Instagram is not your main platform. It is your visual resume.

X is where the recruiting happens. Instagram is not the main platform and it still counts, because it is where a coach finds out who you are.

Instagram is not your main recruiting platform. The recruiting itself happens on X, in conversations with coaches, and no post on Instagram is going to hand you an offer.

It still counts. Not as the place the offer comes from. As the place a coach decides what kind of player, and what kind of person, he would be signing. That is not a small job and it is one you can be bad at.

What actually goes on it

This is the part nobody tells you, and it is the whole point of having the account. Instagram is where everything goes that could not fit on X, or did not belong there.

The photos that would not fit in one X post. You had twelve good frames from Friday. Two of them went on X. The other ten are not worthless, they just had nowhere to go. That is a carousel.

Team stuff. The uniform shoot. The bus. The pre game walk. The whole team in the tunnel. None of that is an X post and all of it says you are part of something.

Your awards. All of them, including the ones that felt too small to announce. On X an award is news and news has a shelf life. On Instagram it is part of the record.

The swaggy stuff. The picture where you look like a football player. You know the one. That belongs here.

The everyday football life. Lift days, film sessions, camp, the rehab, the early mornings. Things that are true about you and would clog an X feed if you posted every one of them.

If you put everything on X, you bury the posts that were supposed to do work.

X is where you talk to coaches, so the signal there has to stay sharp. Instagram absorbs the volume. Two accounts, two jobs, and neither one crowds the other.

This platform is for football

Nothing highly political. Nothing built to start an argument.

Not because you do not have opinions and not because they are wrong. Because this is your football account, and a football account that turns into something else stops doing the job you built it for.

That is the whole rule and it is simpler than the version people usually get, which is a long anxious list of things not to say.

If you want a place to be a person, use a different account

You should have somewhere to be sixteen. Make it a second account, keep it private, and share it only with people you actually trust.

And know what you are still risking. A private account is not a vault. Anything on it can be screenshotted, and a screenshot leaves the room. If something on there could damage your recruitment, then having it on a private account means you are still gambling with your future. You have made the bet smaller. You have not stopped betting.

That is not a reason to skip the second account. It is a reason to know which one you are on.

Make the football account readable

A resume nobody can read is not a resume. Four lines, and most accounts are missing at least one. Position. Class year. Height and weight. A link to your film.

It costs nothing and it takes four minutes. A coach who has to open three tabs to learn your class year is a coach who moves to the next name. Put your city or your high school in there too if it fits, because coaches recruit regions, and your region is how he decides whether you are on his map at all.

Keep the football account public. Not because being public is safe, but because a locked account cannot be read. He cannot confirm the account is yours, he cannot reach your film, and he is not going to request to follow a high school player he has not decided on yet. Your personal account is the one that gets locked. This one is the resume, and a resume has to be readable.

What the research actually says, and what it does not

There is one peer-reviewed study worth knowing about here. In a study of 5.5 million posts, recruits with active accounts received 109% to 143% more scholarship offers during their junior year than recruits with no account, controlling for star rating, height, weight, position and region.

Now the honest part, because this number gets misused constantly. It is observational, not causal. It does not prove that posting caused the offers. The data is from 2014 to 2016. And star rating swamps everything else in the model, worth roughly ten times what an account is worth. A great player with no account still gets recruited. The study does not say otherwise.

What it does support is narrower and still useful: having a real, findable, active account is associated with more offers than having none. Not with better offers. More of them.

Anyone who tells you a study proves social media gets you recruited has not read the study.

Why he followed you and then said nothing

Because a follow is not contact, and in football the rules restrict him far more than they restrict you.

There are stretches of the calendar when a Division I coach may not contact you at all, and stretches when he may contact you but not in person. A follow costs him nothing and breaks nothing. It is often the only thing he is permitted to do that day.

There is also a rule most families have never heard of. A school cannot publicize its interest in you before you have signed. So a coach who is genuinely interested may be specifically not allowed to say so publicly. Silence after a follow is the most normal thing in this process.

What to actually do this week

Fix the four lines and make sure the football account is public. Twenty minutes, once.

Go back through your camera roll from this season and post what you never posted. The ten frames that did not make the X post. The team photo. The award from August. There is already a month of content sitting on your phone.

Decide right now whether you need a second account, and if you do, make it and move the personal posts there.

Then scroll your football account back two years with a coach's eyes, not yours, and take down what does not belong on a resume.

Instagram is not a door you check once and forget. It is the half of your resume that shows a coach a person instead of a highlight.