The Future of College Sports

Fighting perfectionism in college sports

Jayson Schmidt — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 19:33:24 GMT

A note on today’s post:

Typically, I post content on the weekends, as a break from the bulk of the writing I do during my week helping scale FanWord (AI storytelling software for college sports).

Writing for The Future of College Sports keeps me connected, focused, and sane.

To pull back the curtain a little bit, I have maybe 20-30 completed posts that are ready to go and saved in the drafts folder. Each week, I will drop one of these in based on feel, make sure what I wrote a few weeks or months ago is timely, and press send.

Then I probably have another 20-30 that are incomplete. Some are just a title or a paragraph that I jot down while on a walk. Others are close to being complete.

And then some posts materialize out of thin air based on things I’ve seen (or want to tell you).

Like this one.

Talking about perfectionism.

Recently, I was scrolling Substack Notes and I came across this post from :

I am forever a recovering perfectionist. This hits home.

I have spent my entire life slowing myself down because I’d rather get it right the first time than produce mistake-filled work.

I had coaches who bucked the idea that practice makes perfect.

No.

“Perfect practice makes perfect.”

And so, I’ve spent time pausing or doing work in the shadows because I’ve never wanted my work or effort to be perceived as less-than-excellent.

To summarize Brad’s post: you need to be about the process, not the outcome.

You’ll see where I’m going with this.

Ship the work.

I highly recommend a book called “The Practice” by Seth Godin, which is all about shipping the work. Similar to Brad’s post, it’s about doing what you do without regard for what others think.

For the purposes of representing your program, it comes down to three principles:

Action drives creativity: You don’t wait for creativity, but you force it by flexing the muscle of creativity repeatedly.
Share with the world: The only way to drive reasonable, relevant interest in what you’re doing is by committing to a schedule to share.
Start small: If shipping the work is hard, you can lower the barrier to showcasing your teams by sharing with a small audience first.

There’s a quote from the book that I love: "This practice is a journey without an external boss."

Nobody’s holding your feet to the fire. You aren’t being forced to share anything with anyone. And yet? You must.

You need to share about yourself and your programs because your imperfection is what makes you so compelling.

It took me forever to realize that getting my Oregon Ducks-in-a-row is a negative.

But then I learned that getting your ducks in a row takes time. It takes more time than if you just put your thoughts into the world. When you realize that, for the most part nobody cares, you allow yourself the ability to do it until you find the people that care in a positive way.

It’s the philosophy of the man in the arena.

It might be a more exposed experience to put your thoughts out into the world and then watch your team lose, but you have to be willing to get sacked a few times to throw a touchdown.

Nobody ever contributed by standing on the sidelines all game long. And the coaches and leaders in college sports who aren’t contributing to the narrative are standing on the sidelines in a non-normal coaching way.

And I’m not even asking you to be polarizing. Just be yourself.

I happen to like watching ducks out of formation, doing their own thing anyway.

Jayson reads another book.

The book I’m reading currently is another mind-blower.

It’s called “The Courage to Be Disliked” by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. The book’s format is… interesting. It’s in a conversational style between a youth and a philosopher. Take a look at this section, paying attention to the highlighted portion:

It is so much easier to live in the safe zone where your armor is impervious to the arrows of critique. This, though, is antithetical to the life of a person in college sports.

And like the section above, sometimes it’s easier to live in the preseason when everything is possible and nobody’s taken a loss that snaps their team back to reality.

You were built for the wins and losses.

And you were built to share your story. Because for every human that says “her story just isn’t for me,” there are dozens who find that your story resonates.

Back to the book.

If you hear one thing…

The recovering perfectionist in me sees the passage above and remembers that none of this is set in stone.

Your life is on one of billions of paths.

Had I not emailed a college coach as a teenager… moved 1000 miles from home… become a better lacrosse player… turned into a coach… met video people filming our team that liked rock climbing… drove to the only rock climbing gym in South Florida on a regular basis… put a photo of me climbing looking “so cool” on Hinge… matched with a girl on Hinge… found out that her roommate also climbs at the same gym… married the roommate... and on and on and on.

I could have easily been living solo in the woods of Montana, but all of that happened instead. Try. Fail. Learn. Move on. Over and over.

Were some dreams shattered along the way? Yes. But that’s no reason to stop dreaming and stop doing.

Consider this: maybe you were meant to see this post.

You’ve been worried about what others will think if you start sending your thoughts, beliefs, or mission out to the world. Maybe you’ll be ridiculed. Maybe they’ll say “that’s not really who she is.”

Or maybe they won’t.

Maybe they’re so busy in their own madness that what you do doesn’t even register. Therefore the thing you’ve been worrying about was never an issue in the first place.

Always finding excuses is a hard way to live.

Had you not seen this post, maybe you wouldn’t have started posting your thoughts… Which led to you building your brand… which led to a clearer belief system and more success in your program… which led to another job with more resources… which led to another… and another.

While the purpose of life is being true to yourself — and not bigger/better/more — maybe you were meant to advance freely to chase everything in your future.

And it starts with shipping the work.

Thanks for reading.

My name is Jayson Schmidt and I run this little newsletter. I’m a former NCAA Division II head coach, brand strategist across college sports, and I’m now the head of marketing at FanWord — an AI tool for storytelling in college sports.

I’m on a mission to share the future with every stakeholder in athletics, because I’ve seen the impact, both in my own lacrosse program and countless others as a strategic consultant.

Two things I loved from @FSC_WLAX on Insta

Jayson Schmidt — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 15:11:20 GMT

Today we’re taking a look at a pair of posts I saw recently from the Florida Southern College women’s lacrosse program’s Instagram account.

To be fair, I don't get on Instagram often — for a social media guy, scrolling videos isn’t really my cup of tea. But when I do, I’ll often see content from teams.

Especially those like Florida Southern, who we played every year during my time as a head coach at Palm Beach Atlantic. Back in my day (lol), they were the cream of the crop. 2016 National Champions and a favorite to boatrace my first-year program by 90.

It wasn’t that bad, but it was close.

At any rate, they’ve maintained a standard of success that culminated in another NCAA Division II title last spring. Let’s take a look at their account:

This isn’t a profile audit, but I think there are always a few takeaways. Here are three:

While you can’t beat “2026 National Champions” in the bio, I’d probably drop the national runner up and conference tournament champions lines. “9x SSC Champs” hits harder and leaves room for something about who we are, not what we’ve done.
Link in bio goes right to Coach Reber’s prospect day registration page. Love this. The goal is to convert attention — which they have a lot of as reigning D2 champs — into signed athletes. And the first step in doing that is getting them to an event for an evaluation.
I wish they had graphics for the story highlights, but I can get down with the alternating colors. This is prime real estate above the scroll and we want to grab attention.

Now on to the good stuff…

Really smart post #1

This post is all about academics. We’re student-athletes, right?

You get a glance at the team’s academic prowess (twelve 4.0 athletes, composite team GPA), and carousel slides 2-15 break it down by major:

Not only do you see who’s an accounting major, you see their faces.

One of the major questions any recruit is asking themselves when evaluating a potential fit is, “how would I fit in here?” Of course, this is balanced by a multitude of other factors like merit and need-based scholarships, proximity to home, and what major they want to choose.

But if all things are considered equal, a prospective student-athlete that wants to major in sports management will look at this and see their future teammates who will show them the way.

This is a simple yet powerful tool that gives PSAs one more opportunity to see themselves inside your program.

It got 75 shares. Translation: 75 human beings sent the post to 75 other human beings. Some of whom are parental decision-makers (what a mega post for them). Wild.

This is a post with staying power. It’ll work all year long (which is why it’s pinned). I give this post an A++++.

Really smart post #2

The Mocs posted this one three days ago and I think it’s BRILLIANT.

Welcome to the world of college sports, where super-cool-gameday-photos and polished content reign supreme. Except for this. Creating the dichotomy of polished versus real does so much work here.

To break it down, we’ve got our public story with the beautiful polished stuff and the private story with reality. You know the private story as ‘Close Friends’ on Instagram. We’ll loop back around to that in a second.

One of the carousel slides is the best of the bunch. I’ll add it again here:

Public: “We won a national championship.”
Private: “Face masks and neck pillows on the plane home.”
(Still wearing that national championship shirt, I might add.)

As a dominant top-ten program in women’s college lacrosse for over a decade, you certainly get a ton of benefits from that. But it also has its drawbacks. You get the best of the recruits, but you also have recruits asking themselves:

Will I survive here?
Is this place intimidating?
Are these kids mutants?

Winning is central to the program, but it’s not the only thing. And this goes a long way toward undoing the feeling that a winning program is unapproachable.

I also give this post an A++++. Maybe ++++++ on top.

Bonus: The private story

If you’re a recruit seeing that post, you’re also thinking one very major thing…

“They have a private story?”

As a caveat, I don’t know if Florida Southern actually does or if it was just a post concept. But I have seen lots of other programs around the country utilize private stories for recruits. Here’s what it does… it creates a velvet rope feeling.

If you’re a recruit, you now know there’s a version of this team that only certain people get to see… and you would very much like to be one of those people.

Of course, that consideration drives a recruit to action if they’re on the outside looking in. So now you’ve got more recruits reaching out, a larger pipeline, and therefore (as a championship program) better recruits in the next few classes.

Scarcity creates action.

Both of these posts are Florida Southern taking their champion reputation and purposefully poking at it. Being a winner only gets you so far.

But being normal. Being human. Being students.

That works for them.

And it should work for you too, because you don’t need a national championship trophy to run either of these plays. You just need a photo dump of posts and a willingness to buck the norm.

I’ll leave you with this: What’s the last post your program made that had nothing to do with results? A post about “who we are” instead of “what we’ve done”?

Thanks for reading.

I’m on a mission to share the future with every stakeholder in athletics, because I’ve seen the impact, both in my own lacrosse program and countless others as a strategic consultant.

The platforms are begging you to experiment

Jayson Schmidt — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:47:08 GMT

Nobody remembers your flops

It’s Jayson Schmidt here, your friendly branding buddy from The Future of College Sports, reminding you that in the world of content, there’s no such thing as a bad attempt.

I mean sure, are there things we wish we could do better? Always.

But trying is better than perfectionism. And I’m coming for you if you’ve ever deleted a piece of content that didn’t perform.

But I get it.

You post a reel to your team or personal account. You had a weird feeling about it — and maybe because social is out of your lane to begin with. You posted it anyway… and watched it crawl to a meager 340 views, all while Mediocre State’s just posted a reel that boomed to 40k views.

So then, after letting it sit there, you said “ah this wasn’t worth it” or “this is embarrassing” and you quietly deleted it.

Don’t.

Choosing to swing

In social media as in the locker room, it’s important to have a short memory after a bad performance. Thankfully, that’s how social media treats your underperforming content. One bad post doesn’t doom your account. Like the next game, you’re ready to go in search of another W.

YouTube, for example, explicitly says that an individual video underperforming does not penalize a channel overall. Its recommendation systems use fresh performance data for individual videos rather than simply deciding, “This account had a bad Tuesday, bury everything they post next.”

There is an important distinction here. If people consistently stop watching your content over time, platforms can and do learn from that behavior. But one swing and a miss? You’re good.

In fact, your audience probably doesn’t remember the flop either.

Why?

Think about your meager 340 views and what that actually means. It means most people never saw it.

Meanwhile, just-freaking-trying can create enormous upside. History (and YouTube) is littered with people who should have never hit home runs, but chose to swing and did something crazy.

One post that connects with your audience will out-deliver months of safe or boring content. Think of it this way: every account you’ve ever seen that did something cool got there by taking swings that missed. And you never saw them. But now you’re DM’ing their posts to your friends.

In the game of social, losing costs you virtually nothing.

This is the way.

Don’t think, just experiment

It’s the title of this post for a reason.

The platforms want you to try things you wouldn’t normally try. And I get it — more posts = more content in the hamster-death-wheel of lifesucking engagement on their apps. They’re biased. But that doesn’t mean you can’t play into it, especially when these apps are increasingly giving accounts the ability to take risks.

Instagram’s trial reels are probably the best example of this.

Trial reels allow you to publish a reel to non-followers first. It stays out of your followers’ feed, reels tab, and public profile grid during the trial. In Jayson Schmidt Lacrosse Coach terms, it’s a scrimmage. No harm, no foul. Just opportunities to build on what you’ve done previously.

After about a day, IG gives you the numbers in terms of view count, likes, comments, shares. You then get to decide whether the reel deserves a bigger audience. IG can also do this automatically. It’s the Jayson Schmidt Lacrosse Coach version of promoting a player to your active roster after seeing what they can do in practice.

We love to see it. 👏

And so does Instagram, for the record. Their data shows that when accounts are given the ability to experiment via trial reels, 40% of them started posting more frequently. 80% of them saw increased reach from non-followers. Turns out removing the fear of failure makes people create more and do good things.

(There’s a coach out there that needed to hear this.)

For what it’s worth, both TikTok and YouTube have similar discovery philosophies, meaning that your content does not need to live or die based solely on your existing followers. The algorithms are smart and they’ll match pieces of content to the people they believe might actually want to watch them on a one-by-one basis. Then they’ll learn from how those viewers respond with skips, shares, likes, etc.

I guess if I had to give you a TL;DR, it’s that you should worry less about your recruits or followers seeing something and thinking it’s “omg so cringe.”

Chances are, they won’t even be the first to see it.

Here are a few tips on how to do this well…

1. Build experimentation into the gameplan

Simply put, if you’re posting on social in any regular format, aim for an 80/20 split.

