A recruiting coach breaks down why big ID camps like Exact ID and Masters work for young players seeking exposure but often waste older prospects' time. Coaches use them as funnels to their own camps, not genuine recruiting. Get direct contact from schools first, like the Division I program that emailed a Division III prospect unsolicited.
The Exact ID camp was very disappointing. So here's the problem with Exact ID camp, or any camp with a mass amount of schools, say Masters camp or any of those big ones. They have a lot of schools there, which is a really good thing. So if you're a freshman, 8th grade freshman, those camps I think are actually really good because you get exposure, you understand what the level is, you get to experience an ID camp, and if you don't get noticed, it's okay because you're on the younger end. But if you're like, I need to go to Exact because there's so many schools and they're all going to watch me, Most of the time what happens is these coaches go, look, there was a lot of players there. I did get to see some of you. Could you come to our own camp? And then you're like, well, what the heck? Why did I go to this camp if you're just going to invite me to your camp? Now, one argument would be, well, you wouldn't get invited to that, to their individual camp if you didn't go to XACT. Now, XACT and those mass camps can be really helpful, especially if you have genuine interest from 5 schools that are attending the camp. But if you're just going cold and going, there's a bunch of schools, they all get noticed. That is not how this works. So it's really important whenever you go to any camp, individual or mass camp, you have to get genuine interest before you attend, meaning phone calls or emails back and forth going, we need your position, or we watched your video, or we liked your video. One of my students recently got this lovely message from Davidson, and they're kind of aiming for D3 schools, but they got this email from this D1 school. So now the family's like, look, this email is very genuine. I'm gonna probably go to their camp.
