Parents aiming to get their kids recruited for college soccer need three things: film games from multiple angles to build highlight reels, understand the club hierarchy (MLS Next, ECNL, NPL, Elite Academy) that college coaches actually watch, and pick clubs aligned with their target division level.
3 things parents should be doing for their son or daughter if they want to play college soccer. You've got to be filming all the time. You never know when you're going to get that one moment where your son or daughter scores the banger or dribble past the goalkeeper or your goalkeeper makes an amazing save. So you got to film all the time. And Mom and Dad, you should be filming too. Make sure to film sideways at the beginning. Later, once you have a lot of video, you can eventually move to vertical. Yes, there's an argument that you should go over the video so you can get better at soccer, so that's always a great concept, but specifically for recruiting. The second thing I want you to do is understand the different club levels. There's another guy out there— I'll send a video at some point for you guys— who kind of hates on the whole American system. And that's fine, you can hate the system, but the system's not freaking changing, and it's not changing for a long time. And it's great that people want to try and change it and that there's different models out there, but college coaches don't care about any of those things. Their job is to win soccer games. They're too busy worrying about if the system is or is not working and to find out what they need to do is they need to recruit the best kids. And budget-wise and time-wise, that's at the MLS Next and ECNL events, and it is also at NPL events. It's also at Elite Academy events. But you have to be mindful of who you're going to aim for. If you just look at the statistics of the rosters of the very best teams, those are MLS Next kids. If you go, look, I really want to play Division III and I'm open to Division II, you don't have to play MLS Next or ECNL only. Those are really still where you have to be for many teams, but you got to know the club levels. If you want more help, give me a call. Link's in the bio.
