# Jared Zeidman

Jared Zeidman hosts The Nail the Recruiting Process Podcast, where they discuss college recruiting with coaches and other specialists. Their posts highlight practical guidance for athletes and families on recruiting decisions, team culture, transfer-portal choices, and the promises coaches make.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/jared-zeidman/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jared-zeidman-19b74a141
- LinkedIn followers: 316
- Topics: recruiting
- Based on 9 dated posts, latest 2026-06-02

## Summary

Jared Zeidman is most useful for practical recruiting guidance on culture, promises, transfers, and athlete experience.

- Best for: A recruiting publisher or brand serving high school athletes and families.
- Not for: Campaigns needing paid placements, guaranteed impressions, or documented audience demographics.
- Check first: Confirm sponsorship terms, rates, placements, episode listening figures, and audience demographics.

### Takeaways

- Players left winning teams over culture, respect, accountability, or broken promises.
- Bill Walton's recruitment by John Wooden shows honesty and supportive culture over outcome promises.
- A season-long look at Canisius coach Tiffany Swoffard follows program building, growth, feedback, culture fit.

## Main ideas

- **Judge coaches by what they do, not what they promise**: The recruiting trail runs on promises that cannot be kept, and families should judge a coaching staff by what it does rather than what it says. Zeidman cites transfer players who left winning teams despite getting good minutes, citing unhappiness with team culture, feeling disrespected by staff, talented teammates escaping accountability, and recruiting promises about roles or academic accommodations that went unhonored. They conclude that a decent share of head coaches would fail a say-versus-do comparison.
- **The transfer portal is a culture and accountability story, not a money story**: Zeidman pushes back on the easy reading of the portal as athletes chasing minutes or NIL money. They start with the figure that roughly 20 percent of Division I men's and women's college basketball players transfer each year, treating it as evidence of deeper problems rather than individual greed. In interviews with transfer players who already had strong minutes on winning teams, reasons clustered around treatment and trust. They acknowledge the counter-case: some athletes regret entering the portal. But fewer coaches breaking their word, they conclude, would mean a less crowded portal.
- **Recruiting problems repeat across sports, so the guidance should too**: Zeidman treats recruiting as a set of universal challenges rather than sport-specific mechanics. They bring Coach Allison Roberts, a college volleyball recruiting specialist and founder of How to Get Recruited, onto a basketball recruiting podcast because, they say, volleyball and basketball recruiting share a great deal. The episode covers common challenges high school athletes face in finding a college, plus myths about competitive divisions and what athletes should look for. Roberts's account of her recruiting experience as a former college athlete and coach, and the small assumptions that nearly derailed it, comes through the episode.
- **Program building favors culture fit and habits over outcomes**: This guest appearance is part of a two-part episode with Canisius University head coach Tiffany Swoffard, built around season-long access across 2024-2025 and the challenge of leading an almost entirely new roster with no shared on-court history. Swoffard prioritizes growth over outcomes, culture fit over talent in recruiting, helping players move from hearing praise to embracing feedback, teaching the why behind every decision, treating non-conference games as preparation for March, and relying on intentional habits rather than results. Zeidman presents it as a behind-the-scenes look at what building a Division I program involves.
- **Resilience is the differentiator that recruiting conversations often skip**: In an episode with Coach Kristin Tullo, a mental performance coach and founder of Think Strong Play Strong, the discussion moves from recruiting logistics to the mental side of athletics. Tullo argues that resilience is the true differentiator for athletes, that coaches and parents can help build mental toughness, and that letting athletes fail is part of growth. Her approach centers on controlling the controllables and bouncing back faster from mistakes on and off the court or field. She challenges traditional ideas of toughness, favoring the ability to respond well to adversity. Zeidman presents the material as relevant to athletes and the parents and coaches around them. Tullo's background in strength coaching and social work is described in the post.

## Work to read

- [Volleyball recruiting lessons that transfer to basketball](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jared-zeidman-19b74a141_this-week-im-joined-by-coach-allison-roberts-activity-7244334132787314688-qPsb)
- [Why athletes enter the transfer portal](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jared-zeidman-19b74a141_the-easy-thing-to-do-would-be-to-dismiss-activity-7194407260427558912-m8lh)
- [Mental performance and resilience in recruiting](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jared-zeidman-19b74a141_jared-here-in-this-episode-of-the-nail-the-activity-7320508211105603584-tH1f)
- [What John Wooden's recruiting pitch teaches about promises](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jared-zeidman-19b74a141_so-how-do-you-avoid-promises-that-cant-be-activity-7194715581856559105-KS5o)
- [Building a Division I program from the ground up](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jared-zeidman-19b74a141_building-the-foundation-pt-1-a-behind-activity-7343349437450084353-cZRK)

## Brand relationships

- **How to Get Recruited** (mention)
- **Think Strong Play Strong** (mention)

## Partnerships

Across five LinkedIn posts, Jared Zeidman promotes episodes of The Nail the Recruiting Process Podcast and names guests including Canisius University head coach Tiffany Swoffard, volleyball recruiting specialist Allison Roberts, and mental performance coach Kristin Tullo. The posts also share recruiting advice drawing on Bill Walton's recruitment by John Wooden and interviews with transfer-portal athletes. None mentions a sponsor, paid brand integration, media kit, rate card, or partnership contact. The outbound links point to podcast episodes, not a commercial enquiry page. Buyers will need to contact Zeidman directly to ask about sponsorship formats, deliverables, booking, and terms.

## Alternatives

- Paul Garwood: Choose Garwood when the campaign is about how athletes present themselves and what coaches and brands look for. The two posts argue that follower counts alone do not create NIL opportunities; engagement, authenticity, and trust do. They also say college coaches value habits such as communication, accountability, body language, and coachability ahead of statistics. For publishers building practical guidance on athlete branding and self-presentation alongside recruiting content, Garwood reaches the same audience and addresses a compatible decision from the athlete's side of the table.
- Rhoderick (Derick) Wagner: Choose Wagner when the audience is parents and coaches of youth athletes and the question is how much training is too much. His posts argue against early specialization: he cites an American Academy of Pediatrics 2024 clinical report for the claim that about 70% of children leave organized sports by age 13, lists rest and training-hour guidelines, and describes what his Hastings Thunder program does differently. He also takes public positions, including objecting to a reality television project about youth baseball. For publishers whose readers are deciding whether a 10- to 13-year-old should play one sport year-round, Wagner addresses that decision directly.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/