A soccer coach advises junior girls on college recruiting: skip mass ID camps like Masters and Exact, attend 4-6 club showcases instead, and target Division III schools as backup plans. One Princeton recruit needed five ID camps before getting noticed.
If you are a junior girl soccer player who wants to play college soccer, what camp should you go to? As a junior, you need to be going to genuine invitation ID camps, which we would call individual. Your time for mass ID camps like Masters or Exact or Future 500 are probably past you. You can still go to those camps, but 98% of the time the coaches are going to say it was great to see you, could you please come to our individual camp. Now those mass ID camps could be perfect because you get a lot of genuine interest to go to their individual camp, but I'd like to try and do that via email so that way you don't have to go to a mass ID camp for them just to tell you to come to their individual camp. We may as well just go straight to their individual camp. Now you can go to Division I ID camps for sure, but just so you know, Division I ID camps can get you recruited if the coaches will also see you to showcase. If you're not going to showcases with your club team and you want to get recruited to play Division I, ID camps are not enough on their own. You must get seen at a showcase 4 to 6 times in person and then you could go to 1 to 2 ID camps to get recruited. There are exceptions to this rule, like we had one girl who's going to Princeton who went to 5 ID camps at Princeton and didn't get noticed until the fourth— they liked on the fourth one and she got recruited on the fifth one. If you're willing to go to that many ID camps for your dream school and you are the level, it could be possible, but you don't want to bank on that, which is really why I want you to focus on some top academic Division III schools because these are great quote-unquote backups. But more importantly, Those camps and those really recruit you because they use camps to recruit you. Division I schools, while they definitely use those, they must also see you at a showcase. If you would like a list of camps in your state, comment the initials of your state, for example, CA State, and I'll give you a list of camps in your state. If you would like more me, click the link in the bio and I can schedule a call with you and your parents.
