, I'll recommend what we do for coaches, but in the event you want to handle it yourself here are the first three things I'd recommend you check under your recruiting engine:

1. Do you have a plan?  I mean a really detailed, week-by-week plan that serves as a guide for you and your staff.  Something that lets you measure success (or failure) in terms of your goals for a particular recruiting class.  Don't have one?  Sit down with your staff and develop one.
2. Are your letters and email messages speaking your recruit's language?  They need to be shorter, and it needs to be all about them.  And most of all, they need to be consistent...don't let weeks go by in between contacts. 
3. Are you focused on getting them on campus?  Most coaches would answer "yes" to that question.  But that means developing a message that hits on all cylinders and doesn't try to sell a recruit with a letter or email; that "sale" happens when they get to campus.  Make sure your campaign has a singular focus of getting athletes on campus where you can interact with them in person, one on one.

Take my word for it, Coach.  Doing the simple work now will prevent a lot of headaches down the road.