80% of your content lives in proven buckets. These are the things and ideas you execute on consistently. The other 20%? You have my full permission to gEt wEirD.

That means new trends, editing abnormally, testing a different hook/opening, letting your freshmen be hilarious and naive.

When you can, just run those little experiments as trial reels and when something hits, elevate it to the big leagues. Or just elevate it from the jump. It’s just social media. None of this truly matters in the long run. We’ll all be forgotten one day anyway — your program is yours to have fun with.

But you never know. Maybe today’s experiment is tomorrow’s content bucket. The only thing left to do is try.

And I’ll say one other thing as a philosophy on content creation, which you can believe in yourself or preach to the assistant/GA/student-athlete running your account: you will never be “in trouble” if a post flops.

As long as it’s clean — meaning appropriate for a college sports team account — it’s okay to take risks. This is something that I see preach constantly to his team of creators. And it works.

Because fear produces beige content.

And beige content produces nothing. It’s blanddd. And the next homeowner (or coach) to come along will paint over it.

2. Never delete, just diagnose

Remember this: a low-performing post isn’t necessarily bad content. It’s just data.

YouTube actually gives creators a useful way to think about content performance through three basic signals:

Appeal: Did someone choose to watch?
Engagement: Once they started watching, did they stick around?
Satisfaction: After watching, did they actually enjoy it?

That gives you a little clearer picture than “that reel sucked.”

It’s possible nobody stopped scrolling. That’s an appeal problem. Maybe the weather was really good that morning and nobody was on their phones? But if it’s a trend over multiple pieces, maybe we try a different hook, subject, or first frame.

It’s possible people started watching and immediately left. That’s an engagement problem. Think about pacing, length, or when the payoff comes:

Pacing: Start fast with quick changes or edits and then slow down or settle in as needed.
Length: Unless it’s intentionally longer-form video, remember short attention spans. Either do more editing or split pieces into a multi-part series.
Payoff: You can tease the payoff early or deliver it in a reasonable timeframe, but don’t put your best clips at the end of a 0:47 reel. The people won’t get there to see it.

Maybe people watched the whole thing but didn’t engage. That’s a different consideration entirely. Most importantly, a reel that bombs won’t provide a clear answer, but it will give you a small clue as to why something didn’t perform.

3. No comparison game allowed

I think this is so especially important in college sports.

Yeah, Mediocre State got 40k views and you did 340. Okay. Were the videos actually competing for the same audience? Maybe theirs was a crazy play or a trend jumped on at the right time, while yours was a culture video intended for a much narrower audience…

Does it really matter if you got 340 views when the 10 recruits you care about most saw the post?

If you rely too much on universal benchmarks, you function less like a sport program with goals and more like a marketing department. It doesn’t matter if your rival is crushing on social. It’s possible they hit the right topic or caught their unique audience at the right time.

Your best benchmark is your own account. Look at your recent posts and ask yourself curious questions like:

Did this hook work? Did it outperform the last five hooks?
Did this video of a student-athlete talking directly to the camera hold attention longer than some super cool polished edit?
Do recruits engage more with day-in-the-life content?
Does humor do better than hype?

I have answers to all of these from a best practices perspective, but the point is that for your unique scenario, there’s no right answer. I found that humor did much better than hype for my program back in the day, but it’s because we were promoting an environment of freedom where our kids got to play fast, fun, and free.

That probably wouldn’t work for the school down the road… whose coach I could hear screaming at their players from another county.

You do you.

In closing, the teams that win this are the teams that iterate

I’ve written before that everyone on social media is guessing.

You. Me. USC. Michigan. Texas. The brands with trillion-dollar budgets.

Experience makes the guesses better. Like in the baseball example earlier in this post, the more you step into the batter’s box, the more you’ll see pitches. And yes, you’ll strike out. But you’ll also know what pitches to hit over time.

(The lacrosse player in me is holding on for dear life with these baseball analogies. Waiting for myself to get dinged by the pitcher.)

The program that takes 50 thoughtful swings this semester gets 50 opportunities to learn something about its audience, from recruits to parents, fans, donors, and future transfers.

The program that takes eight careful, approved-by-everyone swings gets eight.

Now hear me on this: don’t post garbage for the sake of volume. More does not always equal better. There’s no reward for publishing more often. /caveat over

But if you had the choice between eight and 50, just try something. See what happens. Learn. Adjust. Swing again.

Taking the analogy back to something I actually know something about, my best shooters on the lacrosse field were the ones who took a lot of shots. I’m thinking of our first-teamer who would go 2-for-11 and I never told her to stop shooting because I knew she would figure it out.

What’s the message on the sideline? The next one is going in.

Your content deserves the same coaching. 🏆

Thanks for reading.

I’m on a mission to share the future with every stakeholder in athletics, because I’ve seen the impact, both in my own lacrosse program and countless others as a strategic consultant.

The Future of the Job: SID

Jayson Schmidt — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 21:06:24 GMT

Hey there. It’s time for a new series titled The Future of the Job, where I make predictions and glance at where I think college sports is headed. Each time, I’m framing it by asking myself, what will this role actually look like in 2030?

We start with the venerable ole’ SID.

There’s a job posting open in a tab on my second monitor right now.

It’s for a sports information director. At least that’s what we used to call them. Now they’re something along the lines of a Director of Athletic Communications.

They’ll always be an SID to me. 😒

Here’s what the posting said they were responsible for, at an NCAA Division III school:

Leading media relations, branding, digital content, and storytelling efforts that elevate the visibility and reputation of the department
Overseeing the accurate and timely management of sports statistics
Day to day administration of the athletics website and social media platforms
Content strategy
Brand positioning
Coordination of media coverage
Production of game programs and media guides
Serving as the liaison between Athletics and the Office of Communications and Marketing

[Moment of prayer for a livable wage.]

The list is getting longer every year, it seems like, but it hasn’t always been that way.

If we go back to my playing days (a mere 15 or so years ago), most of those responsibilities weren’t on the list. 25 years ago, when a lot of veteran SIDs got their start? The differences were even more striking.

In the time since, we’ve seen a major evolution. Athletics websites came onto the scene and changed the way we tell stories. Then social media. Now there’s a holistic strategy where an SID operates more like a CMO.1

The times have changed.

The writing half of the job is evolving.

I’m thinking of a small-school sports information director.

He’s really good at what he does. He is a phenomenal long-form feature writer, cares deeply, and always shows up. He likes doing things his way. The work is predictable for him and the output is always on time.

Maybe he sounds like you, or somebody you know.

In the past, which is as recently as a few years ago, the traditional SID workload was maybe 70% writing and production. This includes gameday stuff like sitting at the scorer’s table, setup/teardown, writing game recaps, press releases, updating the record book, and posting on social.

In a lot of ways, it was grunt work that had to be done by a human… and the guy I’m thinking of thrived in that environment.

But there’s an alternative now.

AI can now draft recaps from a box score. It’ll also produce website player bios, weekly award nominations, you name it.
Automated systems will send stats where they need to go (including straight to sportsbooks. Eep.).
The postgame interview audio and video can become a million different content assets in an afternoon.
Livestream clips are on Instagram before you can shout “all hail the algorithm.”

I see it on a daily basis at FanWord, where we’ve built a suite of AI tools to help ease the load SIDs carry. Technology is changing things. It’s a very real conversation. And while I know a ton of people don’t want to have it, the role is going to continue to evolve whether we talk about it or not.

If we can agree that the manual layer of the SID is being replaced by tools, then it’s important to consider not just what the role is, but what it should be.

Especially when the evolution is happening faster than almost anywhere else in the department.

Just wait until the field maintenance crew gets a few of these!

The SID becomes a curator.

Last week, I mentioned that if you aren’t telling your story, somebody else is telling it for you. Short translation: every athletic department is now a media company.

If it wasn’t clear, you are now fighting for eyeballs.

It comes in the form of an attention war with other colleges — or the concept of going to college itself. Social media will always have something more enthralling. I’ll open Instagram to check metrics for somebody and will snap out of it three minutes later wondering why I opened the app in the first place.

Or it’s any app entirely. Ask Brendan Sorsby or those sportsbooks I mentioned a minute ago.

No matter if you’re a full department or a sport program, it’s your job in the fight for attention to show up consistently (publish), compete for attention (do it with quality), and monetize your audiences (help them take the next step).

A lot of departments have accepted this reluctantly, the way you accept weather.

But in the same way that the weatherman has a better idea of what’s coming, that’s going to be the future role of the SID. It’s arguable that there won’t be anyone more dialed in to the changing winds, especially when monetizing audiences means new recruits, donors, partnerships, and digital ad revenue.

In corporate publishing, marketing, and advertising, there is this position.

It’s called an editor.

They’re the people who decide on a macro level which stories are the most important. They protect the voice of the brand/magazine/agency/client. They set the standard and don’t deviate when deadlines approach. And they develop great storytellers.

They curate the future.

Departments have been asking overloaded SIDs to be the damn printing press, when I’m over here like “hey, just be the guy or gal that watches the Gutenberg Bible fly out the door.”

These are two radically different asks.

The 2030 SID.

Our 2030 SID runs more like a little futurist-in-chief. But they really live in four lanes:

They run a proverbial newsroom of both students and tools.
While one could argue that the newsroom of old is long dead, the idea behind it is still alive. Only this time, the clickety-clack on the keyboard is done by AI, grad assistants, and student workers. The SID’s value is judgment, taste, and quality control. Again, curate taste.

They set the brand and content strategy.
They help decide what direction the department is going, not only this year but for consecutive years, and how to make it happen. As I said last week, weaving the same branding thread over 4+ years is a game-changer on a department level.

Any kind of long-range vision is most certainly an improvement over reactively covering whatever happened in last night’s games, though.

They own relationships across campus.
Much to the chagrin of some introverted SIDs, the owned relationships are with everybody on campus. This includes the athletes who trust them with their stories, with coaches, with local media, with the community.

The future of athletics relationship-building isn’t just an AD chair or development thing.

They speak revenue.
Sharp brands in college sports these days are worth their weight in gold. Their content drives attendance, engagement, donor dollars, and sponsorship value. And Lord knows that departments need money these days. My backup third baseman’s gotta get paidddd.

The SID that can connect storytelling to revenue moves from providing a service to becoming a strategic, monopoly-man-pay-raise kind of asset for the department. Which sounds like a wealthy, important future. 🥂

What does this mean for you?

If you’re an SID.
The skills to drill down on are the human ones. Become a curator of good things. Your judgment, relationship building, and comfort with AI tools allow you to become the person who orchestrates. The SIDs who master that combination in the next two years will be shockingly hard to keep in whatever role they currently hold.

If you’re an athletic director.
Staffing for communications has shifted. The future is changing the lift for SIDs, and you must hire for specific archetypes (as you can see in the paid section below) that are going to drive engagement and revenue forward. Investing in communications-as-storytelling is where athletic brands win in future years.

If you’re a coach.
I was you. I remember wanting things and not getting them. That’s now water under the bridge. Good SIDs are about to have more capacity to tell your program’s story than at any point in the profession’s history. The coaches who reinforce that relationship now and bring them story ideas/access/gratitude will be first in line.

#ProTip for SIDs: Start by creating a document that is a story bank for ideas. A little scratch pad. You don’t need to over-format it, just log every interesting athlete note and human moment you hear about. It takes literally one minute.

When your hours in the day shrink (hello crossover season), you can still tell stories because you’ll have a year of material waiting in the form of ideas.

And you’ll look like a genius for being prepared… which you were the whole time.

P.S. Maybe in the future, we’ll figure out how to solve and automate record book keeping so SIDs can have their summer back. Until then, premium content below and see ya next time. 🫡

The four archetypes of SIDs.

Thanks for reading.

I’m on a mission to share the future with every stakeholder in athletics, because I’ve seen the impact, both in my own lacrosse program and countless others as a strategic consultant.

If you don't tell your story, somebody else is telling it for you

Jayson Schmidt — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 01:31:08 GMT

For most athletic departments, storytelling isn’t part of the job anymore.

It is the job.

Everything else, from the wins to the “culture” and your facilities, only counts to one of two groups of people:

The hardworking people making it happen on campus
The people who somehow find out about it

And in this day and age, finding out about you is a storytelling problem. Even winning programs exist in relative anonymity.

It’s a claim that I was able to make last week in the first of two Zoom trainings with and his communications team at Friends University.

Now, I’ve got to hand it to Rob. We’ve worked together for a long time and I appreciate his vision for what an athletic department can be. Everything I am about to tell you, he champions within the department. I consider that to be rare. So if you’re ever in the hunt for real people doing the real challenging work of running a college athletic department, he’s worth a DM.

In the time since we started, his department has seen millions of views — and while vanity metrics aren’t as valuable as heads-in-beds or larger/better rosters — it’s a signal that yes, with energy, you can make an impact in storytelling.

They’re no stranger to the idea that branding builds championships, but they do have a new crop of young talent this year that needs a primer for the year ahead.

Which brings me back to the presentation and a line in the first slide…

If you don’t tell your story, somebody else is telling it for you.

That somebody-else usually tells it badly. And if you’ve ever been in a recruiting battle, it’s even worse.

Let’s dive in.

Friends University has a beautiful campus in the fall. Majestic.

Storytelling = survival in 2026.

Every program has a story. Your community has a story. The only real question is whether you're the one telling it, on purpose, every day.

You have to ask yourself three questions:

Who are you?
Where are you headed?
Why does it matter?

This isn’t a one-time thing you do in August where you laminate it and stick it in a drawer. You do it daily. You answer those three questions on a loop, in public, until the answer is boring to you and brand new to the next recruit who finds you.

