What coaches actually told me.

Hey — it turned out the real story wasn't in my inbox.

When I first started thinking seriously about exposure, I was obsessed with the email problem. I pictured a thousand unread messages from parents and players sitting in a coach's inbox, and I thought, "If somebody could just organize this, everybody gets seen." Then I started actually talking to coaches.

What they told me changed the whole thing.

It wasn't that they didn't care. It was that by the time an email shows up, they've already seen a hundred kids that day — not in their inbox, but on their timeline.

They're watching clips between classes. In the hallway before practice. On the bus. On the couch, half-scouting, half-scrolling. They're not sitting down to read a three-paragraph cover letter about how hard you work on defense. They're double-tapping the one clip that makes them stop moving their thumb.

The coach who really snapped it into focus for me said it plain:

If a parent sends me a ten-minute mixtape, I might open it later. If a thirty-second clip hits my feed and it's the right kid, I'm texting somebody right then.

— A high school coach

That's the gap: players and parents are still writing for the inbox. Coaches are already living on the timeline.

So this issue is about that gap — what coaches actually told me about how they find players, how they watch film, and how little of that looks like the "perfect email" we've all been told to write.

A few weeks ago, I sat next to a coach while we watched one of "my" girls on his phone.

Here's how it went:

He didn't start with the attached full game. He opened Instagram.

He scrolled until he saw her jersey. The first clip was a clean step-back three. He watched it once in silence. Then he dragged the scrubber back with his thumb and watched just the first three seconds again — the footwork, the separation, the defender's reaction. He never listened to the audio. He didn't read the caption.

Then he let the next clip autoplay: a drive from the slot, help defender late, finish through contact. He didn't need the final score. He wanted to know, in under a minute, three things:

• +Can she actually move like this against real defense?
• +Does this look like our pace and style?
• +Is this one clip enough that I should ask for more?

After two clips he said, "Yeah, I'd watch a full game on her." That's it. Thirty seconds of video, one thumb, and a mental "add to list."

The part that stuck with me: the email her mom had drafted for weeks never came up. The filter wasn't "who wrote the best message?" It was "who made it impossible to keep scrolling?"

That's the environment your film actually lives in — not a fantasy where everyone reads everything, but the real world where you get seconds, not paragraphs.

Talking to coaches like that forced me to change how I shoot and what I deliver.

This week's receipts:

• +I stopped treating highlights like attachments and started treating them like the first impression — the right thirty seconds, packaged for the way coaches actually watch.
• +I cut clips first, context second. Coaches see the game in motion before they see the bio. The story is still there — it follows the tape instead of leading it.
• +I stopped chasing ten-minute mixtapes. That energy goes into pulling out 2–3 decisive possessions that speak louder than any paragraph.
• +I added a note in my own playbook: "If an edit doesn't respect the coach's thumb — the way they actually move through content — it doesn't go out."

None of this means email is dead. Coaches still ask for full games, transcripts, schedules. But the first impression more and more lives on the timeline, not in the inbox. The film has to honor that reality or it's just more noise.

If you're a player or a parent, this isn't me telling you to chase trends or turn your whole life into content. It's me passing along what I heard, straight from the people making decisions.

Don't beat yourself up because your email didn't get a reply. Start asking a different question: "If a coach only gave me thirty seconds on their phone, what would I want them to see?"

That's the gap I shoot for — between the story you're trying to tell and the way the people you're trying to reach actually watch.

Talk soon,