5 Things Must Do's For MLS NEXT Players!
An ex-MLS NEXT player who played ten years professionally shares five steps for earning a Division I soccer scholarship: attend ID camps (80% of D1 players were recruited there), build a multi-video portfolio with highlight reels and full-game edits, take ownership of recruiting instead of relying on coaches, start early to avoid injuries derailing your timeline, and use camps to evaluate if a program's culture fits you.
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These are 5 things you must do if you're an MLS NEXT player if you want to play Division 1 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 2s, and 25 D3s 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, 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 want to be very clear with you. More— 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 2, you don't need only a highlight video. One highlight video, just 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 going to watch a full game because they're busy people, so you're going to send them an every-touch video. And 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 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 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 was like, I'm going to get recruited, I'm going to get recruited, my coach is going to help me. And he— 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 1, 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 1 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 want to 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 we— you can, uh, schedule a call with us. All right, I'll talk to you soon.
