→ New here? Start with The Recruiting Process, then the football deep-dive if that’s your sport.
Social media is a real piece of the recruiting infrastructure now. It is not the most important piece. It is also not optional in most sports.
Here is the honest version of how it works and what your kid should be doing.
Which platform actually matters
The platform varies by sport and it is not subtle.
Football: Twitter (now X). Football coaches at every level live on Twitter. Recruiting Twitter is its own ecosystem. Coaches post offers, share commitments, follow recruits, and watch what recruits post. If your son plays football and is being recruited, he needs a Twitter presence. There is no real workaround.
Basketball, lacrosse, soccer, volleyball, baseball, softball: Instagram, mostly. Most non-football coaches use Instagram more than Twitter. Some use both. Some use neither and stay on email. The general rule: Twitter for football, Instagram for everything else. Ask your kid’s high school coach what the coaches in your sport actually use.
Hockey, swimming, track, golf, tennis, the smaller sports: less platform-specific. Email and phone still dominate. A clean Instagram is enough.
The platform matters because that is where coaches are looking. A football recruit with a strong Hudl reel and no Twitter presence is harder to evaluate quickly than a football recruit with both. The Twitter profile is the one-page introduction that lets the coach decide whether to pull up the film.
Who runs the account
The kid runs the account. Period.
This is not a polite preference. Coaches can tell within two posts whether a parent is writing the captions. The vocabulary, the punctuation, the things being celebrated, the level of polish — all of it reads parent-written and all of it gets noticed. Once a coach decides the parent is running the kid’s social media, the kid drops a tier in their evaluation. We have seen it happen in real time.
Same rule as the email: the coach is recruiting the kid, not you. If you are the one posting on his behalf, the coach is learning that he cannot run his own life yet. That is not the read you want.
If your kid is fourteen and just opening a recruiting Twitter account, sit with him while he sets it up. Answer questions. Help him think through the bio. Then hand him the keys and stay off the account.
The bio that works
The bio is the cover letter. Coaches scan it in three seconds. It needs to contain the information they actually need.
The standard format:
[Class Year] | [Position] | [School] | [Height/Weight if relevant]
GPA: [number] | [SAT/ACT if you have it]
[Hudl link]
[Optional: contact info]
A real example for a football recruit:
'27 | OL | Westview HS (TX) | 6'4" 285
GPA: 3.8 | ACT 27
hudl.com/profile/marcuswilliams
DM open / [email protected]
Three things are non-negotiable: class year, position, school. Without those, coaches cannot place the recruit in the right bucket.
Hudl link or other film link is essential. Coaches will not search for film. The film needs to be one click away.
GPA matters more than parents think. A strong GPA in the bio opens conversations at academic schools that would not otherwise be on the radar. A missing GPA reads as something to hide.
Contact info: open DMs are the minimum
Some recruits put a real email in the bio. Some leave it out for privacy. Both are fine.
What is not fine: closing direct messages and not putting any contact information anywhere.
If a coach is recruiting your son, there has to be a way to reach him. If the DMs are closed and there is no email, the coach moves on. There are other recruits with open lines.
The cleanest setup for most families: open DMs on the platform plus an email in the bio that the kid actually checks. If you would rather not have an email visible publicly, that is a defensible choice — but in that case, leaving DMs open is not optional. It is the only path coaches have.
For younger recruits (sophomores, freshmen) where parents want more control over communication, a shared email account that goes to both the kid and a parent is fine. Just remember the kid still needs to be the one writing back.
How to interact with coaches’ content
This is where most kids overdo it.
The general rule: do not reply on every one of a coach’s posts. Do not engage with every tweet. Do not show up in the comments on every Instagram story. If a coach posts ten times a week and your son’s name is in the comments seven times, the coach will notice. It does not read as enthusiasm. It reads as needy.
The healthy rhythm: like the posts that are genuinely interesting. Reply occasionally on something that actually warrants a response (a program announcement, a meaningful piece of content). Quote-tweet or repost rarely. Send the substantive communication through email or DM, not in the public comments.
The coaches your son is most interested in should not be able to tell from his social media how interested he is. The communication that matters happens privately.
The cringe story
A real example. A college coach lost a close friend and wrote a public post about it. The funeral was that weekend. The post was the kind of thing a person writes when they are working through grief in public. Five comments down was a high school recruit, posting some version of “praying for you coach, would love to chat about your program when you have time.”
That recruit is not on the coach’s board anymore. The coach mentioned it to other coaches. The recruit will not know any of this, but his recruiting reach got smaller in a way he cannot recover from.
The lesson is bigger than that one post. A coach’s social media is a window into a real person who has a life outside of football. The funeral post, the family photo, the political moment, the personal milestone — those are not opportunities to slide in a recruiting pitch. Read the room.
If a coach posts something deeply personal, the right reply from a recruit is no reply. Maybe a quiet like. Nothing more. The recruiting conversation continues through the appropriate channels at an appropriate time.
What never to post
The stuff that ends recruiting conversations:
- Anything that looks like trash talk about an opponent, teammate, or coach
- Anything that involves alcohol, drugs, vapes, or guns (even as a joke, even on Snapchat — it screenshots)
- Anything that mocks a school the recruit might want to attend or another player at his position
- Anything political or culturally divisive that does not need to be there
- Reposts and retweets of the above from someone else’s account (the same way the coach reads it as your son’s view)
We tell every recruit: nothing on your account, in your replies, or in your tagged photos should be something you would not want a head coach reading aloud at a team meeting. If there is anything questionable, clean it up before the recruiting process gets serious. Coaches will look. They look more thoroughly than parents realize.
What to actually post
Game film clips, with the kid’s number visible.
Strength and conditioning progress (a clean bench number, a vertical jump, a track time).
Team accomplishments and credit to teammates.
Genuine thank-yous to coaches, mentors, family — kept short and specific.
Major life moments where the recruiting connection is implicit, not stated. A college acceptance letter. A camp invite. An offer (when the time comes).
That is roughly the whole list. The recruit’s social media should be the cleanest, most boring version of an athlete who is serious about the game and has the rest of his life under control. Boring is the point. Boring gets recruited.
The platform rules in summary
- Twitter for football. Instagram for most other sports. Ask your high school coach what your sport uses.
- The kid runs the account. Coaches can tell when the parent is writing.
- Bio: class year, position, school, GPA, Hudl link. Contact info is optional but DMs must be open if it is left out.
- Don’t reply on every coach post. The substantive conversation happens privately.
- A coach’s personal posts are not recruiting opportunities. Read the room.
- Nothing on the account should be something the coach could not read aloud at a team meeting.
Social media is a small piece of the recruiting infrastructure. Done well, it removes friction. Done badly, it ends conversations before they start. The bar is not “be impressive on social.” The bar is “do not get yourself eliminated.” Most of the work is restraint.
— Jeff Thomas for Parent Coach Playbook
Last updated April 2026.