Who should I even ask?
Huddle AI is a career assistant that knows your alumni. It asks a player what she is after, then names three or four people who fit and writes the message she can send them.
Open the directory as a sophomore and you get two hundred names. Every one of them played for the same program. Any of them might help. That is the problem, not the solution: the list answers a question she has not figured out how to ask yet. So she closes the tab, or she messages the one name she already recognized, which was never the point of building the thing.
Coaches fill that gap by being the switchboard. A player asks, the coach thinks of someone, the coach makes the introduction. It works. It also caps the whole network at how many names one person can hold in their head on a Tuesday in February.
What changed
Every network can turn on Huddle AI, a career assistant that knows your alumni and talks like someone who has met them.
It asks before it answers
Say "help me find a mentor" and the first thing it does is not hand over a list. It asks who you are.
That question is the whole difference between a search result and a recommendation. A player who says "sports media, campus radio, New York or Boston, I want to know how people break in" gets a different three names than a player who says "finance, two internships, I need interview practice."
Then it names names
Three or four alumni, one line on what each can actually help with, links to their profile and LinkedIn, and a note on which one to talk to first. Usually that is the recent grad, because a sophomore asking a senior producer at ESPN for fifteen minutes is a harder ask than she realizes.
Two things it will not do. It only recommends alumni who said they are willing to mentor, so nobody gets volunteered. And it never puts anyone's email or phone number in the chat. It points at the profile and lets the member take it from there.
Then it writes the hard part
Most introductions die in the blank message box. The player knows who to ask and cannot make herself type the first sentence, so she waits, and then the internship posting closes.
A fifteen-minute agenda for the call and a note she can send as written. She will change a word or two. That is fine. The point is that she sends it today instead of next month.
One thing to try this week
Ask one player to open it and tell you what it said. Most coaches expect it to be a search box with better manners, and the first reply being a question is the part that changes their mind.
It is on for most networks. If your members do not see it, tell us and we will turn it on.
Not on AlumniHuddle yet?
Every update here ships to every program, at one price. Fifteen minutes is enough to see what it would look like for yours.
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