College Soccer Guy breaks down three mistakes in recruitment highlight reels: hosting on Hudl instead of YouTube, making videos longer than three minutes, and leading with tackles instead of goals. Open with a goal, keep it under three minutes, and tag coaches on Instagram and Twitter.
3 things I would never put in your highlight video if you want to play college soccer. I'm the College Soccer Guy and I help you play college soccer in under 60 seconds. That's why you love me so much. Number 1, the very first thing that should come out of your video should be, it should be on YouTube. It should not be on Hudl where it runs a 30-second commercial. It should not be on any other platform other than YouTube where it has a YouTube page that is dedicated just to soccer and you doing extra trainings on your own and post a bunch of things on YouTube that don't necessarily have to be games. But lots of videos on YouTube. And then your very first clip has to be a soccer clip. So you scoring a goal, but your second clip needs to be your cover photo along with your self-interview. When you do the COVID photo, just give us the bare minimum. We are going to read the email or the college coach will read the email to get the details. So we need to know your GPA, your grad year, what club level you play for, and what is the club level. So tell if it is UPSL, NPL, E64, MLS Next, ECNL. Don't get into it. And you can have one accolade, not more than that. Just get us the bare bones. We will read the email for details. Number 2, I would not have the video be longer than 3 minutes. Coaches are roughly going to watch for about 1 minute, if that, maybe 45 seconds. And then if they like you, they might watch the whole thing, but they're not going to watch more than 3 minutes. I pretty much can guarantee it. Now, here's the reason that's so important is if you send a 4-minute video, they're not going to watch 2 minutes of that video. And then you're not going to resend that video because you're going to go, well, I already sent it. Instead, what you're better off doing is if you have 6 minutes of video, split it up into 2 different clips, send the first highlight video out, then a couple weeks later, a couple, depending on your situation, maybe a couple months later, you send the second highlight video. Then you would take all those clips, cut them into 1-minute clips, and post them on Instagram, post them on Twitter, and you would tag the coaches and DM the coaches. We have a system where we have every single Instagram page of the coaches and we can automatically email the coaches within 15 seconds, which is super cool. Lastly, for pretty much every position, do not show us your tackles. Until towards the middle or end of your video. A tackle doesn't really tell us a lot about you as a person unless it's a tackle and then you complete a pass. But just tackling for tackle's sake or blocks, it doesn't tell us enough about you as a player. If you want more help, comment "call" and we can schedule a call with you and your parents.
