Come back every Tuesday for Recruiting Horror Stories™, athletes' first-hand stories on what can go wrong during the recruiting process.

I want to start this story by saying that this all occurred while I was already committed to play football at Yale. While not being recruited to the level that I desired during my senior year of high school I decided, with the support of my family, that I wanted to do a postgraduate year. I visited some schools and ultimately decided on The Hun School of Princeton. As you can probably tell by the name the school is located in Princeton, New Jersey which means it is within walking distance from Princeton University and about an hour drive from The University of Pennsylvania. 

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I am originally from Maryland and attended high school in Washington, D.C. I received an offer from Yale on the morning of my high school graduation in June and was committed at some point in July before I ever arrived at Hun to begin my post graduate year as I was not interested in a long and drawn out recruitment and my decision took a lot of pressure off of me personally. Upon arriving at Hun I received offers from other universities, including both Princeton and Penn. 

I had communication with coaches from both schools on and off but never expressed any serious interest as far as taking visits or applying to the schools and told my coach that I did not plan on taking official visits to either of the schools. However he had connections to coaches at both schools and tried to convince me to do otherwise. But this is where the story starts to get weird.

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After exactly a month of no communication with the Penn coach that was recruiting me or anybody else on the staff, one of their players, who also did a post-graduate year at Hun, contacted me. He was reaching out because his coach said that I told him I wanted to take an official visit…which was weird to me because I had not spoken to him or anyone for a month and said nothing like that to my coach. Yet my coach had told him that I wanted to do so anyway.

After continuous visits at my school from Princeton coaches and attempts to get me to take an official visit the next situation occurred. Football season was over at this point and it was a Friday afternoon/night basketball game. My phone rings with a call from an unsaved phone number from the New Jersey area. I do not answer as I am watching the game and it is loud in the gym. I receive a voicemail and it is somebody from Princeton asking where my family and I are. My coach apparently told them I was going to take an official visit and they took it upon themselves to schedule me for one.

The moral of this story would be to always communicate with your coach about what he or she is communicating to college coaches. Failing to do so can lead to you being put in very awkward positions and potentially make you look bad, especially when you and your coach do not communicate the same thing and you are not aware of it. 

Thankfully, this ultimately did not have a negative impact on my recruitment as I stayed committed to Yale throughout the process and was admitted shortly after this occurred. But it could have a negative effect on others, so learn from my experience and communicate. 

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* Originally published on December 13, 2022, by Jordan Alcon