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So you have an overseas basketball team's contact information
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You know who you want to contact, but how do you actually get these teams to respond to you
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and ultimately give you a shot at playing on their overseas pro team
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Well, today I want to show you seven communication mistakes that may just be killing your chances
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of getting on to these clubs. So let's get right into it. Now, if you remember nothing else from this video, just know this
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If you are contacting overseas basketball teams and you do not have a reference point
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when you are doing it, your chances of success will be lower. A reference point is essentially anything that acts as a way to bridge the gap or break the ice
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between you and the club or the owner or whoever the party is
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So you can do this in many ways. You can have a reference point of a mutual connection who you both know, of a location
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where you both have seen the level of play of a former player who this person knows
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who the club knows. There's many different ways that you can do this. So a quick example of how I did it
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When I was playing in El Salvador, we played in this tournament called the Central American Championship
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and we played a team in Belize. So in these Central American club championships, you had all of the best clubs in Central America playing against each other
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All of us came together and we played in this tournament together. And when we played Belize, I had my best game of the tournament
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And years later, when I was trying to get on into the Belizeian Professional League
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when I was contacting these clubs, sure enough, I knew that this was my reference point
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They didn't know who I was and I had to somehow bridge that gap and I did that by saying
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hey, look, I played against your best club in the Belizeon League and I played well against them
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So now they have a benchmark essentially of my level of play
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This was my point of reference to them and I got really favorable results from these guys
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But this is the key. If you do not have a reference point, then it will be somewhat difficult to get into these leagues
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Now, you may not always have a reference point. that's okay but whenever you can get in a reference point it is going to shoot up your chances of
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succeed in so much now the second most important thing is that players need to have eye catchers
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or scroll stoppers in their messages and essentially what this means is if you just send a massive
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blob of text with no space in between no points of emphasis in your right and then it's going to be
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really hard for any coach to really take it seriously and honestly read it because if there just eight nine 10 lines just all bunched together i don know what i supposed to focus on but if i have what
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i call a i catcher or a scroll stopper then i know if i just scroll and i'm just skimming the message
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i see this pops out to me this is something that i should focus on and you can do this in a lot of ways
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so one way if you are writing emails one way to do it is that you bold the very important part of your
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message. So I often do this. If a coach was just going through it, he could see, hey, okay
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there's a bunch of text. This is bolder, though. What's this? And he will pay attention to that
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Now, depending on your mode of communication, it's also important to have this on your emails
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And this actually happens in the subject line. That's the thing where say a coach went into his
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inbox and he had 10 messages. All of them have the kind of message header beforehand, the subject
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line. This is where you want to sell your biggest advantage, your biggest selling point of you as a
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player. Your nationality, if you're applying to a league or a team where a certain nationality is
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more advantageous, your stats that you're currently located in this city or in this country and
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you're looking for a tryout, any of these things are going to be more likely for a coach to stop
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and actually pay attention to your message. Now, the next thing you have to pay attention to is
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the platform that you're messaging on. Depending on where you are messaging the coach or the team
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meaning social media, email, in person. The psychology and the behavioral expectation will be different
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This applies to every interaction that you have in life. So in general, if you're going to message someone on email
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usually they're going to be more prone to check it on the desktop or expect a longer message
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Whereas on social media, usually you do not expect a message that is going to be scrolling for many, many paragraphs
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These are instant messaging tools, essentially, in many of these social media cases
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so you have to adjust accordingly. It's a really popular one in the basketball community is Instagram
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But when you actually get on Instagram on your phone, what happens is that they invert all of the text
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It's in one column just like this down. So if you have a few paragraphs and you put it into an email
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format, then if someone checks it on a desktop, it's just a few sentences together. Or you do that
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same message and you put it on an Instagram platform, it's actually going to look like a lot more than it is
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depending on what you're doing, you have to think of the psychology of what the coach
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of what the team is going to have And that leads me to my next point The length of your messages every player needs to be very conscious of this because coaches general managers agents their time is really limited It
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really precious. That's how you have to think of it. Essentially, every message should always follow
