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How colleges can even the recruiting field with virtual reality

Recruiting quality athletes has always been an uphill battle for small schools. Budgets are often meager, and considering how much large schools shell out for recruiting, it’s a challenge for a small program to catch an athlete’s eye. For coaches of Olympic sports, the problem can be exacerbated by the lack of scholarship money available, even for the most promising of athletes.

To make a better connection, some forward-thinking schools are turning to emerging technology. At the top of this list is virtual reality.

Virtual reality has come a long way since the late 1980s and early ’90s. The technology has advanced to the point where users can immerse themselves in a full 360-degree environment. To do this, users wear one of several lightweight and portable VR headsets. And while tech insiders have pointed to video games as the driving force behind VR, brands across a number of sectors, including travel and hospitality and retail, are already utilizing the technology.

In the sports realm, college and professional programs are using VR in training and recruiting.

The training aspect has been well-documented with a variety of teams across the NFL, NHL and college football using the technology to help players see and replay specific plays, all from a first-person perspective. More importantly, VR has the ability to allow coaches to teach athletes decision-making skills in the context of a real play.

Lincoln Memorial golf coach Travis Muncy leads a recruit through a VR campus tour.
Photo by: LINCOLN MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY
However, it’s the recruiting aspect where VR really has the chance to shine in college sports. Major Division I football programs such as Michigan and Arkansas are already using VR for both on-campus and in-home visits, allowing recruits to feel as if they’re actually part of the program on game days, including running the sidelines during the game and celebrating with the players postgame.

For these large college programs, a custom VR experience is just a drop in the recruiting budget bucket. It’s the smaller schools and sports that ultimately will benefit from making the one-time investment in these custom recruiting experiences. A virtual reality experience, created from the school’s unique factors and goals, would start at $10,000.

After all, while student athletes are interested in sports, they are also students, with the same questions and concerns as their peers. They still need to know if they will fit in at a school and enjoy the surrounding area. For athletes who don’t expect a pro career after college, being able to immerse themselves in the classrooms and libraries is just as important as the firsthand look at facilities and locker rooms.

An example of this working comes from Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn.

For a private liberal arts college with an undergraduate enrollment of about 1,700, flying a golf recruit from the United Kingdom to Tennessee would have been a big hit to its recruiting budget. Instead, one student athlete was able to virtually tour the campus and see if it was right for her.

“[Coach Travis Muncy] had a recruit in England that was looking at us and a couple of other schools,” said Kate Reagan, LMU senior director of marketing and PR. “She told him that ultimately it was a [virtual] tour that helped her decide that LMU was the place for her. Coach Muncy was very pleased to have something to show his recruits that might never have the opportunity to visit campus before they enroll.”

While a virtual tour isn’t exactly the same thing as virtual experience, it’s an apt example of how experiencing a location can have a powerful effect on a person, regardless of whether he or she is an athlete.

The virtual horizon

It’s clear that VR gives athletic departments the opportunity to recruit athletes in mass. Imagine taking a page from the playbook of the Savannah College of Art and Design, which earlier this year mailed 5,000 Google Cardboard headsets to prospective students. Athletic departments could do the same thing, allowing recruits to use their own smartphones and get a tour of the school and athletic facilities, and immerse themselves within footage from actual practices and events. With a one-time expenditure, athletic directors and coaches at even some of the smallest colleges and universities have the opportunity to provide hundreds of recruits the “official visit” experience, without having to pay for flights, hotels and meals for each individual student.

Looking ahead, live-streaming virtual reality also may become a valuable tool for schools to use for recruiting. Rather than having to fly all over the country for follow-up, in home visits, imagine a school being able to deliver a VR headset to a recruit and have them look in live on a practice or in a meeting. From here the coaches can sell them again in real time about the exact role they’ll be playing on the field come game day and even provide one last tour of the facilities. In the college sports recruiting game, the last sales pitch is often the most important. Why not make it with virtual reality?

With all the buzz currently surrounding virtual reality, the real impact of the technology is going to be felt in the next few years. After acquiring Oculus for $2 billion last March, Facebook is poised to release the final consumer version of the Oculus Rift this month. Competing VR headsets hit the market last holiday season.

“Head-mounted displays are about to really hit the mainstream,” Adrian Slobin, SapientNitro global initiative lead, told Ad Age last summer. “They’re going to get cheaper. They’re going to be given away with phone contracts. It will pretty soon just be one more piece of gear in your life.”

College recruiters who want to stand out from the crowd should keep this in mind, as younger recruits may come to expect virtual reality as part of the sales experience. This will make it all the more important to create unique VR experiences that can broaden a school’s reach and expand their potential talent pool without breaking the bank.

Abi Mandelbaum is co-founder and CEO of YouVisit, a virtual reality company.

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