Comparison is the thief of joy. Recruiting is full of it.

Why running your own race is good advice that almost nobody can actually follow

Earlier this week, I was out walking with my son when I noticed a house down the street had a new listing sign out front.

I pulled up Zillow before we’d made it to the end of the block.

I looked at the price, thought about what we’re about to list our own house for, and spent the next ten minutes asking myself questions I had no business asking.

What if theirs sells first?

What if ours is priced wrong?

What if buyers who might have wanted our house see theirs and choose it instead?

I know exactly what I was doing. I was comparing. I know how pointless it is - every house is different, every buyer is different, every set of circumstances is different. And I still couldn’t stop myself.

I’m telling you this because I spend a lot of time telling families not to do exactly what I just did.

The comparison trap in recruiting

Recruiting is one of the most comparison-rich environments a teenager can be in.

Commitments go up on Instagram. Your friends get coy if you ask if they’re being recruited by a certain school. Parents talk at tournaments.

A parent whose daughter is a freshman sees a sophomore commit and starts doing math in their head. A junior who hasn’t heard from anyone watches a teammate get three offers in a week and wonders what she’s doing wrong.

None of this information is useful. Most of it is actively misleading. And yet it’s almost impossible to ignore, because the human brain is wired to benchmark. We make sense of where we are by looking at where other people are. It’s just how we’re built.

The problem is that recruiting is one of the worst possible environments for this kind of comparison, because the variables are so numerous and so individual that almost no two processes are meaningfully comparable.

I got a question recently from a parent. They’d heard that timelines for their daughter’s position were typically longer than others. But then they’d seen some data suggesting otherwise, and they wanted to know which was true.

My answer was essentially: it doesn’t matter. Not because the question isn’t understandable - it’s completely understandable - but because knowing the average timeline tells you almost nothing about how your daughter’s process is going to unfold.

Her specific skill set, her academic profile, the positions available at the programs she’s targeting, how many roster spots each coach is trying to fill - none of that is captured in an average. The average is noise. Her process is the signal.

Why “run your own race” doesn’t work on its own

The advice to run your own race has been around forever. I wrote about it before I ever started this newsletter, back when I was just trying to make sense of what I was seeing in recruiting. It’s true advice. Comparison is the thief of joy - the phrase is a cliché because it keeps being right.

But telling someone not to compare is like telling someone not to think about a pink elephant. The instruction produces the opposite effect. You need something to replace the comparison with, not just a directive to stop doing it.

What actually helps, in my experience, is understanding why the comparison is specifically misleading - not just generally unhelpful, but wrong in ways you can point to.

Every recruit is different. Every coach is looking for something different. Every program has different needs in different years. A player who would be an 80% scholarship at one program might be a 20% at another, not because of anything she did or didn’t do, but because of where each program is in its cycle. None of that has anything to do with what someone else is doing.

When you can see clearly why the comparison doesn’t hold, it loses some of its grip.

What you can actually control

This is the bit where I’m supposed to tell you everything is going to work out. I’m not going to do that, because I don’t know if it is, and neither do you, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.

What I can tell you is that the anxiety you’re feeling - or the anxiety your daughter is feeling - is a completely normal response to a process that is genuinely uncertain, genuinely high-stakes, and genuinely out of your control in most of the ways that matter. The uncertainty is real. The pressure is real. Feeling it doesn’t mean something is wrong.

What it means is that you’re paying attention.

The question is what you do with that attention. Pointed at other people’s timelines and other people’s offers, it just generates noise. Pointed at the things you can actually influence - how she prepares, how she communicates with coaches, how she performs when it matters - it becomes something useful.

June 15 is six weeks away. The next few months are going to feel increasingly loud with commitments and announcements and other people’s news. You don’t have to mute it. You just have to remember it’s not about you.

Run your own race. I know that’s easier said than done. Run it anyway.

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