Why coaches spot AI-written recruiting emails.
If your player's outreach emails read like ChatGPT wrote them, coaches will notice. Some coaches have started routing inbound recruiting emails through AI detectors. Others just have a trained eye after seeing hundreds of these.
I have spent the last two months testing this on real outreach for clients. Here is what the giveaways actually are, in rough order of how strongly they tag an email as machine-written.
The em-dash
The single strongest tell. An em-dash is the long dash that looks like this: —
Real teenagers do not use em-dashes when writing emails. They use commas, periods, and occasionally semicolons. LLMs reach for em-dashes constantly because they are punctuation-flexible and create a polished pace. Detectors know this.
If your daughter's outreach emails have em-dashes anywhere, they are flagged.
Perfect parallelism
"I am committed to academic excellence, athletic growth, and personal development."
Three balanced noun phrases in a row. No real 16-year-old writes that way. AI writes that way because it is a low-friction sentence to produce. Real writing is messier. Mix lengths. Mix structures. Throw in a fragment occasionally.
Hyperbolic openers
"I am incredibly excited about the opportunity to introduce myself to your program."
Every part of that sentence has a problem. "Incredibly excited" is overclaim. "The opportunity to" is filler. "Introduce myself to your program" is third-person framing of a first-person action. Real player voice would be: "I wanted to introduce myself ahead of the ECNL Girls National in North Carolina."
Specific words that flag heavily
- "Furthermore", no teenager writes this
- "Moreover", same
- "In closing", same
- "It is with great enthusiasm", same
- "I would welcome the opportunity", corporate fluff
- "Sincerely" as a sign-off. A 16yo signs "Best" or "Thanks"
What we do instead
Every email I draft for a client gets run through GPTZero and Grammarly before send. Target: under 60% AI-detected on GPTZero, 80+ on Grammarly's quality score.
To get there, I follow a few rules:
- No em-dashes. Anywhere. Commas, parens, periods. Even in compound modifiers, I rewrite to avoid them when possible.
- Mix sentence lengths. A short sentence. Then a longer one that has a clause or two. Then another short one.
- Concrete details over abstractions. "GPA is 4.0 weighted" beats "I am committed to academic excellence."
- First-person ownership. "I reached out earlier this spring" beats "my family reached out earlier this spring." The player has to own her own recruiting.
- One school-specific paragraph per email. If the same paragraph could be sent to ten schools, it is a templated paragraph, and templated paragraphs read as AI.
Why this matters at the volume question
A family doing recruiting on their own can write five great emails before the format starts repeating. By email twenty, the sentences are leaning on the same scaffolding. By email thirty, the AI detector is fully tripped.
This is a real reason families hire boutique help. Not because they cannot write. Many of them write better than the recruiting services they pay. But the editorial focus required to keep thirty emails reading like genuine first-person 16-year-old voice is a separate skill, and it stays sharp longer when someone is doing only that work.