A college recruiting advisor explains how student-athletes can use offers from lower-tier schools to get attention from top programs. The strategy is risky: coaches may withdraw interest or bad-mouth you if it backfires. Only leverage if you're willing to lose those offers and you're honest about it.
How do you leverage offers from a D3 school that are mid-tier to a top academic D3 or mid-tier D1 to quote unquote top-tier D1? So leveraging is a dangerous game. Do not do leveraging unless you are willing to lose the schools that have shown you interest because you really don't want to go to those schools, or you say to yourself, I'm willing to potentially not play college soccer because if you lose the schools that you are leveraging, you may not have the opportunity. So the only reason you would leverage, which is kind of a mean tactic, to the school that loves you is because you're saying to yourself, you know what, these college coaches can also be mean to you and they can tell you they love you even though they're actually recruiting many other players, which is true because they have a job to do. On the flip side, they're usually very good people, but they do have a job to do. You also have a job to do, which is to look out for your own best interest. But if you go and leverage and the coach hears about it, that you're shopping his offer to other schools to get more interest, it's very likely not only will they be upset with you, they will talk bad about you to other coaches. So you wanna be very careful. It's a very small world. However, if you say to yourself, look, these are schools that are backup schools to me and I don't want them, and you've been transparent with X coach, then you can then say to the other coaches, hey, coach from Tufts, I've been talking to NYU, and while NYU is an amazing school and I'm very grateful for the opportunity, Tufts is my top choice. May I ask where I stand in the recruiting process? And that is how you would quote unquote leverage offers. And this can work. Now, let's say you don't want to lose any offers and you still want to leverage. You can still use this similar strategy as long as you're very nice and polite and upfront with the school you are leveraging to. So you can say, I have interest from— you don't have to mention the school's name— a school within our, say, conference or your conference. And I really am appreciative of their offers and I really love those schools. However, you are my top choice. May I ask where I stand in your process? And that's how you figure out where you are. And because you've told the school you have offers and interest, the school you want to get interest from is much more likely to pay attention to you. Hence why when I work with students, we do start our list a little bit broad and then narrow it because leveraging is a part of the process. If you want more help playing college soccer, give me a call. Links in the bio. Talk to you soon. Goodbye.