The trap for every department or program is that most don’t take the time to drill down into who they really are. They answer with vanilla, when they should be strawberry. Or at least Neapolitan. If you say: We’ve got a great community. We’re a family. We’re headed toward success. It matters because… winning?

That’s not really an identity.

I mentioned to the people at Friends (because I can’t help it) that it’s like when I submit my Survivor casting tape every year.

If you say “oh I’m really competitive” or “I’ll outlast anybody in an immunity challenge” that doesn’t do much for a casting team that hears the same answers from 20,000 other casting tapes.

You have to be you. Good, bad, ugly. Because maybe imperfect *you* is exactly what Survivor is looking for.

(Fingers crossed on my tape.)

But the same applies to schools across America. Oh, you’re a faith-based institution? Great. There are 1,000 of those. What else? What makes you different? What makes you special?

For a school like Friends, they’ve never been about the generic. Their answers have always been specific and a little polarizing — high-achieving, culture-driven, holistic in training up both coaches and student-athletes, and rooted in faith.

“A little polarizing” is exactly the point.

To me, when your story is crystal clear, some people are going to say “this isn’t for me”.

Good. That's the system working.

When the wrong recruit, the wrong parent, the wrong donor bounces off your message, they're clearing the runway for the right ones — the people who lean in because you were brave enough to stand for something in particular. You do not want to be for everyone.

For-everyone is milquetoast.

In 2026, everything’s coming up milquetoast.

(You already know this if you’ve ever tried to build a roster out of “anyone who’ll show up.” I have. Ask me how the culture turned out. I wrote a post about this once… see below.)

75% show. 25% tell.

As you figure out who you are, where you’re headed, and why it matters, you have a decision to make. “How do I want to broadcast this to the world?”

This is the part that a lot of departments fall back on, with things like mission statements and graphics. Uh oh… I feel another Simpsons gif coming on…

Say it with me… you don’t win friends with graphics!

Telling people with ‘branded’ content is fine, but it shouldn’t represent more than a quarter of your content strategy. If we’re looking at percentages, you want 75% of your strategy to be show and 25% tell.

That is, 75% of the time, show it with your student-athletes and coaches. They’re the living proof of what you believe.

Tactically speaking, this means two things:

When an athlete or coach does something great on campus or in their sport, tell that story in the third person (from the department’s perspective).
When they’re just being themselves, or telling a story only they can tell, hand them the mic and let them tell it first person (from their perspective).

Teams will lose. People will leave. Even your best season ends. None of that is the story. The story is what happens underneath. The good, the bad, the loud, quiet, fiery. All of it.

Your story travels three ways.

Three channels. Everything you do fits into one of them.

1. Social media is your reach. This is the top of the funnel, and where a lot of departments already spend all their energy. Raw reach has never been the goal… but you can get the right reach if you pick one clear identity and post on-theme long enough that the algorithm learns who to push in your direction.

A program that posts recognizable, consistent content gets fed to the recruits who’ve already told the platform they care about something (algorithm 101). A program that posts random stuff gets filtered out, no matter how clean the edits.

Consistency beats polish.

2. Long-form storytelling is your depth. Social media creates curiosity. Long-form creates connection with feature pieces, recruiting pages, player Q&As, newsletters, mini-docs — the stuff people bookmark and watch or read a few times before coming on campus.

It’s also where your differentiation finally has room to breathe. You can’t be specific and a little polarizing in a six-second clip. You can in a long-form story. This is the most underused channel in college athletics.

3. Intentional events are your proof. The story you tell online has to match the one people feel when they show up. Gameday, visit days, senior night, the give-back community moment nobody outside your town heard about — design them as a living representation of your brand from the start, and less like a string of logistics you scramble to replicate down the road. It’ll be easier to do again and again.

The in-person experience is the highest-trust version of your story. From the perspective of a recruit or parent, it’s also the one they repeat to each other in the car on the way home.

In the Year of our Lord 2026, I believe that somewhere north of 75% of departments and programs treat ‘content’ as social media. The ones who win balance social, long-form, and events. Especially with the advent of AI. In a world where nothing may truly be validated as “real”, we are going to see the rise of intentional events matter more than ever.

Tell it consistently for five years and you win.

The departments that win tell the same story, consistently, over a long period of time.

I saw it as a coach by year four. Recruiting classes and current student-athletes all on the same page. It’s a beautiful thing when it happens, but it’s hard to do.

Five years of change-free messaging is rare in this business. Everybody chases the rebrand or the new tagline or the game-changing campaign. Or people leave for other jobs and the thread from year to year walks out the door.

That’s the reason why Friends wanted to do this year’s trainings. No deviation from the plan, just new faces to make it happen.

Which is exactly why consistency is an edge that’s right there in front of you.

The departments that win the next decade won’t be the loudest or the richest. They’ll be the ones brave enough to be somebody in particular. They’ll be the ones to answer who are you, where are you headed, why does it matter with a real answer, and then say it out loud until the right people find them.

You will repel the people that aren’t supposed to be there.

And attract the ones that are.

Without doing anything out of the ordinary.

To me? That’s winning.

Not to mention the winning on the field, and stuff, too.

A final note.

None of this requires a bigger budget than your conference peers.

It requires a clearer story than they have… and the nerve to tell it every day with the whole building in lockstep with you.

Like a giant run club that’s become all the rage.

On second thought, maybe not.

Thanks for reading.

I’m on a mission to share the future with every stakeholder in athletics, because I’ve seen the impact, both in my own lacrosse program and countless others as a strategic consultant.

Storytelling as told by Survivor: People are everything

Jayson Schmidt — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:19:02 GMT

I shot this post out into the Substack-verse the other day.

If you recall, I am a bit of a Survivor freak.

I watched the show from day one as an 11 year old in the summer of 2000. A few years later, I went away to college and did college things, but inevitably, things come back around.

By 2018, I was a Division II head coach, and our team practiced two hours every evening. I'd inevitably drone on at the end and one of my players would say something along the lines of, "Come on coach. Survivor's on at 8."

At the time, my first thought was: "Survivor's still on?"

But something about trying to be more concise as a head coach, and actually leaving the facility at a reasonable hour on Wednesday nights, made me curious enough to turn it back on.

And I immediately fell back in love.

In the time since, I have spent far too much time thinking about Survivor, creating my own birthday Survivor competition, and applying to be on the show every year.

Survivor is a microcosm of life — perception, randomness, competition, reading people. It got me thinking.

What might be the takeaways from a reality television juggernaut that has lasted 50+ seasons and 26 years? Clearly they’re doing something right.

Survivor is — and I mean this with full sincerity — the greatest sustained storytelling operation in television history. Nothing else is close.

Which of course is why you’re here, even if you’ve never watched an episode. Because a show doesn’t survive a quarter century on backstabbing alone. To me, it survives on a storytelling craft that also transfers directly to anyone trying to make people care about their program or athletic department.

So here we go.

This series is truly all in service to me and my passion for Survivor.

But I hope you can glean something.

TLDR: My name is Jayson Schmidt and I love watching people stab each another in the back while physically malnourished. And then have to run a giant obstacle course. Let’s do thissss. 🔥

Storytelling Rule #1: People are everything.

Here’s the basic Survivor template: take great characters, put them in provocative dilemmas, and you have a recipe for decades of success.

The template isn’t necessarily the island, the challenges, the twists, the idols, or the torches. All of that is the backdrop. A stage with its own structure, if you will, for the moments that the people make. Jayson’s winner pick (always) gets eliminated. Underdogs rise. Rugs get pulled in the most satisfying way.

The structure creates the moments.

But the moments only matter because of the people they happen to. The same blindside vote executed against a nobody is fun but otherwise uneventful. Executed against someone the viewers have fallen for? It’s an event people talk about forever.

Survivor’s producers understood this from the very first season, even though they may not have known what they were doing initially. But the truth still remains: the beach is a set and the people are the show.

The college sports translation is that your program has a backdrop too.

It’s your facilities, schedule, uniforms. Heck, even the wins.

I’ve seen programs pour their entire budget into the proverbial backdrop and wonder why nobody’s emotionally invested.

Say it with me now… nobody 👏 falls 👏 in 👏 love 👏 with 👏 a 👏 locker 👏 room.

But they do fall in love with the kids that use it.

This is why, if you post a facility video without humans, set to music only, I will personally arrive on your front door and wave my finger in your face.

Survivor casts good narrators.

Jeff Probst, not looking a day over 40. Beast.

Here’s where we can draw some parallels.

Survivor Casting — who needs to see my application — is looking for great narrators. Their job gets so much easier on the backend in the editing booth when they put great storytellers into the environment.

Notice I didn’t say that they cast for any of the following:

Who is the biggest
Who is the strongest
Who is the smartest
Who might win the game

They want people who will tell good stories from their perspective while playing the game. Things like what they’re feeling, the risk they’re taking, or why so-and-so is a damn coconut head.

A physically dominant player who can’t articulate their journey is nearly useless to the show. But the underdog? Who comes across as a little mediocre but has you right there with them in every confessional? Well, that person is reality TV gold.

I’m constantly dreaming of how I would crush these challenges — ask my wife who is probably eyerolling somewhere.

I understand that not everything is about storytelling.

You do naturally want the biggest and the fastest in the recruiting world if you can help it. These are college sports that award a national champion, after all.

But this is meant to help you win the branding game so you can win real games, so therefore: your players need to be great storytellers.

We have the data — prospective student-athletes most closely trust your team to tell them how your program really is. Not the locker room or sweeeeet graphics or even the coaching staff. Having student-athletes that can articulate not only who you are but also tell it in a captivating way is worth its weight in Survivor prize money.

This starts with your ability to identify storytellers ~~in the casting process~~… I mean on the recruiting trail. 😅

What does this mean for you?

First, an eval — who are the kids in your program or department that are magnetic?

You know who I’m talking about. They’re the ones that people naturally flock to. They’re somehow compelling in every way. Sometimes they’re your best player, but most of the time, they’re not. Either way, you need to get them involved in your social media. Let them be your voice.

It’s a sliding scale. You’ve got at least one of them. At worst, even the driest program has a more compelling kid than the rest.

If Survivor would build the edit around them, you know you’re good.

That’s a day-one move.

The longer-term vision is to begin to pay attention to storytelling in your recruiting strategy. You already assess loads of traits, from character to grades to athleticism to whether they acknowledge people in the halls. Next time you’re with a recruit, ask yourself, “Can this person tell a story?”

On a visit or a call, give them an open-ended question and let them run.

Now hear me. I’m not saying that the quiet or nervous kid doesn’t have a place in your program. Character always wins over charisma. (Sorry, rizzzzzzz.) Those players will always have a home choosing to lead by example.

But between two comparable recruits, the one who can articulate the bigger picture and advocate for the program becomes:

a leader
a future recruiter
your culture, in walking form
probably a podcast host in their late 20s

Not to mention the voice that probably helps you land your next super-recruit.

To summarize: great people… tell great stories… and change the game.

Next time on (Lessons from) Survivor — Rule #2: the single production device that generates almost the entire show, and how to build your program’s version of it. Survivor fans might already know where we’re headed. We’ll see next time.

Reply with your allegiance: Are you a Survivor person? And if so, who’s your favorite player ever? This information will be used for absolutely nothing except my delight. 🏝️

Thanks for reading.

I’m on a mission to share the future with every stakeholder in athletics, because I’ve seen the impact, both in my own lacrosse program and countless others as a strategic consultant.

Chalk Talk: Your “engagement rate” is like how loud your baseball fans get

Jayson Schmidt — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:57:22 GMT

Welcome to Chalk Talk 👨‍🏫 — this is a new, recurring series where I take a marketing or branding concept and distill it down to something that helps people in college athletics operate better.

It’s come to my attention that a lot of the things that I reference on a weekly basis in The Future of College Sports aren’t commonplace for somebody that doesn’t also sit in the marketing lane.

So let’s go demystify a marketing topic and find out it was a sports concept all along. Onward! 🎉

Today’s topic: Engagement Rate

No, I’m not talking about how many of my former players are getting engaged in a given year.

Though that number is through the roof. 💍

If you’ve ever sat in a meeting with someone in the department whose email signature includes the words external/digital/communications, you may have heard somebody drop the term engagement rate.

And it’s usually delivered with the confidence of someone quoting scripture. Even you look around confusedly and start making up your own verses (what up, 1 Lions 20:26… “thou shalt win the Super Bowl.”), I have good news.

You already understand it completely. Allow me to explain.

Engagement rate is how loud your stadium gets, adjusted for how many people showed up.

Stick with me here, I’m in a baseball mood because my fourth-place-Central-Division-but-climbing Detroit Tigers are up early on the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim of Orange County of California Angels as I write this.

Here’s hoping they will be when I finish. Anyway.

Picture two baseball venues.

Ballpark A holds 2,800 people and it’s full. Polite crowd. Golf claps. A smattering of applause on a nice play. Someone’s dad yells a few times.

Ballpark B is that one small-college field… and you all know what I’m talking about. It seats 800 people on bleachers, plus the moms and dads on those sweet rocking chairs.

You know what I mean. These are the Rolls Royce of comfort.

That little ‘ole park is also full, but it’s *deafening* for its size. Every hit and every out are opportunities for fans to lose their minds. And they have cowbells. Somehow. Students actually show up. The opposing team is having a bad time.

Which crowd tells you more about that program’s connection to its people?

Ballpark B, obviously. Not because it’s bigger. It’s obviously not. But because a higher *percentage* of the people present actually care.

That’s engagement rate. In social media, it’s not how many people saw your post (that’s like the seating capacity). It’s what share of them clapped, yelled, or told a friend to come.

