5 Must Do To Play College Soccer

These are 5 things you must do if you're an MLS NEXT player if you want to play Division I college soccer. Now before I jump into the 5 things, I want to preface this by saying you should at this point, before you even watch this video, already have a video. You should already have a list of about 25 D1s, 10 Division IIs, and 25 DIII that you know you're interested in. I also want to add that in my own story, I was playing the equivalent of MLS NEXT, and I was given an offer and the offer was taken away from me, which was obviously miserable. It was a school called Cal Poly. Now luckily, because I was open-minded to the different types of schools, I had emailed some other schools and the school that I ended up going to, Valparaiso University, I got a full-ride scholarship and then that coach helped me enter the combine and then I ended up playing pro soccer and then I played pro soccer for 10 years, all because I was open-minded to the different schools. So I wanna preface this by saying, if you can be open-minded and you have your video and a list of schools, the next 5 tips here will really help you a lot. Number 1, you will have to go to ID camps. And I know many of you are concerned, well, if I have to miss a game or miss a practice or miss a showcase to go to an ID camp, my coach will be upset with me and/or why would I miss those because I'm playing MLS next, I don't need to miss those. So I wanna be very clear with you. 80% of students who play Division I college soccer who are from the United States have been to the ID camp of the college coach. There's two reasons you need to go to the ID camp. One, the college coach needs to see you in a training environment in order for them to feel comfortable to make you an offer in 80% of cases, even if you're really good. Number one. Number two, you need to guarantee they watch you. If you go to a showcase or you go to— if they say they're going to come to your practice or a scrimmage, You might not touch the ball. You might have a bad game. You may not be involved. It's not a guarantee. And that's a lot on the line for them not to see you. If you go to a camp for the next, you know, 6 hours, especially if it's a 2-day camp, you're guaranteeing that they're gonna see you. And if you're playing MSNEXX, they want to see you and it's not a waste of money and they want to actually watch you 'cause they do wanna recruit you. Yes, the camps are for money, but if you're a bad player, that's where they make, that's where it's a money grab 'cause the coaches are never gonna recruit those kids and then they justify the camp as, well, you got to learn from us, which is actually a pretty cool thing. But for you MLS Next kids, that's not what they're for. They want to recruit you at the camps. If the camps are for anybody, it's for you MLS Next kids. Okay, now, you understand that you must go to camp. The second piece of this is you cannot go to camp cold. You cannot just go, I'm gonna go to Penn's camp and be the best one there. They already have a list of kids they have in mind. And maybe those kids sent them an email, maybe they didn't. Maybe, odds are, the coaches have been at this for a very long time. They have a relationship with different clubs. And the club coach have said, hey, look, I've got a freshman. He's going to be really good one day. I heard he's coming to your camp, just so you know. And then if that kid was really good, they would also send an email to Penn State saying, hey, I'm coming to your camp. I know you can't talk to me, but I look forward to seeing you there. So that kid is ahead of you, right? Because that kid already has a connection with the club and the coach and sent an email. Now, you cannot depend on having a connection. If you have one, that still doesn't guarantee anything, right? You're the one— watching this video maybe without the connection, and you're gonna email the coach and they may like you more, and then the connection means basically nothing. So, I wanna add that what is most important here is that you message them before you go to the ID camp. Now I know you're concerned, what if the coaches I play for are really upset with me and angry with me that I'm leaving? What you need to do at this point is you have to express to them that you've received genuine interest. If you just go to a million camps, they probably won't be very happy with you because you're gonna be missing a bunch of events, and in their head, which I disagree with, you're gonna get the exposure you need, or if you're good enough, you'll get recruited, right? And that was not my journey, so hence why I'm telling you that I don't want you to depend on that. But that's still how they think. So you have to respect that. You can't change the way they think. However, if you have evidence via email that says, I would like to see you at my ID camp, I really like you, from a D3 top academic school or from a D1 school, which they will break the rules to communicate with you, then all of a sudden your coaches won't be upset that you're missing practice or a game because it serves their interest. If you end up playing at Penn State Penn State, which is a big deal, your coach, your club