Utilize Your Contacts
The first, and most obvious, is utilizing the contacts that you have already created. Lean on them. Seek advice first. Ask them who the best person is to contact within the organization. Ask them if you can send a resume, cover letter, and some sample reports to pass along. It’s important to be calculated in this process. People are less inclined to help if they feel the only reason you are contacting them is because you want something. There are a few ways to ease these potential feelings. First, stay in constant contact prior to asking for a favor. Check in frequently. Ask them how they are doing and wish them well for the coming games. Build a relationship that is mutually beneficial. Seek to help them in any way you can. If you are at a school that could be assisting a road scout in talking to any sources he/she may need. If you’re in equipment, throw him a shirt or two. Trust me, that’ll all go a long way. Build those relationships so that you can lean on them when you need them.
Contact Them Using Any Means Available
If you have access to emails, use them. Be fairly aggressive in your email frequency. They may get annoyed with the flood of emails but they are likely to remember your name and the eagerness you displayed in making contact with them. If email isn’t an option (even if it is), sending your resume to the facility is an effective approach. To be truthful, teams receive a ton of resumes. However, from my experience, they do their best to sort and read each one. Don’t get discouraged by a lack of immediate responses, resumes are often filed away and revisited closer to the hiring cycle (immediately following the draft).
The Best Strategy For A Response
If you have contacts on specific teams, by all means, be aggressive in pursuit of a job with those clubs. However, in my opinion, the best approach is to increase your odds by contacting all 32 NFL clubs. It’s simple math, contact all 32 teams and get one denial, your odds have only diminished by around 3%. Contact only 8 teams and get one denial, your odds decrease by 12.5%.
What You Should Send
I’ll be consistent in my advice on this until I hear otherwise from the decision makers. Send your resume, a cover letter specific (somewhat) to the club, and a sample of your reports (2-3 should suffice, write reports here). They may not read your cover letter, they are more likely to read your reports and resume. However, this shows you put in the requisite effort and time. It’s a way to stand out from the crowd.
Who You Should Address
Anyone in a leadership position should be addressed. Directors are more likely to respond than GM’s and other executives, however, it is often that GM’s will pass the information along to those in charge of sorting through resumes of potential employees.
Final Piece
Your pursuit should not stop with the sending of these packets to clubs. It is only the beginning. Continue to write your Elite Scout School reports (sign up here), continue to be aggressive in building connections in the league, continue to utilize your contacts, and continue to pursue every avenue available to get your name known to these decision makers. My personality is by no means aggressive but I have seen time and again that those that make their desires known and are the most persistent are often the ones that land the job they desire.
NOTE: If you have one email for an organization, you can likely figure them all out. They are uniform. If one is first initial, last initial @team.com then all will have that same format.
Mailing Addresses and Leadership
**Updated as of 1/29/2021**
Arizona Cardinals
Mailing Address:
8701 S. Hardy Drive, Tempe, AZ 85284-2800
Front Office:
Steve Keim: General Manager
Matt Harriss: Director, Football Administration
Quentin Harris: Director, Player Personnel
Dru Grigson: Assistant Director, Player Personnel
Terry McDonough: Senior Personnel Executive
Adrian Wilson: Director, Pro Scouting
Chris Culmer: Director, College Scouting