The formula: likes, comments, shares, and saves — divided by the audience.

A 24,000-follower account whose posts get 90 likes is Ballpark A on a sleepy Tuesday night.
A 3,000-follower account with 400 likes and 39 comments is Ballpark B, and everyone would rather be Ballpark B.

While follower count might be a fun number to look at, it’s less important nowadays. How you engage with an algorithm-driven audience will set you, your program, or your department away from the competition.

An engagement breakdown.

Not all engagement is created equal and I want you to know the hierarchy:

👍 Likes — are like golf claps. Nice, cheap, low commitment.
💬 Comments — are like cheering. Someone stopped scrolling to say something. Platforms weigh these heavily, and so should you.
🔖 Saves — are like buying your 900,000th GAME to WATCH on FLOSPORTS. Sigh re: the commercialization of college sports. All ~~seriousness~~ jokes aside, saves signal intention that fans/users/humans want to come back to this, which means quality. It’s quietly one of the most powerful algorithm signals on Instagram.
📤 Shares — are dragging a friend to the game. This is the single strongest signal to the algorithm — someone staked a sliver of their own reputation on your content to say “hey, watch this” to another user.

What does this mean for you? When you review your content (which I suggest doing monthly), don’t just quick-scroll your recent posts and see what got the most likes. Go into your analytics and see what got shared and saved. That’s the content doing the most work and the content formats you should run back.

#ProTip: Don’t chase a universal “good” engagement rate benchmark off some marketing blog (except this one… so maybe 5% or higher, depending on your sport and circumstances). But truthfully, you gain the most awareness when you compare yourself to yourself.

Pull your last 15 posts, eyeball which three generated the most comments-plus-shares relative to reach, and make more of whatever those were.

That’s a full analytics strategy for a program with no analytics staff and it’s good enough (read: simple enough) to beat what half the “industry” does with dashboards.

17.2% engagement rate. Because photos of kids getting off the bus and playing hacky sack on a practice day will always perform. 💪

Why the sportcoat crowd loves this number.

The sportcoat and lapel pin NACMA crowd loves this number because it’s more honest in a way that some vanity metrics (like follower count) aren’t.

Followers can be old, inactive, accumulated during one viral moment in 2021, or purchased.

Not you, obviously. But... some people… many people, even. I see you. And I know.

Engagement rate can’t really be faked at any meaningful scale. It measures the live, current relationship between your program and your audience — which is why companies look at it before brand deals or NIL, why savvy ADs glance at it when evaluating their department’s strength in the community, and why a small school with a loud following should stop apologizing for its seemingly small digital follower count.

You don’t need the biggest stadium.

You need the loudest one.

That’s Chalk Talk, Vol. 1. Got a piece of brand or marketing jargon that deserves the treatment next? Reply and nominate it. 📣

Thanks for reading.

I’m on a mission to share the future with every stakeholder in athletics, because I’ve seen the impact, both in my own lacrosse program and countless others as a strategic consultant.

I know what you're doing right now.

Jayson Schmidt — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:42:18 GMT

I know what you’re doing right now.

Yes, you.

I can see you all the way from my desk here in Fort Lauderdale as I write this.

It’s clear as day.

You might think that 99% of people don’t notice.

But I do.

And as part of our pact here — where I share with you trends, best practices, and where the future of college sports is headed — I have a duty to make sure that you know that it’s not okay.

Okay, I’ll stop being cagey.

It’s time for you to start posting content to YouTube Shorts.

Scroll to the bottom or click here for a free six-step guide on how to get started. Normally for our paid tier — [Future+] — this section will be unlocked for the next month and is a valuable resource on how to get going.

No YouTube Shorts presence? You’re in good company.

The vast majority of college athletic programs don’t have a Shorts strategy, even if they have a YouTube account. And for some, even if you’ve forgotten the login (no judgement) or are vaguely aware that Shorts exists in the same way you’re vaguely aware you should be drinking more water.

(They know. They’re just not doing it.)

But I’m not here just to share Happy Gilmore GIFs and dunk on you. I’m here to tell you that the gap is an opportunity. Because the programs and departments that figure this out first are going to build a discoverability advantage that compounds.

And right now?

Most of your competition is asleep at the wheel.

First, a quick explainer.

YouTube Shorts is YouTube’s vertical video format, not actual shorts.

Think Instagram Reels or a TikTok, but living inside Google’s ecosystem instead of Meta’s.

It launched in 2020, has over 70 billion daily views globally, and is built directly into the YouTube app that over 50% of teenagers already use more than any other platform on a monthly basis.

Recruits are on it. Their parents are on it. And the bar for college athletics programs using it well is, at the moment, remarkably low.

It was in September 2024 when I write the piece below, and it still is.

Here’s what’s actually happening.

When your program posts a Short, it’s more than dropping a vertical video into another social feed, because you’re also depositing a content asset directly into Google’s search ecosystem.

Remember, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know: YouTube is owned by Google.

Everything you post there gets indexed or tracked (RIP your search history). And as AI-powered search tools like Gemini continue to become the default way people find information, that indexed content becomes something different than a fleeting social post.

It’s an asset and a way for your brand name to be discovered:

When a recruit’s parent Googles your program.
When an admitted student searches for what campus life actually looks like.
When a booster searches your coaching staff.

The programs and departments that have been consistently building a library of posts on Shorts are the ones that surface.

The ones that haven’t? They’re either not in the conversation or left to whatever is getting indexed by the big machine in the sky. ☁️☁️☁️

This is the part of the YouTube conversation that nobody in college athletics is really talking about, which is why (to me), it’s so important.

You can be a first-mover.

The content is already sitting in your camera roll.

No excuses, party people.

As much as you hear me talking about having a plan, you don’t need a “new” plan to be on YouTube Shorts. If you’re already creating vertical video for Instagram or TikTok — dorm tours, locker room walkthroughs, game-day hype clips, player Q&As — you have Shorts content ready to post. Right now.

The lift is smaller than a wide-eyed freshman lacrosse player in the weight room.

And by that, I mean me.

Drop it into YouTube with native captions (the auto-caption feature is solid)
Write a description that includes your school name, program name, and sport (if applicable)
Post it. Consistently.

That description matters more on YouTube than most platforms because it feeds the search index directly.

#ProTip: A caption that says “Big W 🔥” doesn’t help a recruit find you six months from now. “Senior night dub — Women’s volleyball at [School Name]” does.

This is, in fact, basic SEO. And almost nobody in college sports is doing it.

Practical takeaways.

Say a junior PSA is doing research in February.

She’s interested. She’s not on your Instagram quite yet. She types your school name and sport into Google.

If you have zero YouTube Shorts, you might surface. You might not. It’s not the end of the world.

Contrast that if you have forty Shorts posted over the last year — practice clips, culture content, facility walkthroughs — your program shows up in multiple places:

AI-generated answer summaries
Traditional search results
Video results
Image results (this is the importance of a good cover)

She gets a picture of your program before she’s ever emailed a coach.

The programs building this library now are earning discoverability that will compound well into future recruiting classes.

An aside that’s worth talking about.

I’ve never been one to say “get on this train or else!!”

I genuinely don’t think that, by not posting to YouTube Shorts, you’re going to be playing catch-up against a crowded field and will never be able to make up the difference. That’s a ludicrous take.

The people of college sports are a proud and potentially stubborn people.

There will be hundreds, nay thousands, of coaches, SIDs, and administrators that won’t care. Ever. And that’s a good thing.

As long as that’s the reality, and we can posit the following:

The advantage of moving early will always outweigh being late.
Even if you’re a late adopter, that’s still better than not moving at all.

We just simply don’t know where the world is headed and what will matter in a year, or two, or ten. But you might as well place your bets with conviction.

Free Preview: How-to deep dive

This is a free preview of our deep dive section, normally part of our paid tier [Future+]. New paid subs get 50% off with promo code OFFER50 — it’s $5.

1. This strategy is a sidecar move.

Posting on shorts doesn’t replace Instagram. Instagram remains the dominant content platform and the data has backed that up consistently.

But it does mean the “both-and” approach is the right one. Instagram for active reach. YouTube Shorts for search discoverability and long-tail visibility. Long-form YouTube for deeper program storytelling.

These don’t cancel each other out. They stack.

The programs and departments that win the next phase of digital attention will be the ones that treat content like infrastructure — built for today’s audience and tomorrow’s search results at the same time.

2. You don’t have to be current.

When I say that YouTube Shorts is great for search discoverability and long-tail visibility, it means that your old content is just as good.

My advice?

Take whatever old content you have and start posting it to YouTube Shorts. It doesn’t really matter how old it is.

Nobody searching "Lebanon Valley College softball" in 2027 cares that the clip is old. They care that it exists.

3. How-To Download Your Old Video/Photo Content

In the event that you no longer have those videos or photos or don’t want to re-create reels, you can download them.

Step 1: Click the three lines in the upper right of Instagram to go to Settings.
Step 2: Click Accounts Center — it should be the first option at the top.
Step 3: Click on the link that says ‘Your media gallery’.

This gives you access to any media you’ve posted on Instagram, Facebook, or Threads. Once you’ve found a video, click the download button to save it to your phone.

It’s that easy. 🎉

You can also do a mass-export of all of your information and content, but in my experience, it’s a bit overkill. It takes at least a week for them to prepare your file — and for some, up to one month. And then you get four days to download it.

4. The metadata cheat sheet.

This is where 90% of programs will get lazy, and it’s the entire reason the strategy works. YouTube can’t index what you don’t tell it. Here’s the formula:

Titles: [What the video is] + [School name] + [Sport]. Front-load the searchable stuff. Remember earlier in the post?

❌ “Big W 🔥”
✅ “Senior Night Win — UCSD Volleyball”
✅ “Inside Our Locker Room | Rollins Men’s Basketball”

Descriptions: Two to three sentences. Include your school name and sport. If you’re not a major D1 brand, city/state and conference help. Every one of those is a search term someone will eventually type.

“Game-day atmosphere at [School Name] women’s soccer in [City, State]. The [Mascots] compete in the [Conference] at the [Division] level. Follow along for behind-the-scenes access all season.”

That took 20 seconds to write and it will out-perform “🔥🔥🔥” in search results for the next billion years.

Hashtags: Not needed, but three is plenty. #Shorts, your school, your sport. YouTube reads the description for context.

Covers: Choose a thumbnail frame with a face or a recognizable campus/facility shot. Remember the image-results scenario from earlier — your cover is your image search result.

#ProTip: Save this as a template in your Notes app. Fill-in-the-blanks metadata takes under a minute per video once the template exists.

5. The 20-minute weekly workflow.

You do not need a Shorts content calendar. Just a 20-minute block every week or two. Here’s how I would do it:

Pick three clips you’ve already posted (or are about to post) on Instagram or TikTok. Download them or pull them from your camera roll.
Upload all three to YouTube Studio on desktop — it’s faster than mobile for batching multiple pieces at once.
Apply your metadata template to each one (see above).
Schedule them to publish across the week. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Done.

Three Shorts a week is roughly 150 a year. That’s a searchable library most of your conference won’t have built by 2030, and it costs you 20 minutes every Sunday or Monday.

BTW— Consistency beats volume here. One Short a week for a year beats 30 Shorts in August followed by silence. But you knew that. 😉

6. Judge it by the right scoreboard.

Fair warning: your first Shorts will get modest view counts, and someone — maybe yourself — will use that as evidence the whole thing is a waste of time.

They’re reading the wrong scoreboard. Lemme nerd it up for a second:

Open YouTube Studio → Analytics → a video’s Reach tab → Traffic sources.

The number to watch is the percentage coming from “YouTube search” and “Google search” — those are people who typed your school’s name and found you instead of whatever the internet decided to serve them. A Short with 400 views where 30% came from search is doing exactly the job you hired it for.

Also worth a look: the impressions count (how often YouTube showed your video as a result) and whether it climbs over time. Search-driven content is a slow burn by design.

Give it 90 days before you evaluate anything. This is a compounding asset, and compounding is famously boring.

But you know what isn’t boring? Winning elite recruits consistently and turning those recruiting wins into real wins and championships.

See you on Shorts. 📈

Get 50% off forever

Is your program active on YouTube Shorts? Curious whether this is on your radar — hit reply and let me know where you’re at with it.

Thanks for reading.

I’m on a mission to share the future with every stakeholder in athletics, because I’ve seen the impact, both in my own lacrosse program and countless others as a strategic consultant.

What's new in College Sports, July edition

Jayson Schmidt — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 22:59:04 GMT

Howdy, howdy, howdy.

We’re in the throes of summer and if you’re feeling just a bit restful, you can begin to think strategy about the 2026-27 year. In order to do that, you need to be on the up-and-up about the latest in social media, tech, and sports.

Because for all you know, Threads is still a thing.

(It’s not.)

But I like Threads. It’s quiet.

Kind of a serene-lake-on-a-summer-morning-in-Michigan kinda vibe.

Nothing more serene than trying and failing to have shaggy hair in 2006.

But it’s been a few months since I’ve done one of these, so let’s get right into it.

Okay, but Threads is a thing?

Turns out, Threads just crossed 500 million monthly active users, which puts it within striking distance of X. For a platform I keep threatening to abandon and never do, congrats Threads.

Here’s why it matters for you: the audience on Threads skews toward text-based, real-time conversation. It’s less saturated than Instagram and less hostile than X. If you’re a coach or SID who likes to write, this is a low-competition place to build a voice.

