By Jamie Styles
October 31 – Football clubs looking to recruit the best talent into their academies might consider turning to social media which was used by the Boston College Eagles American football programme with transformational effect.
At the end of the 2012 season, the Eagles were ranked a lowly 87th in the country and last in its conference. In an attempt to reverse this trend, new head coach Steve Addazio launched an online campaign to help engage with potential recruits.
With the help of his new coaching staff, Addazio brainstormed a phrase that depicted the new attitude of the team (“#BeADude”), and with this they turned to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Vine to represent the program.
This included Addazio himself posting locker room pep talks to YouTube.
The campaign was met with almost immediate success. In under a year the program’s recruiting class jumped to 17th nationally and 4th in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Many new recruits openly attributed their decisions directly to the #BeADude campaign.
Although there are obvious differences between the American College system and Youth Academies (not least that the football – soccer – academies generally start players at very much younger ages) their goals of attracting and developing the best talent are the same.
Given what we have seen in America, the power of Social Media could be the key to achieving this goal.
For the English Football Association, which has launched its own much-criticised commission into the identification and development of youth talent and has also said that it hopes to increase the number of British Asian people playing football, Social Media could provide a useful tool. Certainly social media sites generally boast ethnically diverse user bases.
Social media and technological innovation may have accelerated the college football recruiting process in practically every facet, but Addazio adopted Social Media for the right reasons. He knew it was where his “customers,” high-school football players, already were.
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