After a soccer showcase, email every coach who watched you play, not just ones from your target schools. Ask them to be a reference and attach a full-game video from the tournament, not a highlight reel. Two templates cover coaches you know attended versus ones you're unsure about.
What should you email a coach if you know they came to your showcase? First of all, congratulations, you got a coach to come to your showcase. That's not an easy task. That means you've probably been listening to what we're telling you to do, so that's awesome. Second, you do need to send a follow-up, and we suggest sending a follow-up to everybody. Obviously the schools you're interested in, but even if it's a school you're not interested in, we still suggest you follow up because it's really rare for a coach to see you in person. So let's say Eastern Mennonite, which is a small school, saw you play. And you email them and say, hey coach, just want to follow up to ask if you saw me play. You could even say that, coach, and honestly, hey coach, your school's not the right fit for me because you don't have my major. There's another school who's asking if anybody's seen me in person. I know you saw me in showcase. Could I use you as a reference? The coaches are nice people. They want you to play college soccer. They very well, we've seen it happen many times, go, hey, absolutely, just put my name down. And maybe that coach will call that coach and go, hey, like we play in different conferences. Oh, you know what? We know each other. All these coaches know each other. What'd you think of them? And then at least you have somebody to give honest opinions. If you're going to send an email to a college coach, you have two templates. One is, They did see you play and you know they saw you play because your coach told you, your mom told you, your dad told you, somebody told you. Ideally not start a new email, no new subject line, just within the chain that you sent them about the showcase in the first place. The other option is let's say you don't know if they came to your game, which is more likely the case. You would say, dear coach, I hope all is well. I'm not sure if you had the opportunity to come to my game. We did. Tell them how you did. Or if you already have the clips ready, you could send the video right there. And again, we don't really want a highlight video unless it's a highlight of the whole tournament. We'd rather have an every touch video of each game.