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the same principle. Hope that they're well, greet them, and then get straight to the reference point
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if you have it or your biggest attraction that you have and that you can offer them. Give them
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highlights and then essentially give them a call to action you don't have to get
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through into well I didn't make this team because of this YZ and I work so hard
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these things they're honestly irrelevant to the coach they do not care that you got
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cut from this team they do not care the reasoning behind it do not rationalize you
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not justify what your resume is just say this is what I can offer you these
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are my intentions if you're interested great if you're not then they're not
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going to be interested okay but you're going to have a better chance of getting on with the team
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If you're straight to the point, business-like professional. Now, one factor that a lot of players do not think of is the time of the day and the time zones
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Just because it is 9 a.m. wherever you are or a good time of the day to send the message
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doesn't necessarily mean it's a good time of the day for someone else across the world to receive a message
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Remember, you're playing overseas basketball. So you have to be respectful of all these different time zones and where you're actually sending off your message
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I would always send off my messages in essentially two or three slots of the day
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What's the first thing that everyone does? Basically, everyone does in the world as soon as they wake up
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They check their messages on their phone. Okay, so that's a great time when people are just getting up to give them the messages
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Usually people will lounge in bed. They're kind of getting their day started for a few moments
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Get them right in the morning where their energy is high as to not drained from the day
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Part would be maybe their lunchtime. Okay, they get a break. Usually people have other jobs
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They have other obligations. But usually everyone more or less is going to have some sort of lunchtime around like 12 to 2
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And another time would be later in the day. maybe in six, seven, eight, when people are back home, relaxing, just kind of winding down
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The point being, if you are messaging teams at 3, 4, 5, 6 a.m., something like that, 1 a.m., 2 a.m., then they're
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probably not even going to look at the message. Worst case scenario in that case would be that they are sleeping, they get a notification
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they look at their phone, who is this, put it down, don't even pay attention because they're half awake, and they never get around to it again
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So you have to think of when is it that people would actually look at their phone would check their emails Now one point that should go without saying remember this is overseas basketball professional basketball money is involved
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businesses are involved, partnerships are involved, reputations are involved. People take this seriously
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So you have to represent yourself as a professional. That means no spell and errors, no grammar
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errors, punctuation errors, use spell check, no slang, no swearing, anything like that
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It should be pretty common sense, but too often I see people writing me like
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yo bro, put me on on that team. There's no yo bro
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It's a business interaction between you too. For the most part, you are cold call in these teams
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So you have to be professional and actually give the team the impression that, okay
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this guy is about his business and he's actually going to represent us in a good way
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Last week, I was helping a team decide between two players who they wanted
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And the deciding factor for this club was that this guy, this one player
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Player A had a website and they said, this guy actually looks like he's professional
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He's about his business. And I'm not saying everyone has to have a website. Of course, I'm not expecting that from everyone
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The point being that you have to be professional. You have to represent yourself in a certain way
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And the last thing that I would recommend is to put and call to action at the end of your messages
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Now, this essentially just means if you're interested, you can reach me at this number or at this email or I can be found here
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something that gives them direction into what is the next step in the process
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But put this at the end of the message because if you put it at the start and say
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this is my phone number, then they're going to read the rest of the message in theory. And then they're just kind of kind of get distracted and say, okay, what does this person want again
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So they want to try out, grab their attention, get the body of the message
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And then you put it at the end. This is the next step. You can reach me here. So there you guys have it
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Seven communication mistakes that could be killing your chances of getting on with an overseas
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basketball club. I say this to players all the time. You should be treating your next email
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just like it's your next workout, meaning it should be just as important because ultimately
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they are both critical for your success. Now obviously this is just one piece of the puzzle
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We haven't even gotten into how to find these teams, how to contact them directly, what league
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you should be looking for. So if you guys are interested in learning more about that
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then go ahead and subscribe to this channel because this is completely different. devoted to helping players get on in overseas basketball
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I'll see you guys in the next one, all right? Peace
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