In fact, I feel like I have the most success when I post to a community, like what you see below. Normally, posting a photo of a baseball atlas into the void probably doesn’t get much engagement. But posted to MLB Threads? Better. ✅

Anyway — I’m not telling you to be there if you don’t want to be. But I *am* telling you that this quiet little lake has more people fishing on it than we all probably gave it credit for.

(I will continue my Threads campaign regardless. You knew that.)

Instagram wants you to stop chasing reach.

The biggest shift this summer isn’t a new feature, but rather a shift in how people consume content and how Instagram rewards creators for that.

Adam Mosseri (Insta CEO) said that you don’t “get reach” by trying to get reach. You get it when people engage with your content, and specifically when they share and save.

Here’s the lowdown on what’s new and what to do:

📊 “Your Algorithm” now covers your entire feed. It started with Reels, expanded to Explore, and as of June it’s on the main feed too. Users are telling Instagram exactly what topics they want to see, across every surface of the app.

What does this mean for you? Your content needs a clear, consistent topic identity. A program that posts recognizable, on-theme content will get surfaced to the recruits who’ve told Instagram they care about it. A program that posts random stuff will get filtered out, no matter how good the video might be.

🔗 Links in captions are (finally) being tested. One of the most-requested features in Instagram history is in limited testing for verified creators — up to 10 links a month, directly in your post captions. If this rolls out wide, it changes how you drive recruits to your landing page or recruiting form. This could be a major development, so keep an eye on it.

🏆 #ProTip: Before you post anything this summer, ask one question — would a recruit send this to a teammate in a DM? If yes, post it. If no, it’s a story at best. Saves and shares are the whole game now. The platform bases distribution on specific, quantifiable engagement signals:

Watch Time is King: If users scroll past your content in the first 3 seconds, the algorithm assumes you have nothing valuable to say.
Sends Per Reach: DM shares and sends are 3 to 5 times more powerful than likes for triggering unconnected reach (showing your content to non-followers). Likes largely just surface content to existing followers.

Updates from the world of AI.

If you’ve tried ChatGPT or Claude in the last year… and maybe gotten weird results or just haven’t done enough to have these LLMs become a part of your workflow — the tools have changed enough that it’s worth one more look. Here are some updates:

You’re not behind. It’s easy to think you’re late to the party, but you aren’t. There are so so so many people who live a life of technical ignorance. You may not be a first-mover, but you’re an early mover. And every breakthrough that you can create for yourself today compounds in a future sense.

You don’t have to pick a “model” anymore. ChatGPT now runs on its GPT-5 family. You pick how much horsepower you want, not a model name. Claude did the same, running on its latest with a simple effort setting instead of a lineup of code names.

What does this mean for you? You can ignore the menu entirely now. Open it, type your question like you’d text a smart friend, and go.

They remember you now. Both ChatGPT and Claude have memory turned on, even on the free versions. That means you can tell the tool who you are once (”I coach D2 volleyball, here’s how our program talks, here’s who we recruit”) and it carries that context forward into every future conversation. No more re-explaining your program every single time.

#ProTip: Spend five minutes up front feeding it the good stuff. Paste in a few of your best captions or a past email you’re proud of. Tell it your program’s vibe… are you loud and funny, or steady and pro? Once it knows your voice, everything it drafts for you comes back sounding more like you and less like a press release from a healthcare company.

If you ever want to try another tool and want to take your memory with you, just use this prompt:

Summarize your entire memory of me, including my preferences, projects, and work style, in a detailed, structured format suitable for importing into another LLM.

Works pretty good. You may also want to ask if it can give you an initialization file in a one-click copy format. (It can.)

The right way to use AI.

Here’s the trap most people fall into: they ask AI to write the whole thing, paste it straight to an email or Instagram, and it reads like… well, like AI. Recruits can smell it. Instagram is rolling out labels to flag it.

Don’t do that.

Something we end up saying a lot at FanWord is that AI is best when you let it get you 90% there in 10% of the time. (If you’re an SID and curious about the writing platform we have for game recaps and player bios, message me.)

Just let the AI be your assistant coach.

✍️ Beat the blank page. “Give me 10 caption ideas for our incoming class reveal.” You’ll hate seven, tweak two, and love one. That’s a win.
🔄 Repurpose what you’ve got. Paste a long recruiting email and ask it to cut three social posts out of it. One piece of work, three places to use it.
🧠 Think out loud. “Here’s my summer content plan — what am I missing?” It’s a decent sounding board at 11pm.
🧹 Clean up, don’t cover up. Let it fix your grammar and tighten your wording. But keep your voice though.

The rule is simple: AI can help you say it faster, but the “it” has to be yours. Your program’s story, your read on a recruit, your voice… those don’t come from a chatbot.

And I don’t know if they ever will.

That’s the light version. I’ll go deeper on this in a future edition with prompts, workflows, and the whole toolkit. But for now, that’s plenty to get you further than at least half of all programs.

What to actually do with your restful summer

You’ve got a window right now that closes fast once August hits. Here’s the short list:

Grab content from your athletes. They’re out doing some crazy stuff right now. Get them on an iPhone talking about the program. You can use it for the next few weeks of summer.
Pick an identity on Instagram and commit to it for the next 90 days. The algorithm rewards consistency more than polish. What aspect of your program are you going to push?
Plan to make one thing worth saving this week — a culture post, an academic post, a day-in-the-life. Without a ton of athletes around, maybe it’s something a parent bookmarks?
Go say something on Threads. The lake’s not as empty as I claimed. Maybe it’s your own X account. Just be you. Your brand is very important, as I’ll talk about in the weeks to come.

None of this is complicated. It’s just consistent. And consistent is the thing that’s outlasted every platform update since I’ve been writing these.

What’s your program’s biggest question heading into 2026-27? Hit reply — I read every one and I’ll be building future editions around what you send. 🏆

Thanks for reading.

I’m on a mission to share the future with every stakeholder in athletics, because I’ve seen the impact, both in my own lacrosse program and countless others as a strategic consultant.

New: Opendorse Releases 2026 Annual NIL Report

Jayson Schmidt — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 17:12:21 GMT

As we creep toward July 4th, I hope you’re soaking up every moment of sun and summer. ☀️

This time of year also means that it’s time for the Annual NIL Report from Opendorse. If you follow along, the same ritual follows. A few enormous numbers get screenshotted. The seven-figure quarterback makes the rounds. Most of college athletics reads it the way you’d read a weather forecast for a city you don’t live in: interesting, vaguely relevant, ultimately someone else’s climate.

🎉 Good news! This year’s report rewards a closer read.

Buried under the headline figures is a story about two completely different economies wearing the same three letters. One of them gets all the coverage. The other is the one most of us are operating in.

Let’s break down what the report says… and then let’s talk about the part nobody else is going to write for you.

Big ‘ole headline: the market got 50% bigger overnight

A year ago, Opendorse projected the NIL market would reach $2.8 billion. Their new estimate for this year is $4.5 billion. That’s a 50% upward revision in twelve months. Whoa.

The engine behind the jump is what they call “above the cap” money: an estimated additional $735 million in athlete earnings flowing through commercial channels in 2026–27, on top of the $21.3 million revenue-sharing cap that Power 4 schools are now maxing out.

The mental image Opendorse uses is perfect. Schools spend to the cap, then go “digging in couch cushions” for every commercial dollar beyond it.

The cap was supposed to introduce restraint, but instead every grubby paw is couch-deep in search of the dog-treat of revenue. Just ask my boys, they know:

Maze is 10, Coast is 2. Both good boys.

The new gatekeeper

The other structural shift is the arrival of the College Sports Commission and its NIL Go platform, the House settlement’s compliance layer. (“Woooooo” goes NAAC.)

As of May, NIL Go had cleared north of $242 million in deals while bouncing more than a thousand others worth a combined $56.2 million. When deals get rejected, schools have started routing them into neutral arbitration. The most public case involved 18 Nebraska athletes and a stack of multimedia-rights money.

Here’s the part worth filing away: The CSC’s scrutiny is aimed at “associated entities,” meaning collective and booster-adjacent money dressed up as endorsement. Genuine third-party commercial deals, the kind a local or national brand initiates on its own, move through with far less friction. The regulatory weather is harshest exactly where the rev-share arms race lives, and lightest where the open commercial market lives.

Here’s what a typical NIL deal looks like

Strip away the marquee numbers and the average deal is almost modest.

It’s $6,200.

It’s a one-off (84% of all deal volume), paid in cash (96%), and completed in a median of four days. The deliverable is usually a single piece of Instagram content. Instagram accounts for 83.6% of all NIL social activity; TikTok trails at 8.1%, and everything else is a rounding error.

The million-dollar quarterback is real, but he’s a 90th-percentile outlier at a marquee position. The market’s center of gravity is a few thousand dollars and a story post.

Now here’s the part the report doesn’t tell you

Read the fine print under every chart and you’ll find the same six words: NCAA Division I athletes. Every dollar figure, every platform split, every brand-footprint slice. The 98%-of-top-media-markets stat is a Division I footprint. There is no Division II in this report. No Division III. No NAIA, no NJCAA.

If you work anywhere below the Power 4 line (and statistically almost all of us do), the report’s biggest numbers describe a market you can’t access and mostly can’t see. So let’s read it for the rest of college sports.

1. There are two NIL economies, and you only live in one

The single most clarifying number in the entire report is the average NIL pool by tier:

Power 4: $36.6 million
Group of 6: $7.7 million
The rest of Division I: $205,400

That’s roughly a 178x gap between the top of the sport and its own middle class, inside Division I alone, before we get to the divisions the report skips.

Stack the commercial share on top and the split sharpens. Commercial dollars make up 36.8% of the Power 4 pool. For the Group of 6, 1.8%. The revenue-sharing economy, the cap and the war chests and the conference budgets, is a Power 4 story your program is reading about rather than living in.

The commercial economy is the one with the open door.

For everyone outside the top tier, the rev-share content is someone else’s sport, but the commercial content is your playbook.

2. The commercial market is the democratized one, and the data proves it

The most underplayed finding sits in the Olympic-sports section.

Olympic sports collectively carry 15,200 nano-influencers (athletes with 1,000 to 10,000 followers) which is more than football’s 10,800.

Nano and micro creators are the exact tier brands activate most often, and that tier is dominated by non-revenue sports.

Look at the influencer concentration:

Men’s ice hockey leads every sport in college athletics: one in ten players has 10,000-plus followers.
Gymnastics, tennis, and field hockey are all gaining commercial ground year over year.
Men’s tennis jumped from third all-time to first in average deal value.

None of those are revenue sports. None of them see a rev-share check. All of them are commercially live, and all of them exist at every level of college athletics, not only the top.

The built-in audience advantage that Opendorse spends the whole report selling, the idea that athletes arrive with an engaged following instead of spending years building one, does not belong to the SEC.

It belongs to all of you. A D3 volleyball player. An NAIA wrestler. And yes, a Power 4 receiver. The audience is division-agnostic. The infrastructure to capture it is the only thing that isn’t.

3. Reset expectations to the real numbers

Here’s the figure every athlete, parent, coach, and administrator need to hear.

For most non-revenue sports, the average commercial deal lands between $300 and $1,000. Men’s tennis tops the Olympic-sport list at $2,700. Several sports sit under $300.

Read the right way, those are achievable numbers, available to an engaged athlete at any division.

The damage the seven-figure headlines do is to expectation-setting at the schools where a four-figure deal is a real win.

Anchoring your people to the real distribution, instead of the outlier, is one of the more useful things a communicator can do this year.

4. Small schools have the inventory and miss the moments

Opendorse leads with Eli Heidenreich, the Navy receiver whose social following grew 440% in four days after a hometown draft moment. It’s a great story, and it quietly makes a point Opendorse didn’t intend. Those spikes only convert into deals when a program has the staffing and systems to catch them in real time.

Smaller programs are full of inventory: engaged audiences, local relevance, ready-made nano-influencers. And they routinely miss the moments because nobody is positioned to capture them.

Below the Power 4 line, the binding constraint is comms capacity, meaning whether someone on staff is watching, ready, and able to turn a spike into a deal before the window closes.

The schools that win the commercial market will be the ones with the fastest hands.

Read it with this lens on

One last thing, because credibility runs on it.

This report is a market read and a product launch at the same time. There’s a lot here:

The new “Athlete Commerce Media” framing
The Opendorse Commerce Media and Opendorse One products
The 96%-versus-78% fulfillment stat
The 3-to-5x media boost

Those all exist to reposition NIL from “pay athletes” to “buy media,” with Opendorse as the buying infrastructure.

The $4.5 billion figure comes from Opendorse’s own transaction flow, which means it describes Opendorse’s book of business at least as much as the whole universe.

The numbers can be both accurate and self-interested at once. They’re a vendor’s vantage point, and reading them with that in mind is incredibly important.

The takeaway for the rest of college sports

On its surface, the 2026 NIL Report is a Power 4 football-and-basketball document.

Its most useful insight is the one it states without meaning to: there are two NIL economies, the commercial one is the accessible one, and it runs on engaged audiences and fast execution rather than enormous budgets.

That economy reaches every division, every conference, every roster, including all the ones this report forgot to count. Which means the real opportunity below D1 is the one nobody has measured yet: underbuilt, under-covered, and wide open.

That’s the part you get to own. 🏆

Thanks for reading.

I’m on a mission to share the future with every stakeholder in athletics, because I’ve seen the impact, both in my own lacrosse program and countless others as a strategic consultant.

Welcome to The Future of College Sports

Jayson Schmidt — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 20:05:33 GMT

I’m Jayson — a former NCAA Division II head coach, branding consultant for ADs, and I love to ~~make weird little photo collages in canva~~ write about college sports.

