Is it better to email a college coach or to send a letter in the mail? Email is obviously faster, but do coaches prefer to have an actually document in their hands?

NH,
If you go to any school website that your son is intersted in going, there might be somewhere you can fill out a questionaire. I saw it on a schools website today. Might be worth checking into, if they have it there , they must read them.

NHbaseball -
Not all coaches seem to be frequent e-mail users. IMO, the standard letter is a better form of first contact, with a completed player profile & e-mail contact info included, then followed up with a phone call. That way the coach has all the information they need and can return the contact by either letter or e-mail.

Here's an article about that very question on the main site: e-mail vs. letters

RHP05Parent-

Thanks for the info. The link really helped. Sounds like a personal letter is the way to go.

NHbaseball

NH- just to add, I think many coaches are not big "e-mailers" ( the younger ones maybe more so). but, I think a personal letter, at least to start shows a little more sincere interest and effort on your son's part and that hard copy letter seems to get remembered, put in a file and of more value, especially for initial contact, than does an email IMO.

We write and send a letter then email the coach that we have sent him a letter. Most of the coaches we've contacted are emailers. Maybe this is just luck? The coaches know that this generation of players use email.

Our experience is many of the recruiting coordinators are emailers. The bottom line, a brief nice letter, email, player profile form, a note from your coach about you and a phone call. Do all of them.

When we were going through this a couple of years ago, my son sent letters rather than e-mails. A couple of months went by and 2 of the coaches who he hadn't heard from called and mentioned that the letters got "lost in the shuffle" and they had just surfaced. So from that point on, he e-mailed and got much faster results.