Youth soccer players should contact college coaches as early as 7th grade with 30-45 second highlight videos showing goals. Send repeated gentle emails to build familiarity before showcases. Coaches value seeing year-over-year improvement, and early outreach helps you stand out and get invited to camps.
If you're playing Easton RL, who should you be emailing, or should you be emailing college coaches? If you're playing Easton RL, I recommend you start with Division III and Division II schools. The main reason being Division II and Division III can respond to in any which way they like starting in 7th, 8th grade. So while you may say to yourself, I'm only in 7th, 8th grade, I shouldn't begin, if you're a girl soccer player, you need to start. If you're a boy soccer player, there's an argument you can wait a year and no harm, no foul. But if you have a video that is good, I'm talking quality-wise of footage, like very good, but then in terms of ability, you don't have to be the best player ever, but just a good 30-second to 45-second moments of you scoring, you should be sending emails to coaches. Because if you do it early on, like in 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th grade, particularly 7th, 8th, 9th, what happens is when you hit 10th grade and they wanna start coming to your showcase, they're actually gonna show up because they've known you for the last couple years. If you start emailing in 10th grade and go, I'd love for you to come to my showcase, and then you bounce emails back and forth, all of a sudden you're in the last half of your sophomore year and they're like, we couldn't come, you were injured, you didn't play, and now you're a junior and now you're getting uncomfortable about like, how come I'm not being recruited? Whereas if you started emailing in 8th, 9th grade, all of a sudden the coaches know who you are, they're like, oh, I'm gonna come to see you at the beginning of sophomore year. Then if something happens, like you get sick or injured or they can't come, okay, no big deal, they still know who you are, they'll come at the second half. You don't wanna wait till it's later because then if they miss you or get fired or they change jobs, which does happen, you're in trouble. Many of you are really worried about starting too early. The only reason it would be too early to begin is if you're really not good at soccer, like you're just not skill level. I know most of you are like, well, if they see me today and I'm pretty good but not great, they will think I won't become better. And that's not how coaching works, especially when you're in 8th, 9th grade. They know you're young. What they wanna see is how good are you then and how good have you become in a year? Because when they recruit you for college, they're gonna take you freshman year and they're hoping you're gonna be a lot better by your senior year. So if they don't see that level of progression and they only see you say junior year, you're really good, but they never got to see how much better you're gonna become, they're gonna be really nervous to make you an offer because they don't know if you're gonna improve or if you're just gonna stay stagnant. So that's why. The other reason is, when I say start the process, sending an email with a video can only make you look good. If you don't wanna go to the camp yet, don't go yet. You can wait 'til a little bit, but you need them to know who you are and it takes so long for them to actually know your email, know your face, because they're getting tons of them. So if you just do a gentle email drip like you would do for any company— for those of you who have parents who are entrepreneurs, it takes many emails before they're going to buy the product, AKA you're the product. If you want more help, give me a call. Links in the bio. Talk to you soon. Goodbye.