If you followed Coaches Social over the years, you know me.

You know that I’ve been writing a newsletter about social media, recruiting, and branding specifically for college coaches.

The coach in me has really enjoyed helping other coaches build their programs.

Remember this?

Now, I’m not one to overemphasize moments and make them this big “aha” thing.

I like to keep it light.

But lately I’ve been thinking about the bigger picture. About where college athletics is heading. Because we all know that so much is in flux these days.

I’ve been thinking a lot about whether a newsletter aimed at social media for coaches was still the right container for what I actually wanted to say.

The answer I kept landing on was: no.

The coaches and the original focus of this newsletter will always be at the center of this, but the conversation happening in college sports right now is bigger than any one role.

It touches coaches, athletic directors, SIDs, people in marketing and rev gen, student-athletes, administrators, brand builders, technology people — and every fan, journalist, and industry observer trying to track where college sports is going.

So that’s the conversation I want to be part of.

Here we are.

Welcome to The Future of College Sports. 🚀

I’ve been writing publicly for over fifteen years.

Newsletters, blog posts, essays, and terrible ideas — scribbled out in airports and hotel lobbies and my kitchen table at all hours.

As a college coach.

As I developed strategy for departments.

As a fan.

Writing has always been my way of making sense of things, through every iteration of what it means to be obsessed with college athletics and the people inside of it.

And right now, there is a lot to make sense of.

Here’s what I believe.

College sports is at an inflection point.

NIL changed the dynamic completely, then revenue sharing changed it again, and I don’t think we’re going back.

The transfer portal was a game changer for programs when I was a head coach. But that was five years ago — and now the flurry is faster than ever.

Conference realignment continues to reshuffle and consolidate power. Even at the small college level, as my friend Rob Ramseyer recently wrote about.

And underneath all of it, moving faster than most people in the industry are willing to admit, is artificial intelligence. It’s reshaping the way stories get told, how content gets made, how programs get discovered, and how decisions are made by admins, coaches, recruits, and just about everybody in sports, actually.

In this changing world of college sports, most programs are behind.

It’s not because of a lack of effort, talent, or commitment, but rather because the pace of change has been relentless and the resources have a hard time keeping up.

Most college athletic departments are running on thinner margins than they should be, leaning on people who are overworked and under-equipped, trying to build a brand in real-time while also just trying to survive the week.

Because there’s no other choice.

I’ve been inside enough programs to know this is true at every level. Division I powerhouses. Mid-majors. Division II programs with enormous heart and limited budgets. D3 schools both growing and shrinking. NAIA schools doing remarkable things with practically nothing.

The challenges and what’s at stake may be different, but the underlying questions are the same.

How do we tell our story better?
How do we reach the people who need to find us?
How do we build something in a world that does not stop moving?

Those are the questions I’ve been asking as a 15-year vet of both college athletics and the writing world.

Moving forward? I want to continue to ask them out loud, with people who care about the answers as much as I do.

So who is this for?

If you’re a coach and you’re still here. There will be plenty of content like I’ve always produced: not just the why, but the how. This is still for you, maybe more than ever.

If you’re an athletic director trying to make sense of the technology landscape, the brand decisions, the resource allocation questions that don’t have clean answers — this is for you.

If you’re an SID, work in marketing, or rev gen — this is for you.

If you’re in the technology or media space and college sports is your market — this is for you.

If you’re a student-athlete thinking seriously about your own brand and your own story — this is for you.

And if you’re just someone who loves college sports and wants to understand what’s actually happening beneath the surface — yes, you too.

The Future of College Sports doesn’t belong to any one group. It’s all of us. Assessing the landscape, creating new solutions, and building together.

Here’s what we’ll cover.

The intersection of tech, marketing, branding, and AI in college sports is largely undercovered.

The mainstream sports media focuses on the big stories — player and coach salaries, TV deals, conference politics — but that’s only part of the picture.

The whole picture includes what happens when:

A small college program finally figures out its brand identity and starts winning recruiting battles it had no business winning.
How AI is going to change the job of a sports information director over the next three years — and what the smart ones are already doing to stay ahead.
The psychology of why certain programs just feel right to recruits and their families, and what that feeling is actually made of.

That’s the stuff I want to dig into.

A little bit of the 30,000 foot view, yes. But mostly from the ground level, where the tireless soldiers of college athletics need the biggest boost.

My entire adult life has been spent thinking about how college programs build something worth belonging to.

As a coach, I understood it from the inside — the pressure to recruit, to retain, to perform, to build a culture people want to stay in.

As a brand strategist, I understood it from the outside — watching programs grow, watching others stall, working to understand what separates one from the other when the gap isn’t talent or resources but vision and execution.

Fifteen years of “noticing that” has taught me one thing above everything else.

The programs that win — and I mean win in the fullest sense, not just on the scoreboard — are the ones that tell the truth about who they are and do it consistently (every channel, every touchpoint) over a long period of time.

From experience, that is a lot harder in practice than on a blog.

But it is possible. And the tools available today to help programs do it have never been more powerful.

Opportunity knocks.

The Future of College Sports is being written right now — by the coaches, the administrators, the brand builders, and the people who are paying attention and willing to move.

I’m glad you’re here for it.

Thanks for reading.

I’m on a mission to share the future with every stakeholder in athletics, because I’ve seen the impact, both in my own lacrosse program and countless others as a strategic consultant.

A new year, a new era, and some things that haven't changed at all.

Jayson Schmidt — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:45:00 GMT

A new year, a new era, and some things that haven’t changed at all.

We are officially one full year removed from the TikTok ban that wasn’t, the House settlement that was, and a lot of noise that made it easy to lose track of the things that actually matter to a college coach.

So let’s do a reset. 🥂

Here’s the lowdown on where the platforms are heading into spring crossover season — and a few reminders that never really go out of style.

📸 Instagram in 2026: originality wins

If there’s one theme across everything Instagram has done in the last twelve months, it’s this: they are aggressively rewarding original content and penalizing everything else.

The algorithm now identifies “original creation signals” — specifically whether your content was first posted to Instagram, whether you used native IG tools to create it, and whether you create more than you repost. Cross-posting a TikTok with the watermark still on it? The algorithm sees it, and it counts against you.

The practical upshot: stop thinking of Instagram as a dumping ground for content you made elsewhere. Make things for Instagram. Even if it’s the same idea, a native edit in the IG app will outperform a cross-posted file every time.

Two features reshaping the platform right now:

Your Algorithm — users can now directly control what topics appear in their Reels and Explore feeds. They can add interests, remove them, and the recommendations adjust across both surfaces. This isn’t a small update. Recruits are curating their feeds. If your program doesn’t clearly signal a consistent identity and content theme, you’ll disappear from their feeds regardless of your posting volume.

Saves and shares are the new likes. This shift has been happening for about six months now, but it’s fully baked into how the algorithm distributes content in 2026.

Ask yourself before every post: would someone DM this to their teammate? Would a parent save this to show at the dinner table?

If the answer is no, reconsider what you’re posting.

When given the chance, I’ll always post a lacrosse pic.

🏫 College athletics: a year into the new era

Revenue sharing has been live for seven months. Some patterns are emerging.

The programs with the biggest budgets are spending freely — and in some cases, blowing past the spirit of the cap by frontloading deals. The gap between the haves and have-nots is real.

But here’s what’s also happening: athlete movement is creating friction. Revenue-sharing contracts are being tested in courts. At least one high-profile transfer dispute made national news when a quarterback tried to walk away from a $4 million deal.

The system is messy, and families are navigating it without a lot of guidance.

This is an opportunity for coaches who can communicate clearly — about what they’re offering, what the program stands for, and what the four-year experience actually looks like.

The noise level in recruiting has never been higher. The coaches who cut through it aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones who are clearest.

Your social media is part of that clarity. What story are you telling?

📱 TikTok: settled, finally

The deal closed in December 2025. A group of American investors now controls a portion of U.S. TikTok operations.

Anyway — the app is stable, it’s in the App Stores, and the existential drama has passed.

One thing worth knowing: TikTok rewired how the For You Page refreshes content in early 2026. The reset is now a multi-day process, which means content has a longer shelf life than it used to — but it also means your hook matters more.

Content that loses viewers in the first two seconds is genuinely penalized now.

Lead with something worth watching. Immediately.

The reminder you probably needed

Fifteen-plus years into writing about college sports (as a coach and consultant), a few things have stayed true across every platform shift, every algorithm update, every seismic moment in college athletics.

The programs that win on social are consistent.

Not perfect. Not viral. Consistent.

One good post per week, every week, for twelve months is worth more than a brilliant campaign in September and silence in February.

If you fell off during the holidays, welcome back. The recruiting calendar is full. Spring visits are around the corner. The window to build something before the next signing period is open.

What’s your social media goal for the first quarter of 2026?

Also: a housekeeping note.

I’m running product marketing for FanWord, a software platform that helps sports information directors produce game recaps, long-form stories, and more. If you want to hear more about it, hit me up.

Fall's just about over, people. Did your social keep up?

Jayson Schmidt — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 19:31:00 GMT

The fall season is almost over. Did your social keep up?

It’s November.

Cross-country is wrapping up, football is heading toward conference championships, and basketball has tipped off. If you’ve been posting consistently since August, you probably have a body of content you didn’t have last year.

And if you haven’t…

Well, there’s still time to finish the year strong before the winter quiet.

Here’s what’s been happening on the platforms this fall, and what to do with it.

📸 Instagram overhauled how it measures everything

In late 2025, Instagram switched its primary performance metric from “reach” to “views.”

All content — Reels, photos, carousels, Stories — is now measured the same way. No more comparing apples and oranges between formats. One number, across everything.

Here’s why it actually matters for you:

It changes what “good” looks like. A photo carousel that used to seem underperforming next to a Reel’s reach numbers might now look exactly comparable. Before you conclude that video is your only path to distribution, look at your actual view numbers across content types. You might be surprised.

Two other features that went live this fall:

Trial Reels are now schedulable. You can queue up a test Reel in advance without being at your phone. For coaches managing social themselves, this is a real quality-of-life improvement. Use it to test hooks and thumbnails before pushing content to your full audience.

Your Algorithm launched in December — a feature that lets users directly control what topics show up in their Reels and Explore feeds. Users can type in interests, add or remove them, and the entire recommendation engine adjusts.

What does this mean for you? Your recruits are curating their feeds more intentionally than ever. If your content doesn’t match what they’ve told Instagram they want to see, it may not show up at all — regardless of how well it performs elsewhere.

This is an argument for specificity over volume. Fewer, more intentional posts that clearly signal what your program is about will outperform a firehose of miscellaneous content.

💰 The House settlement fallout: what nobody’s talking about

Revenue sharing went live July 1. The initial numbers are wild.

Some programs spent well north of $20 million on their rosters before the cap could be implemented — with booster groups frontloading deals to avoid the restrictions. One Power Five program had an anonymous donor inject $20 million to upgrade their football roster in a single offseason.

For most coaches reading this, those numbers aren’t your reality.

But here’s what is your reality: the schools with the biggest budgets are going to look even bigger to recruits in the short term. Every NIL conversation now comes with a revenue sharing conversation. Every visit includes a presentation that may include dollar figures.

The way you compete is by being clearer, faster, and more authentic than the schools outspending you. Even if you’re a tiny Division III outfit with zero resources.

Your social media is your 24/7 recruiting pitch. Every post is a data point a recruit is using to decide whether to open your next message.

Make it count.

One thing before the new year

The end of the fall semester is coming. Your student-athletes are wrapping up their academic semester, and a lot of them will be home for five or six weeks.

That’s five or six weeks where your program’s presence on social is on them — not on staff.

If you haven’t talked to your team about what to post over break, now is the time. Give them direction. Encourage the ones who are already active. Ask the ones who aren’t to at least post one thing about their experience.

You don’t control what they post. But you can influence it.

How’s your fall content performing compared to last year? Reply and let me know — I want to hear what’s actually working.

Revenue sharing is live. Your brand matters more than ever.

Jayson Schmidt — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 17:15:00 GMT

Summer’s over. Here's what changed while you were on the recruiting trail.

August means summer travel is wrapping up, fall practice is starting, and every coach is about to get very busy very fast.

Has the social media landscape shifted while you had your head down?

Hmm. Maybe, coach. May-be.

(Spoiler: It always does.)

Here’s the lowdown on what happened this summer and what you need to know before the season starts.

🏛️ The biggest news isn't on your phone, it's in your athletic department

On June 6, federal judge Claudia Wilken signed off on the House v. NCAA settlement. Revenue sharing is officially live as of July 1.

That means schools can now directly compensate athletes, up to $20.5 million per school in year one.

Here’s what this means for how you recruit:

The financial conversation is a requirement. Every program is going to be navigating what they can offer, what they can’t, and how to talk about it with families. That’s a new skill set for a lot of coaches, and it’s going to show in how programs present themselves.

Your brand still matters. In fact, it matters more now. When every school is talking about money, the ones that can also articulate why someone should want to be there — the culture, the development, the outcomes — are the ones that close.

Your social media is your first impression for most recruits. Make sure what’s on your feed actually reflects the program you’re selling in the living room.

…

Oh, wait.

You mean to tell me that none of that is new?

In athletics, even when things change, things stay the same. 😂

📸 Instagram: Two things to know before fall

One: photos and carousels can now appear in the Reels tab.

If you’ve been sleeping on carousels, this is your wake-up call. Add trending audio to a carousel post and it can surface in the same discovery tab as your Reels. That means more potential reach with less video production.

