Sending a mass email to coaches

You could send it using the BCC: (Blank Carbon Copy) field. That way they will not see the other recipients of the email.

The problem is the email could not be personalized at all and must be pretty Generic.

The question is what type of image do you want to portray to the coaches?

I think you would at least send individual emails to the top five or ten choices and send a mass email to the other ten to fifteen using the BCC: field

Well, what I was planning on saying was:
"I will be playing in the blank tournament this week, July 25th-30th at blank University. I have attached my schedule for the week and I hope you have the chance to come see me play at some point during the week."

Take the time to personalize.

I agree. Personalize the emails, and strive to develop a relationship with your future coach.

You can do both - personalize AND send a form letter. Use Excel to create a chart of schools with a column for at least each coach's email, last name and team mascot.

Then create a Word form letter, something like this:

Dear [Coach's last name],

I just wanted to give you an update with my summer schedules. I've been doing some reading on your website and am very interested in learning how I might fit into the [team mascot]'s baseball program.

I look forward to hearing from you.

...

Then in Word, do an Email Merge, and select the [Coach's email] column.

We even took this a step further, after being advised out on this website by some helpful folks. My son read up on each school's website and found a few items of personal interest about each team and/or coach. He then typed a few sentences for each school in a "Personal message" column in the Excel spreadsheet. Then in the form letter, just include that column as its own paragraph.

Good luck.

Sandman that is a great idea.

For those that sent mass emails, what were the responses?

Sandman,

You da man! Fantastic idea.

The thing is TPM, if you include enough personal data in a mail merge, it's really no different to the recipient - it just saves a lot of time for the sender. We're not talking about a "Dear Coach... love to play for 'your' team..." email. In our case, I seriously doubt coaches ever even knew it was a mail merge.

In my son's case, he contacted about 3 dozen schools, a fairly even mix of D1/D2/D3, w/ a slant towards D3. Very few D1 responses (no surprise), but about half the others, maybe a little more, have responded. Some have asked for summer schedules, some commented on his swing (he included a link to his YouTube channel), some camp invites with personal messages, some generic money-maker types.

IMHO, I think if you take the time to personalize the form letters (as much as that sounds like an oxmoron ), I doubt coaches would know the difference. But it's much more efficient than simply typing each one from scratch (even after starting w/ a copy/paste).

Also, my son sent a few follow-ups: after he'd gotten his SAT scores, updates after showcases, mid-summer leagues' performance,... each of those didn't require any additional personal notes about how my son likes their program or success rate or whatever... so for those, it was even easier. The only variables in those emails were the coach's name and email address.

quote:

Originally posted by TPM:
For those that sent mass emails, what were the responses?

Thanks fenway. But again, I have to thank folks out here for the tip to be careful about being too impersonal with form letters. IMO, the personal paragraph really helped alleviate that.

If anyone's interested in a copy of our spreadsheet and some of the "form" letters we've used, feel free to PM me.

Sandman,

With regards to camp invitations, how did you gauge genuine interest? Is it appropriate to email back to check if they have seen the player and what is the general interest in becoming a future player in the program.

With these economic times, you cannot go to all these camps and if you are interested in a school, you would like to know if the interest is mutual plus you would also like to trim those without genuine interest and move on.

I am also interested in the form letters.

Thanks

If the camp invite was all that was in the email, with no mention of them having seen my son play, or having seen his YouTube channel, etc., we pretty much assumed they weren't very interested in anything other than our money.

He did ask some coaches who we knew had seen him at a showcase what they thought of him and how he might fit into their program. A few answered, many did not.

Sandman,
Thanks, I was just curious as to how much contact one could expect from a "mass" mailing. I am not sure how many that you mass mailed, but 36 responses (legit) sounds good to me.

Your informantion is quite helpful to those who are going through the process and want to put in the time and effort.

Just to clarify, he didn't receive 3 dozen responses; he contacted about that many. About 1/3 were D1s and didn't respond. About half of the other 2 dozen did. So the total was maybe about a dozen.

quote:

Originally posted by Sandman:
Just to clarify, he didn't receive 3 dozen responses; he contacted about that many. About 1/3 were D1s and didn't respond. About half of the other 2 dozen did. So the total was maybe about a dozen.

I misread, thanks!