A college soccer recruiting advisor explains that DPL is the fourth-tier girls' league, typically feeding Division III. For Division I, girls need a 3.8+ GPA just to be competitive, while boys with the same grades stand out. He recommends highlight videos, playing against boys, and showcases to get noticed.
College soccer guy, what do you think of the DPL league? The DPL league is specifically for girls. Girls goes like this: ECNL, Girls Elite Academy, ECNRRL, DPL. So DPL is like 4th tier, 3rd, 4th tier. And traditionally speaking, DPL does definitely still means college soccer, like potential Division 3. For the most part, you're not going to be playing Division 1 college soccer at the top, I would say, 55 to 75 schools. Now there are a lot of Division 1 college soccer teams. So could you play in the lower tier Division I schools? Potentially, for sure, yes. However, on the girls' side, the recruiting process is a little bit different because every single girl who wants to play college soccer at a D1 school almost all have a GPA above 3.8. On the boys' side, it's less so. So if you have a 3.8 GPA as a boy and you're a good player, coaches are like, wow, I'm going to take that kid because that's hard to find. On the girls' side, everybody has a 3.8 and above. So if you're a girl with a 3.8, you're not special, you're just like everyone else. You're the minimum. You have to have great grades because every girl has great grades. So that makes the recruiting process a lot more difficult for you guys, a lot more competitive. The good news is there's a lot more soccer teams that are there for girls than there are for boys. But there's also a lot of girls soccer players that want to play college soccer. So it's really just very competitive. So DPL pretty much means you're probably going to play Division III college soccer. Now there are exceptions to that rule. With a good video, with video against boys, with showcases, with using your club team and your showcase that you're going to. You could absolutely, in College ID camps, get the interest of Division 1 schools, but just don't jump straight to trying to play for Penn or UCLA. That's not realistic at all. You need to start on the lower end, get interest first, then gradually work your way up. Otherwise, you'll end up not even getting an opportunity to play college soccer anywhere, and that would be very sad. If you would like more help playing college soccer, I tend to attract more boys, but about 40% of the students we work with are girls. So I definitely want to help girls play college soccer just as I want to play— boys play college soccer. It's actually a lot more competitive for girls than it is for boys because boys eventually want to go pro, so some of them don't even want to play college soccer, which is pretty stupid if you ask me. But girls, they don't want to play pro for the most part. They want to play college, and that's where they want to stay. So it makes it a lot more competitive. So if you want to play college soccer, let me know. Call me. Links in the bio.
