3 Ways to Guarantee you get recruited
A recruiting consultant tells a high school junior his highlight video isn't enough. He needs game footage, grades, test scores, a professional self-interview, and a mass-email system targeting Division III programs to build leverage for Division I offers by August.
Chapters
Hello, Mr. Austin. I'm here to scare you away for a second. Here's your father. We were talking about your soccer ability and obviously about your amazing grades. So I'm pretending as if today is our first meeting, you know, and you're working with my team and I. So I want to tell you what we need to do. The first thing is your video is not okay. You cannot send your video as it is to the top academic schools. You're missing a self-interview. You're missing key, key facts about your grades. Your test scores, everything else. And it has to be really professional. College coaches will assume your highlight video is like an essay and your essay, your highlight video is like a B minus. College coaches don't pay attention to B minus essays. So that's number one. Number two is you need a lot more video. This is the student I told your father, we had a student that went to Yale. This is their document, just so you can get an idea of what it looks like, is they have, way, way more video than you do. So I want to go over the videos real quick. So look at all these videos that we sent out to the college coaches. We sent like 12 videos for you because we're starting a little bit later. We may not be able to send this many, but this is what it takes to go to these schools. So you need a lot more video. I would edit those for you. That would be my job. You'd send me the full game and I would edit them for you. You're very good. You're attacking center mid style. I just finished the Arsenal Champions League game. You look a lot like Ozil, but right-footed. You have a lot of potential, but we need more video. Then I was telling your dad, you have no interests from D3s. That is a big problem, a really big problem. And in your case, what's like super important, because you want to play at a top academic school and you're a junior and you have no interest from Division 3s in a real way, like phone calls, transcripts. At your age, we already have kids who are debating you know, which offers they're gonna take. And the reason that's important is when you don't play MLS NEXT on a pro academy team, or you're not being seen in person 4 to 6 times every year since 8th grade, you have to have offers. So if you really wanna play at Yale, which I think you might be capable of given your video, or you wanna play at Columbia or even Georgetown, which Georgetown is obviously probably a little out of reach, I would say at the minute. But if you wanna play at these schools, because of your grades and your parents' budget, you can get into these schools academically. Like, you really will. Your high school is really good. So if the coaches know that, that's a big deal. So we have to write that in the emails. On top of the fact that if you say to them, hey, I've already gotten interest from Chicago, which is the best Division III program, and 5 kids a year transfer to Division I top academic schools from Chicago, from Tufts, from Carnegie Mellon, from Johns Hopkins, then these might be possible. And here's the big thing. If you do this whole process and let's pretend November comes around, which is ED1, and you don't, right, Georgetown says we don't like you and Yale says we don't like you and you only have D3 offers, then don't do it. You know, go to Georgetown, play club soccer and have a great time at Georgetown. But if you don't do this right now, like get very serious this summer and consider Division IIIs, You will not play college soccer at all. It will just— the opportunity for you will disappear. And this happens to a lot of our families that they're so focused on Columbia or Georgetown or Yale that they never consider even emailing or getting offers from D3s. Then Columbia kind of drags you along for a while, says, I kind of like you, I don't really know, but no, yes, no, no. You wait for them to respond, then it's too late to go to Division III because they're done earlier. They are done in July and August, the top schools. So in saying that, here's what I would have you do. First is an audit. I know you've already spoken to these schools, so I need to see what you said. Maybe we need to text them, maybe we need to cold call them, I don't know yet. But my goal is for you to get, you know, hear back from Yale, especially Yale, 'cause I think that's really in the cards. So that's number one. Number two is I need to do an audit. Number two is I gotta fix your video. Then I need to know your showcase schedule and whatever camps. You probably need to go to this camp and this camp, but that's debatable. I have to talk to your dad about those. The next thing we will need to do is you must go to 2 to 3 genuine invite camps. If you want to play at MIT, for example, they have typically once a year an invite-only camp. And while MIT cannot get you in like entirely, while that's on paper mostly true, we had a student where the coach literally said, As long as you get an 800 on your math score, I will make sure that you get in. Now, he ended up getting a lesser score on his English, so he did not get in. But had he gotten that score, the coach could have helped him get into MIT. And you are that level. And we have another student at MIT, and you can get help from soccer. And that's the point. Soccer is to help you play at the next level. So in saying that, you must go to 2 to 3 genuine invite ID camps of D3 schools, which means we're not going to go cold to MIT. Well, MIT we might because it's a dream school, so fine for MIT. But otherwise, we want to go to where they say, I need your position, I really like your ability, I love your grades, can we get on a phone call? And then go to their camp, which is then to say the D1s would be very similar. I would want you to go to the Yales of the world or your dream schools, but we need genuine interest before you go. You can't just go cold and expect to get picked. You're short like me, they're not going to pick you first. But if they see 3 to 4 videos of you before the camp, now we're talking about a different world. So I was telling your father, if you want our help, you must dedicate an hour a week to playing called soccer, which is not easy, but that's— you don't have a choice to playing called soccer with us. And we got to help you write the emails. We need to send out a mass email with my email system, which will take 15 minutes to the D3 top academic schools. And it's pretty easy. When we do that, you're going to go like this. You're going to see this email list. It will connect to your email account and it will connect to a Google Drive that I'm going to set up for you. You're going to click on top academic, okay? Then what you're going to do is you're going to press select all. It will select all the top academic schools. Some of them you'll never go to, like you'll never go to this school, but you're going to write them an email anyways because they are very good at soccer and they sometimes will get you interest from schools you would have otherwise not had. You're going to click write emails. You're going to go, dear hashtag coach, hashtag genuine, and it will automatically populate the coach's name for you and write something genuine. So within 10 minutes we can do it. Then every time you receive an email, the system will automatically categorize it. Was it genuine? Was it generic? And that's how we decide which camps to go to. And at the bottom here, it will tell you which camps you got invited to. So that way we can act very quickly because you're— you have a problem. You must get recruited by August if you want to play top academic D3, and then if you want to leverage that against potential Division I's. And remember, the good news is, look, we could do this. I want you to be able to close your eyes and say, I did everything I could to play college soccer. If you say, you know what, I don't need to try this hard, then don't work with me. Go about your life, go to Georgetown and just go to school and play soccer on the club team. It's really fun. They play 3 times a week. It's competitive. It's top— Georgetown's club team is D3 level. They're very good. But if you want to be part of a team and you want to be part of a soccer team that's like a true fraternity of soccer, that's a different story. And the club teams do not act that way. So that's where I would say this is what we need to do ASAP. And then after that becomes follow-up, and that's part of my job when we're working with you.
