Lacrosse recruiting email template

The first email template

That is the entire email. Under 150 words filled in. Resist adding a paragraph about your love of the game, a list of every award, or an attached resume.

A few notes on the fields. The bracketed test score is optional and should come out entirely if the number is not a strength, since an average score is worse than no score. The major line matters more than recruits expect, especially at academically selective schools where a coach is thinking about whether admissions will support you. The height line in the signature is standard in lacrosse and saves a coach from having to ask.

The one line you cannot template

Every field above can be reused across a hundred schools except one. The sentence about the specific program is what decides whether the email reads as a broadcast.

Good versions are concrete and verifiable:

• I watched your quarterfinal against Salisbury and the way your defense slides early is how we play at my club.
• I visited campus in October for the open house and sat in on a class in your engineering program.
• Your goalie graduates in 2027 and that timeline lines up with when I would arrive.
• I want to study nursing and yours is one of the few programs on my list where I could do that and still play.

Bad versions are the ones a coach has read a thousand times: great program, great tradition, always been a dream of mine. Those sentences make the email worse than having no personalization line at all, because they prove the template.

The follow up template

The rule for follow ups is that each one must carry new information. A follow up that only asks whether they saw the last email gives a coach nothing to act on.

Template mistakes coaches notice immediately

1. A leftover placeholder. Sending an email that still says [COACH LAST NAME] ends your candidacy at that school.
2. The wrong school name, which happens constantly when people copy and paste between drafts.
3. Multiple coaches in the To line, which tells every one of them they are interchangeable.
4. An attachment instead of a link, which trips spam filters and often will not be opened.
5. A subject line in all caps, which reads as spam to both the filter and the human.

Before you send, reread the email once looking only for the school name and the coach name. That single check prevents the two most damaging errors on this list.

Keep a record of what you sent

By the fortieth school you will not remember who you contacted, when, or what you said. Keep a simple sheet with the school, coach name, date sent, what the personalization line was, and whether they replied.

That record is what makes follow ups work six weeks later, because a good follow up references what you already told them and adds something new. It also stops the two errors that end recruitments: emailing the same coach twice with the same message, and forgetting which programs already told you their class was full.