For programs that don’t have the bandwidth to produce polished video every week, this is a real opportunity.

A strong photo carousel — behind-the-scenes at practice, incoming class feature, facility highlights — with solid audio is now a legitimate growth play.

Two: Broadcast Channels are officially a recruiting tool now.

Instagram’s Broadcast Channel feature — which lets you send one-way messages to an opted-in audience — has evolved into something more useful. Recruits can join your channel, you can push updates directly to them, and it signals to the algorithm that your audience is engaged.

A few programs have started using Broadcast Channels as informal recruiting pipelines. Recruits opt in, you send camp recaps, game-week content, and program updates directly to their DMs — without fighting the feed.

If you haven’t set one up, this is the right time of year to do it. Fall games give you something to push.

📱 TikTok update: still alive, still for sale

The TikTok deal is still being negotiated. Trump extended the deadline a second time in April, pushing the new target to June — and as of this writing, a sale agreement is reportedly close but not finalized.

The practical takeaway: TikTok is still downloadable, still functional, and your recruits are still using it.

Don’t build everything there. But don’t abandon it either.

The one thing I’d encourage you to do differently is treat TikTok content as native content. When you cross-post a TikTok (with the watermark still on it) to Instagram, the algorithm penalizes you for it. Either remove the watermark before cross-posting, or re-edit the content natively in Instagram.

It’s an extra step. It’s worth it.

The best use of your time before the school year starts

You don’t need a new strategy. You need to execute the one you have.

One Reel or carousel this week. One Story every day if you can manage it. A few DMs to recruits you’ve been in contact with.

That’s it. Fall scheduling starts, and the window to build before the season is closing fast.

What does your content calendar look like for fall? Worth an email if you want to think it through.

Everything changed. Nothing changed.

Jayson Schmidt — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 15:33:00 GMT

The platforms survived. Now what?

You made it through the most chaotic three months in social media history.

In January, TikTok went dark for about 14 hours. Then it came back. Then it was technically banned but not enforced. Then Trump signed an executive order. Then Apple and Google pulled it from the stores. Then they put it back.

If you had a great TikTok strategy going into 2025, you earned the right to be confused.

Here’s the lowdown on where things stand — and what it means for your program heading into spring recruiting season.

Sometimes, it's tough to keep up with all of the changes to social platforms. Here's the lowdown of what's new:

📱 TikTok: still alive, still chaotic

TikTok is back. For now.

The ban went into effect on January 19, lasted less than a day, and was functionally suspended by executive order while the White House brokers a deal for U.S. ownership. As of now, the app is downloadable, usable, and very much alive.

What does this mean for you? Two things.

First, if you abandoned TikTok in January and haven’t gone back — go back. Your recruits never left.

Second, if you built your entire social media strategy around TikTok and nothing else, this was a lesson. A platform that went dark nationwide — even briefly — is a platform that can go dark again. I don’t think the lesson is to stop using TikTok.

The lesson is to stop treating any single platform like a guaranteed utility.

Build your audience on Instagram, but use TikTok as a distribution layer on top of it.

📸 Instagram: the algorithm got a memory

Instagram made a significant shift this quarter: the algorithm now rewards consistency over time, not just recent performance. They’re calling it a “long memory” — your account’s history of posting patterns and engagement now factors into how your content gets distributed.

What does this mean practically?

A program that’s posted consistently for six months — even without viral moments — will outperform a program that posts in bursts around national signing day and goes quiet for weeks.

Two other updates worth knowing:

Trial Reels launched in late 2024 and picked up momentum this spring. The feature lets you post a Reel to non-followers first, get performance data, and then decide whether to push it to your full audience. Think of it as a focus group before you commit. If you haven’t experimented with this yet, April is a good time to start.

Saves and shares now matter more than likes. The algorithm has shifted weight toward content people bookmark or send to a friend. That should change how you’re thinking about what you post. A highlight reel might get likes. A post about your program’s academic support probably gets saved by a parent and shared to a recruit.

That second type of content is doing more work for you, even if the numbers look smaller.

🏫 College athletics: the landscape is shifting under your feet

The House settlement is moving through final approval, and revenue sharing is expected to go into effect July 1.

Whether you’re a power five coach (or not),
Whether you’re a revenue sport coach (or not),
this changes the conversation you’re having with recruits.

Your brand — what your program stands for, what it looks like, what it communicates — is going to matter more, not less, as financial packages become part of every recruiting conversation. Athletes and families will have more information and more options than ever before.

The programs that win won’t necessarily be the ones with the biggest budgets.

They’ll be the ones with the clearest identity.

What should you actually do right now?

Here’s a short list. None of it is complicated:

Get back on TikTok if you left — the kids are there.
Post consistently on Instagram for the next 90 days, even if it feels repetitive — the summer is a time for experimentation.
Start experimenting with Trial Reels on one post this month
Make sure at least some of your content is worth saving — reference posts, culture posts, academic posts

Spring recruiting is in motion. This is not the time to go quiet. June 15 is rapidly approaching.

What are you seeing from your recruits on social right now? Drop a comment below — I’m curious what’s getting traction.

TikTok was temporarily banned – how it affects your team's brand

Jayson Schmidt — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 20:34:41 GMT

As of tomorrow, TikTok is banned in the United States.

Or is it?

Here’s what President Trump had to say about the upcoming ban.

“I think that would be, certainly, an option that we look at. The 90-day extension is something that will be most likely done, because it’s appropriate. You know, it’s appropriate. We have to look at it carefully. It’s a very big situation,” Trump said in the interview.
“If I decide to do that, I’ll probably announce it on Monday,” he added.

Regardless of whether the extension carries or the ban stays in place, one thing is clear – the social media landscape can shift in the blink of an eye.

Lots of coaches around the country that have leaned on TikTok to get massive growth in their program and recruiting efforts are wondering how to adjust. In this post, we’ll explore TikTok’s popularity, how a potential ban could reshape your efforts on social, and what alternative platforms and strategies you can use to continue building your team’s brand.

Why TikTok Mattered

In recent years, TikTok has evolved from a little baby app for short dance videos into a major social media platform embraced by professional sports teams, influencers, and college programs alike. Part of its appeal lies in its highly visual, bite-sized videos that resonate with a younger audience—often the exact demographic that college coaches hope to reach. By showcasing locker room celebrations, campus tours, workout sessions, and day-in-the-life vlogs, programs have harnessed TikTok to humanize their players and coaches, amplify team spirit, and give fans an insider’s perspective on college athletics.

Furthermore, TikTok’s algorithm has been known for catapulting accounts to viral stardom with little warning. This meant even smaller programs could attract significant attention with the right content, leveling the playing field against major programs in the Power 4 conferences (Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, and ACC). In short, TikTok represented a chance to stand out in a crowded digital sports world, making it a valuable tool for coaches in NCAA Divisions I, II, III, and even NAIA programs.

Potential Ban Implications

A total ban on TikTok presents several hurdles. Coaches and teams that have cultivated a large following on the platform will most certainly lose an established audience if TikTok is forever off-limits. Recruiting efforts may also take a hit, as an entire generation of PSAs are familiar with TikTok’s quick, visually engaging style.

Additionally, sponsorship or endorsement opportunities for currently and future athletes via NIL — particularly for programs that have leveraged TikTok for branded content — could be at risk.

But remember – social for your program has always required some level of adaptability. It’s why we’re using TikTok and not Vine. Even Instagram will probably go the way of MySpace before long.

Exploring Alternative Platforms

If TikTok truly goes away forever, there are plenty of other platforms eager to capture short-form video enthusiasts.

If you know me at all, you know that I have been beating the Instagram-for-everything recruiting drum for years. Using Instagram Reels is probably something you’re already doing if you’ve got a TikTok, so we’re going to keep a good thing going.

If you’re repurposing content from TikTok to IG, we’re simply going to go native on IG from here on out. Hell, it’ll probably make your life a little easier.

If you saw my piece from my talk at Penn State over the summer (link below), you might remember that it’s not exactly all doom and gloom if TikTok goes away. According to their incoming student-athletes, 90% of them used Instagram to help in their recruiting process.

That’s compared to 23% that also used TikTok.

If you’re looking to take advantage of another platform because you just have so-much-free-time (lol), here are my thoughts:

YouTube Shorts: Relatively speaking, it has exploded in popularity. If you’re already posting long-form video (player-led dorm tours, etc.), it wouldn’t hurt to be here.

As a vehicle for watching video content, more teens use YouTube on a monthly basis than any other app.

X/Twitter: The data still speaks: on average, one-in-four prospective student-athletes still use the platform to learn more about your program.

Facebook: While FB might feel outdated to some, but it remains a staple for reaching parents, alumni, and older supporters who can still influence recruiting decisions and/or support your overall brandbuilding.

Due to Meta’s ability to crosspost, it’s easy to send IG reels straight to Facebook.

Strategies to Grow Beyond TikTok

Give Recruits a Next Step: It doesn’t have to be much, but make one last post on TikTok today with handles for your other social media accounts. Cover every base in the event your recruits or followers don’t follow you on all platforms.
Fortify Your Instagram Account: Develop an array of media, from short videos to photo carousels. Mix up content types and understand that more effort will be sent to Instagram by some of your competition as the result of focused efforts.
Emphasize Storytelling: Regardless of platform, storytelling remains key. Share behind-the-scenes moments, celebrate individual student-athletes’ journeys, and invite your audience into the program’s culture. Authentic stories resonate most, whether in 15 seconds or a full minute.
Encourage Player-Driven Content: Players can be your best brand ambassadors. If they can no longer use TikTok, encourage them to share their experiences on Instagram, Snapchat, or YouTube. Empowering your athletes fosters an engaging, relatable narrative in this NIL world.
Measure and Adjust: Track engagement metrics and experiment with content styles. The social media world evolves quickly, so using in-app analytics can help you pivot as needed and stay ahead of trends.

While a potential TikTok ban might feel like a seismic shift if you’ve spent any time at all building a following in the app, the digital world has always favored those who can adapt.

Like a true coach making halftime adjustments, here’s your opportunity.

(I know that was cringe. Like the true coach that I am, I can’t miss the low-hanging fruit of coaching clichés. No apologies here.)

Email is a legitimate branding tool.

Jayson Schmidt — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 15:20:42 GMT

If you’re not using email to separate yourself from other programs, know that some of them are using email to separate themselves from you.

Email as a marketing and branding tool is a valuable way for programs to communicate with their fans, alumni, and donors.

Note #1: Recruiting messaging is not the focus for this post, but it’s still obviously valuable. If you’ve ever had messaging from Tudor Collegiate Strategies, you know that months and months of pre-written content to send out to recruits can be a gamechanger.

For the sake of this post, we’ll consider any recruit-focused email as sometimes individualized and sometimes what you’d consider “mass email” or email marketing. Because of that, the recruit email strategy and discussion is much larger and therefore will be tabled for another time.

Note #2: I say this, but there’s always an opportunity for you to be a thought leader in your sport’s world. This is also a post for another time, but when I was a head coach, I had tremendous success writing generic email newsletters on recruiting basics.

Those emails were sent out to recruits beginning their process in hopes that they’d find value in what send over. It was never focused on my program, but I always signed them with my contact info. We got thousands of email opens and our recruiting site saw higher visit data as a result.

In short, email is king for two reasons:

You aren’t metered by a social media algorithm. Access to an inbox is intimate.
Your people want to hear from you. Let me say that again like I’m in church… your people want to hear from you!

I’m here to remind you that if you have someone’s email, they want your updates. Their interest in what you’re doing should be rewarded with a monthly or quarterly update.

For fans, donors, and alums aged 40 and over, they’re used to consuming content in the written format. You’re missing an opportunity to speak their language and get better attendance, alumni turnout, and financial contributions as a result.

Just because you’re writing in their language, it doesn’t mean you can’t use that elsewhere. Written newsletters sent to any specific segment of your email list can also be turned into a script for a social media video update or an audio message.

Reuse what you've made and give it new life frequently.

Thanks for reading The Future of College Sports. This post is public, so you can share it with your staff or colleagues.

Here are some questions I’ve received about email as a tool for your program:

What platform do I use?

The best platform is often the one that you know best. Websites like MailChimp and Flodesk have a monthly cost associated with their services (we can help with discounts), but allow emailing en masse in a visually appealing way. You can also get a fair amount of mileage out of Front Rush, ARI, or whatever platform/service you already have.

If sending emails to smaller groups where privacy (e.g. hiding other recipients) is not relevant (like parents), using Outlook is perfectly suitable.

Can I make it feel personalized?

If written like a letter, use personalization tags to address each recipient by their name. This builds a stronger connection with audiences like parents and donors. Often, it looks like: [firstname] or [fname] or it may be built into your preferred mail service.

If emailed with a template (colors, sections, and photos) you can skip the personalization.

What’s segmentation?

Okay, no coach has asked me this, but it’s a good thing and I’ll tell you why.

When you can divide your contacts and email lists into different groups based on purpose of contact and other relevant factors, it changes the game.

By tailoring your messages to each group, you increase the chances of that group engaging with your content and program… and ultimately your end result (greater parent involvement, fundraising, alumni game turnout).

Think about it – you could probably segment your alumni fall email update into six different groups without thinking about it:

Young alumni (under 27)
Alumni game aged, close to campus (< 300 mi, under 40)
Alumni game aged, not close to campus (> 300 mi, under 40)
Have made one donation to the program
Have made one donation to the program, returned to campus once in five years
Have made donations in excess of $10,000

Even if you’re using a template, there’s no reason to not spend extra time duplicating your email update. The group that has no money, but wants to play the current team wants to feels included. The older group that would rather show their support by stroking a check wants to feel valued, too.

