College coaches face the daunting task of tracking the performance of hundreds of recruits from all over the country - if not the world - in an attempt to figure out who's worthy of recruiting. Once identified, one of the keys to landing top talent is to show them you're interested in their athletic careers. It turns out that Google makes it easy to keep up to date on the performance of athletes in your pipeline using Google Alerts.

A friend of mine who is a college coach and recruiter brought this to my attention. He sets up Google Alerts for the name of each prospective athlete. Whenever they compete and end up with their name in the paper. Google indexes newspapers, finds the names, then generates email alerts to the coach each time their name is mentioned. At that point, the coach immediately fires off a quick email to the prospect congratulating them on their performance.

In a competitive recruiting situation, being the coach with the most touches like this could be the difference in winning or losing over the next few seasons.