This post was written by Dan Tudor. He is the founder of Selling for Coaches, a training program that teaches advanced recruiting and communication skills to college coaches and athletic departments around the country. He will be blogging about recruiting training for Double-A Zone. Click here for more information about the company.

Those wondering whether the country's current economic troubles would affect college athletics have their answer.

Readers of the Double- A Zone blog saw two examples of the state of the economy on college sports, with stories about Michigan State raising their football ticket prices and a contingency plan that could affect the way regionals for this year's Division II basketball championships are staged.

Want more proof? It's easy to find. Small schools like Benedictine College, as well as large schools like UNLV, are enduring across the board athletics department budget cuts. Miami University announced the football team will travel by bus to two of their away football games. Stories of shrinking budgets in college athletics departments are plentiful.

All these budget cuts are forcing coaches to get creative when it comes to recruiting. No more ballooning budgets; instead, get ready for the era of penny-pinching prospecting.

The athletics departments and coaches that we work with at Selling for Coaches are being advised to focus on a different set of strategies when it comes to recruiting more intelligently during these turbulent economic times.

Here are three strategies for coaches to use when recruiting prospects:

Lead with a conversation about tuition, scholarship amounts and other money related issues. For most of your prospects and their parents, the financial component of your offer will be front and center on their minds. For a Division III coach who is reading this, this is especially important for you. It's tough enough to sell your school at time when you have no athletic money to give, but don't compound the challenge by putting off the conversation until the end of the process. Talk about it immediately. Learn what concerns and challenges the cost of the school pose for the parents of your athlete. Ask them how they would imagine how they would make going to your school a reality. Again, no matter what level you coach, this is a conversation that needs to happen sooner - not later - in the recruiting conversation with a new recruit as we head into some challenging economic times.

Make your message about your prospect, not you. Here's a question: How many of your brochures, letters and other recruiting materials are speaking to your prospect's needs instead of listing all of the wonderful aspects of your university and program? It's time to create a new story for your recruits, and it needs to be totally and completely centered around them. For example, a coach's communication that is currently centered around new facilities needs to tie the benefits of those new facilities directly to the prospect. Make it personal, relevant to their goals, and something that sets you apart from your competitor down the street. Now more than ever, the message you send needs to be better than it has ever been.

Focus on the parents as much as you focus on your prospect. In times like these, parents are going to wield some heavy influence over the choices their sons and daughters make. Even when a full scholarship is being offered, parents are going to be a big influence in the final decision. The recent comprehensive study we did on how college athletes make their final school choice yielded some amazing insights when it comes to the parent's role in recruiting. The majority of prospects said their parent's opinion of an athletics program was either an important or very important factor in their final decision. Prospects today want and expect their parents to help them with their decision, and I think that will be even more important during these uncertain economic times. What should coaches do? Make sure that you have targeted recruiting messages developed specifically for parents of your recruits. In many cases, this strategy will prove to be the most beneficial changes coaches make in 2009.

Let the government debate the merits of $800-billion legislation. A college coach should be focusing on the numerous inexpensive things that you can put into practice quickly and easily. If you do, you'll start to see positive results immediately -- even in the midst of an economic crisis.