will get to say to everybody who's looking to pay them, hey, we had a kid that go to Penn State last year. So now your interests are in line with each other. So you have to make that happen. Okay, number 2, you don't need only a highlight video. One highlight video, no matter how good you are, is not going to be enough. You're going to need multiple videos. Now in my perfect world, you'd make one highlight video kind of every year, freshman, sophomore, junior year. But you would only send that out once. Then you would never send out another highlight video. Once the coaches have seen your best moments, they don't really care. Okay, you got a score here, you got good dribbling here, whatever. I need to see you in a full game. Now the coaches are not gonna watch a full game 'cause they're busy people. So you're gonna send them an every-touch video. An every-touch video is every touch you took in that game. Now when I work with my students, we edit those videos from best to worst. We don't just give the order of the game. And we zoom in a bunch. And if there's a really bad clip, that doesn't justify the whole game, like you score an own goal or you misplace one pass that leads to a goal against you, we cut that out because it doesn't really tell everything about the story. It kind of looks bad. But we do put in mistakes in there because we need it to feel authentic. And if the coaches watch a highlight video and then again an every-touch video and then maybe another every-touch video, and then you go to an ID camp, and then they say, we really like you because we've seen your videos and we've seen you at the camp, we'd like to come to your game. Now all of a sudden you're getting interest from Division I schools and your chance of playing Division 1 soccer goes up by tenfold. Number 3, your club coaches are not going to do this for you. I know you're thinking, well, I play MLS next, so it's really not that difficult. My club coach will call somebody and I'll be on a team before you know it. So I want to tell you a brief story. There was a player we had playing for Minnesota United, amazing MLS club. He didn't find me till he was on his gap year. So all of his high school, he's like, I'm going to get recruited, I'm going to get recruited, my coach is going to help me. And he just didn't get recruited. You know, he sent emails, player coaches liked him, thought he was okay, but they had some other people in mind. He wasn't aggressive enough. He didn't go to any camps. He didn't go to as many camps as he should have. And his coach called one or two schools and the coach was like, great, thanks for calling me. I need to see him in person. I need to get an email from him. Like, I need to know that he wants to go to my school. I don't care that he's just good. I need to know that he's actually interested. So now the student's on a gap year and they call us. And I look at his video and it's horrible. It's just atrocious. Like it's blurry. The clips are terribly out of order and it's awful. Now his ability was Division I, 100% for sure. So within 3 months he committed to La Salle, all because we changed his video. We went to some ID camps, we sent aggressive emails and he was good enough. And then we were open-minded to a couple of different Division I schools so he could get interest. And boom, he was recruited super easily, relatively speaking. But we did have to put in that extra amount of work. So I just don't want you to depend on your club coach or academy director or anyone else. To get this process done for you. Number 4, you will get injured. You will miss games. So if you are planning to start this when you're a junior or senior because you're like, that's when I'm playing MLS Next and I'm just great, or you already are a junior or senior, you have to know that things aren't going to go according to plan. The coach is going to tell you they're going to come to your game, but they won't. They're going to say to you, I really need to see you in person, but if this other player signs with us, then I don't need you anymore. And you don't want to be in that position because then you're going to be really late to this process and Frankly, you'll be in a lot of trouble. And number 5, and the final most important one, is you must go to camps not because you want to be recruited, but because you need to know if you like the coach. What if you go to this camp and the coach is a prick, right? He's yelling and screaming and he's aggressive. I don't care if it's Penn State, Georgetown, UCLA, Stanford. If you don't like the coach and you don't like the environment, you will be a miserable person and you will transfer or you'll get depressed and you'll wanna quit soccer and that will defeat the purpose. What I'd love for you to do is if you could comment below what you're struggling with, like, hey, the coaches aren't responding to me, or I don't know which camps to go to. If you tell me what you're struggling with down below in the comments, I will try and help you with the best I can. If you want more help, please like and subscribe. And if you want, get on a call with me. Just click the button below and you can schedule a call with us. All right, I'll talk to you soon.