Recruiting 101

Recruiting Day 1 (Recruiting 101)

For those of you who may have come to this blog and are unfamiliar with how Hoops Dynasty works and are curious just exactly how the recruiting process unfolds, let me take a minute to kind of dive into it with you right now.

At 5:01 pm Eastern time on the first day of recruiting all the Sim AI teams will do the bulk of their recruiting. They aren’t limited to mile constraints or anything like that, but they also don’t target the upper tier players that their teams could probably snag if a human coach was there.  So an A+ prestige team may target players in the top 50-100 instead of the top 15.  So they will have their list of kids “considering them” before recruiting opens for the human coaches at 6:01 eastern.  At that time you have your entire recruiting budget at your disposal to fill all your open scholarships.  Every 3 hours (only 2 for the first cycle) the actions you select will be completed and the recruits will respond. Their response can either be negative (telling you there is no chance they are coming to your school), neutral (saying they want to learn more or need more information), or positive (start considering your school, open to the idea).  Any response that isn’t negative means that if you throw more effort and recruiting $ into that prospect you have a chance to be on his short list.


[Short blurb on recruiting $, at the Division III level, you will receive $3,000 for each open scholarhip, $5,000 in Division II, and $15,000 in Division I. Conference are also rewarded money for how their teams do in the postseason tournaments as follows.


For the National Tournament:
     In Division III, conferences will earn $3,000 per game played by one of it's member schools
     In Division II, conferences will earn $5,000 per game played by one of it's member schools
     In Division I, conferences will earn $20,000 per game played by one of it's member schools
For the PostSeason Invitational:
     In Division III, conferences will earn $1,000 per game played by one of it's member schools
     In Division II, conferences will earn $1,500 per game played by one of it's member schools
     In Division I, conferences will earn $5,000 per game played by one of it's member schools


The money is split between all conference teams. So if one wins the national title, they don't get a huge cash infusion, but each team in the conference gets a nice little bump since that extra earned money is shared]

 What you’ll see most of the great coaches do is get their main targets to try and consider them almost immediately (within the first few cycles).  This is done across the board over the first 5-8 hours of recruiting and can be arguably the most stressful time of the whole process when you’re just on the cusp of playing with the Big Boys like I am at ASU.  I’ll have guys that I’m targeting who are almost elite but not quite and I need to hope that none of the big boys (A or A+ prestige) decide to step in and make them theirs. 

Unfortunately recruiting is where prestige plays the ultimate role.  It is so insanely hard to beat out a team for a recruit if they have a better prestige than you.  It can be done, especially if location is on your side (recruit is within 50 miles of you and over 1000 from them), but it won’t be cheap and I have always opted towards staying away from battles with teams that were even one jump higher than me in prestige.

The downfall to the current recruiting construct in this game is that once you get through the first 8 hours, if you have your recruits considering you, and only you, you can mostly sit back and coast.  You don’t need to do any other actions once they are considering you in order to get them to sign and really the only active steps you have to take are checking in to make sure nobody else has come in and jumped onto their considering list before signings start.

At that point you wait for the signings to start and watch as your targets sign on the dotted line and show up to practice.