Atlantic 10 Best Practices: U Mass and the Recruiting Section

This blog is all about inspiration. We're spending 5 days elevating best practices from the squads that make up the Atlantic 10 You can tune in on this blog, or you can follow along on Facebook (linked here) or on Twitter -- I'm @pawlow34.

What makes something a best practice? This isn't about the most intricate experience. It's about looking at the world from your consumer's point of view and delivering something that hits it right smack on the head. In the case of colleges, I'm treating the primary consumer as that prospective student athlete.

Thus far we have seen George Washington put faces to skill development (here) and Dayton celebrate success, here.

Let's keep rolling!

Hit the UMass basketball page and scroll down to the bottom. You can kind of see a box for Minute Matters in the bottom center of this image. Don't worry, I'll zoom in for you...

You'll see that UMass lays out content for their three most important groups of consumers: Fans, Recruits, and Alums. We'll go right into the For Recruits box, here.


There is a LOT of information lobbed out here, everything from Compliance and Rules to Directions to Campus or Visitor's Guides to Twitter. But what intrigued me inside this section was the Strength & Conditioning area, which I now dive into...

As you'll note below, this information is extremely deep, but what they do well is specify how they will make you a better athletes. Workouts include a pretty extensive overview.

Program details include speed endurance (designed to help you endure a lack of oxygen), intervals (to improve anaerobic capacity), hill training (for running mechanics and power), speed training (for speed of muscular contraction), and plyometric training (which I hated, but builds strength and footwork). The information is great, as it not just tells you what they do, but why they do it. So many times in life we share what we are doing, but often times it is the why we do it that helps people connect.

How could this be better? I'd love to see this broken out, specifically, for basketball. Give us the picture of what the Hoops team workouts are like and then connect it to the style of play that UMass employs. Would make the workouts not feel like workouts, but more a part of a master plan.

What's up next? Atlantic 10 week continues tomorrow. We will continue unveiling peaks into things I found fantastic across the 14-team Atlantic 10 landscape.

And, don't forget, you can follow along via this blog, or hop over to Facebook (linked here) or on Twitter -- I'm @pawlow34.

Thanks for reading.

Andy