A roadmap for getting a 14-year-old soccer player recruited to college. Start now with camps, emails, and video to college coaches. You need roughly 15 touchpoints for coaches to remember you, and waiting until junior year makes D1 unlikely unless you're exceptional. Coaches at this age care more about character and professionalism than current skill.
My athlete is 14 years old playing MLS Next 2 Academy. Is he on the right path in order to play college soccer? The short answer is I need to see video. So if you book a call with me, I can look at the video and then say to you, look, that video is really good, your ability is really great, you're on the right track, or no, you're doing a bunch of things wrong. At 14 years old, let's pretend you're in 7th, 8th grade. I want you going to camps. I want you sending emails, especially if you're a good player who might make their MLS Next team. I want you doing game video review, and I want you sending emails to college coaches. You may say to me, well, why would we do that given their age? First of all, as a parent, if you're watching this, you're like, oh, my kid's probably pretty good, right? You have a bias. I want to create that bias with the college coaches. I want them to say, I've known this athlete since they were 12, 13, 14 years old. I know they're a hard worker. If you're worried that if you go to a camp and you don't perform well, the coach aren't going to like you, then you've got the wrong thing in your head, because coaches don't judge you at this young age whether or not you are good enough or not. They know you're going to get better. What they do look at though is character and personality. So if you're lazy or or you don't pick up the cones, or you don't shake the coach's hand, or you don't look in their eyes, well then yes, they may not like you and therefore not recruit you. But they need to get to know you as a person. So this is why it's so important. Also, it usually takes about 15 touchpoints. Touchpoints meaning an email, a video, an ID camp for them to actually remember your name and know who you are. So if you try and get 15 touchpoints, all of which is in junior year, the chance of you playing Division I soccer is really difficult unless you're super amazing. And if you're super duper amazing, of course you always could potentially get recruited, But you're asking so many things to go in your favor, and guess what? There's a bunch of other super duper amazing people who are doing this, who are starting early. If you wanna know which camps to go to given this age, comment the word quiz and we can send you a quiz of which camps you should probably go to.