All of these groups have different desires and capabilities. How you meet them regularly at those desires and capabilities will determine how your program better gets them involved.

Stay tuned – more on email marketing to come. 🎉

Vertical video gets you views

Jayson Schmidt — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 23:22:57 GMT

Let’s talk about vertical video

For the sake of leaving no obvious thing untouched, here’s the difference between vertical and horizontal video.

Horizontal video is most often the 16:9 ratio found on the left and is otherwise known as landscape. You’ll find this format most often on platforms like YouTube. This is the legacy format you’ll see in movies and television.

Vertical video is either full vertical (9:16), meaning it takes up the full resolution of the screen, or some version of what’s above. The important takeaway is that you don’t need to rotate your phone to watch content. That makes vertical video perfect for up/down scrolling apps like Instagram.

Take a look at this sequence of reels from Conn Coll men’s soccer. With the caveat that this is an oversimplification, look at the view counts for the three reels that use full vertical video versus the one reel that takes a horizontal video and leaves a bunch of blank space. The result is double and triple the view counts for the videos that used the full height.

Here’s an example from Babson volleyball. The cover photo on the far left is full width, but the reel was horizontal and it shows. Two reels at roughly 1,000 views each while the other two were far more interesting and totaled almost 50k in views for the effort.

Let’s do one more and leave my unintentional path of New England small college athletics. How about the XC/TF program at Caltech:

The two videos in the middle outperformed the two on the outsides. Here’s what strikes me: better concepts and better execution.

The far left video could have performed better if it were full height/resolution. It was a good idea, it just needed to be thrown into an app like Capcut that tracks and centers video movement with AI.

The far right video was essentially just a picture or two set to music and not utilizing the full height that a reel allows, either. For the record, we’d much rather see that beautiful ocean as a video.

For Caltech, the difference in view counts wasn’t monumental, but it does matter. Good content ranks higher in the algorithm and gets more views. For them, 1,000 extra views at a time still adds up.

What’s the takeaway from these examples?

Using full-height vertical video creates more engagement without doing anything.
Taking the step to edit content into the vertical format typically signifies that you’re doing other things to edit your video footage into view-worthy content, like adding trending audio or subtitles.
Recruits consume high volumes of video content via Instagram and TikTok. They expect your content to be like the rest of the content they consume: vertical and engaging. You need to meet them where they’re at if you want to make an impact.

Insights from my Penn State workshop

Jayson Schmidt — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 15:40:46 GMT

I just got back from doing a workshop for coaches at Penn State and I have some valuable intel to share with you from the pre-workshop survey we sent out.

Sidenote: As I travel around the country doing branding and social media workshops for coaches and departments, State College is clearly near the top of the list. While smaller than Ann Arbor or Madison, it’s clearly one of those quintessential college towns. A must-visit if you’ve never been.

Prior to the visit, our team surveyed their incoming student-athletes on a host of recruiting and social media questions. Here’s a highlight of a few of them and some takeaways.

There’s one platform you need to focus on.

118 of 131 incoming athletes said they checked out their future program’s Instagram during the recruitment process. That’s 90% of athletes. That’s miles ahead of the next social media platform.

You *must* invest resources into your team’s Instagram.

I’ve been beating this drum for years. I’ve seen a Division 2 volleyball program go from 4,000 followers to 204,000 followers in one academic year by posting good content five times per week.

Your presence in Instagram is a non-negotiable.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Big Ten school or a juco in central California – everyone has the same access to the platform and with legitimate effort, can see a tangible result:

More views
Greater exposure
More athletes
Better athletes

Secondarily, a quarter of all athletes said they checked the team out on Twitter/X. We’re seeing data that states they’re looking at your personal coaches profile more than a team account. They’re seeing the identity of the team on Instagram, but on X, they want to know who you are.

They’re also sometimes seeing you on TikTok and YouTube. If you’re already creating vertical video content, you can repurpose it in both locations.

If it were me and I had some longer-form video content to post (like tours, athlete interviews, etc.), I would focus on YouTube over a TikTok that just duplicates IG content. All hail the power of Google/YouTube search.

#ProTip: If you’re struggling to maintain a presence on social, put all of your eggs in the Instagram basket.

Here’s what PSAs are looking for…

It’s pretty simple: they want to know what life is like in your program.

The graphic above is a tiny sampling of the response I pulled. They want to see athletes and their experiences. Not just one athlete, one time during the school year.

They want lots of athletes, at all times in the year. A true behind-the-scenes look with different voices.

With so many incoming athletes requesting this content, you should have a large list of athletes willing to help make this content.

The athlete that said “I am so bad at social media so I have no idea” is a future coach in the making I am sure of it. 😂😂

Here’s an interesting individual response. Look at the nature of their response:

I would film fun things… to show… we are a fun team to be around.

Show the serious aspects… to show… we also can be focused on what we are doing.

Ask players some questions… to… know the team better.

Post things that would grab viewers attention… to show… that a campus has so many opportunities and things to offer for students and student-athletes.

In the minds of these athletes, there is always a cause/effect to showcasing them and their team on social media. They want to be known. And they want future recruits to know them.

It doesn’t have to be exotic. You don’t need amazing-groundbreaking-award-winning content.

You just need to post.

On Instagram.

And feature your student-athletes.

It’s that simple.

GUIDE: Setting up weekly social posts.

Jayson Schmidt — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 21:51:55 GMT

Hat tip to Jeff Schmidt from Puget Sound football; he requested a post on this topic a little while back. Great things come from Schmidts, apparently. I have major respect for anyone that not only wants to get better, but has specific direction on things they’re looking to improve.

Fill out our reader survey to tell us what you’re looking to learn about and help direct the future of this newsletter.

Start Survey

Let’s build a weekly machine.

Short and sweet?

We know that social can be an incredible tool for coaches to showcase their programs and impact recruits. The goal is to set up and produce content for social media as efficiently and effectively as possible to fit into your already busy schedule.

Whether you’re at a small college with limited resources or a larger institution where certain sports dominate the budget, managing your own social media can be a game-breaker or a game-changer. Let’s dive in.

1. Kickstarting Social for 2024-25

Regardless of whether you’re the new coach on campus or you’ve been there for decades, it’s important to run a diagnostic on where you’ve been.

Look at past posts and see what received the most likes and comments. Update your profile with the latest info about your team and make sure it reflects your team’s personality and vibe. I wrote a three-part series earlier this year on your team’s bio. If you missed it, it’s a must-read:

If you’re starting fresh, you don’t need to be on every platform. If it were me, I’d focus on these platforms in this order:

Instagram: This is non-negotiable and you can literally stop here if you want.
Twitter/X or Threads: Easier reactionary content. Often text-based.
TikTok: You’re just repurposing your IG content here. There’s going to be an overlap from recruits on both IG and TikTok, so this is an above and beyond.
Facebook: Your FB page can get automatic post updates to the account every time something goes to Instagram. Easy.

Regardless if you’re on just Instagram or all of the above and more, make sure that you are consistently telling your team’s story.

If you’re simply renewing your focus on social media, set some goals. Do you want more followers, better engagement with athletes and alumni, or to get the attention of new recruits? Establishing a consistent posting schedule to keep everyone engaged is important, while consistency is key to staying visible against your competition.

2. Crafting Your Weekly Content Plan

Your first step is to think about the key themes you want to highlight each week. This will mimic your game or practice schedule when you’re in that mode, for what it’s worth. Examples of themes include:

Game highlights
Practice sessions
Player spotlights
Facility tours
Academic achievements
Community involvement
Motivational quotes
Behind the scenes
Recruiting insights/process insights

Mixing up your content is required to showcase different sides of your program.

Plan Your Week:

Like any good gameplan, you need a plan of attack for when shit hits the fan. Otherwise, it’ll be Thursday with ten minutes before practice and you haven’t posted anything all week and you’re ill-prepared to do anything today because you have coaching to do.

That’s fair – but we still have the competition to out-recruit and bury on social media.

My advice? Starting on Instagram, aim for one post per week for one month.

That’s it. It can be a reel (vertical video), carousel (lots of photos), or even a dreaded graphic. Reels and carousels are getting the most traction, so start there. If you’re getting other photo and video content beyond what you’ve posted (or are intending to post), add it to your Instagram story. Especially if it’s a behind the scenes look.

The goal is for this to be such a low bar that we stack wins. Post once a week and you’re putting yourself ahead of everybody that posts every once in awhile. That’s dozens, if not hundreds of programs.

After one month, increase from one post to two. Stay there for six months.

I like Tuesdays and Fridays for that cadence, but feel free to adjust to your game or practice schedule. If you are quite literally posting yourself and don’t have an athlete or another coach/GA/etc helping, you’ll want to aim for the day after. Gameday is chaotic, unless you’re capturing the postgame thoughts of your team, for example.

If you’re already posting more than twice per week, here’s some inspo in the form of a sample weekly content plan. Let’s pretend we’re a fall sport with a frequent Saturday game schedule:

Monday: Start the week with a motivational quote, team mantra, or core value. Positioning is always paramount, so tell your story.
Tuesday: Highlight a player’s recent achievement, whether on the field or in the classroom. Perfect for conference POTW posts.
Wednesday: Share mid-week practice clips or behind-the-scenes content. If you’re a women’s soccer program and you play Wednesday-Saturday, for example, then this is a gameday content day.
Thursday: Throw it back with a memorable game or an alumni success story.
Friday: Preview the upcoming game, plus big hype energy from your walkthrough practice or team sessions.
Saturday: Post updates and highlights from the game.
Sunday: Wrap up the week with a post-game recap and shoutouts to standout performers.

Mix up your posts with photos, videos, stories, and even live-streams.

BTS (behind-the-scenes) content is always a hit. Fans love seeing what goes on during practice, team meetings, and travel days. Recruits are constantly asking themselves if they can see themselves in that scenario or if they’d mesh well with your team.

You can use tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, or Later to schedule posts in advance so that you stay consistent even on your most chaotic days.

3. Staying Consistent and Keeping It Fun

Stick to Your Schedule:
Consistency is crucial for keeping your building and maintaining momentum. Stick to the posting schedule you’ve planned out. Set reminders for yourself or use the scheduling tools mentioned above to make sure you’re posting regularly.

Keep Content Fresh:
While it’s important to stick to a schedule, don’t be afraid to mix things up if something exciting happens. Spontaneous posts about unexpected victories, fun team moments, or big news can add a dynamic element to your feed.

Stay True to Your Team:
Make sure your content always reflects your team’s values and personality. Whether it’s through the tone of your posts, the visuals you use, or the people you put in front of the camera, staying true to your culture is going to make your team more recognizable in comparison to the other vanilla programs out there.

Celebrate Milestones:
Don’t forget to celebrate your social media wins, too. Whether it’s hitting a follower milestone, seeing a post go viral, or getting great engagement, share these wins with your team and fans. It keeps the momentum going and shows the positive impact of what you’re doing.

Setting up a weekly posting plan can help any coach effectively manage their social media accounts, even with tight resources. Don’t forget: Start with clear goals, keep a consistent posting schedule, and continuously adapt based on what resonates with recruits and your audience.

Want to go deeper? Click below to read a post outlining the who-what-where for weekly content we sent out in March.

The Future of College Sports

Fighting perfectionism in college sports

Talking about perfectionism.

Ship the work.

Jayson reads another book.

If you hear one thing…

Thanks for reading.

More Links:

Two things I loved from @FSC_WLAX on Insta

Really smart post #1

Really smart post #2

Bonus: The private story

Thanks for reading.

More Links:

The platforms are begging you to experiment

Nobody remembers your flops

Choosing to swing

Don’t think, just experiment

Here are a few tips on how to do this well…

1. Build experimentation into the gameplan

2. Never delete, just diagnose

3. No comparison game allowed

In closing, the teams that win this are the teams that iterate

Thanks for reading.

More Links:

The Future of the Job: SID

There’s a job posting open in a tab on my second monitor right now.

The writing half of the job is evolving.

The SID becomes a curator.

The 2030 SID.

What does this mean for you?

The four archetypes of SIDs.

Thanks for reading.

More Links:

If you don't tell your story, somebody else is telling it for you

Storytelling = survival in 2026.

75% show. 25% tell.

Your story travels three ways.

Tell it consistently for five years and you win.

A final note.

Thanks for reading.

More Links:

Storytelling as told by Survivor: People are everything

Storytelling Rule #1: People are everything.

The college sports translation is that your program has a backdrop too.

Survivor casts good narrators.

I understand that not everything is about storytelling.

What does this mean for you?

Thanks for reading.

More Links:

Chalk Talk: Your “engagement rate” is like how loud your baseball fans get

Today’s topic: Engagement Rate

Engagement rate is how loud your stadium gets, adjusted for how many people showed up.

An engagement breakdown.

Why the sportcoat crowd loves this number.

Thanks for reading.

More Links:

I know what you're doing right now.

First, a quick explainer.

Here’s what’s actually happening.

The content is already sitting in your camera roll.

Practical takeaways.

An aside that’s worth talking about.

Free Preview: How-to deep dive

1. This strategy is a sidecar move.

2. You don’t have to be current.

3. How-To Download Your Old Video/Photo Content

4. The metadata cheat sheet.

5. The 20-minute weekly workflow.

6. Judge it by the right scoreboard.

Thanks for reading.

More Links:

What's new in College Sports, July edition

Okay, but Threads is a thing?

Instagram wants you to stop chasing reach.

Updates from the world of AI.

The right way to use AI.

What to actually do with your restful summer

Thanks for reading.

More Links: