In this concise advice segment, the speaker explains how playing for a strong high‑school soccer program—using Harvard‑Westlake’s recent CIF championship as a case study—can aid a player’s pursuit of college soccer. The key points are: elite high‑school coaches often have direct connections with college coaches and can vouch for players; such endorsements can sometimes be sufficient for Division I recruitment, but relying solely on high‑school play is risky. The speaker advises athletes to (1) leverage their coach’s network by having the coach contact interested college coaches, (2) attend college camps to gain additional exposure, (3) follow up personally with college coaches, highlighting team achievements, personal awards, club experience, and providing both club and high‑school coach references with titles. The video ends with a call‑to‑action inviting viewers to seek further help via a link in the bio.
Chapters
If you're playing high school soccer and your high school team is amazing, how can that help you play college soccer? So in the example of Harvard-Westlake, who congratulations to them, they just won CIF. Michael LaRouche is the head coach there who is an NCAA championship-winning coach. The assistant coaches all are in the college soccer world as well, and they understand the process to get recruited. So in that world, that high school team already has some kids going Division 1 at very high levels, and part of that is because the kids are good at soccer, but the other part of it is because the coaches know people, and they are able to say to a college coach if they call them, what's the player like in training, what's their attitude, whatever comes out of his mouth is going to be respected. So with those cases, if you have a coach like that level, then high school soccer could be literally enough to play college soccer. On the flip side, high school soccer can often not be enough on its own. So if you're on a really good high school team, you're still going to have to go to camp. So I just don't want you to depend only on high school, but if you're on a winning team, you need to leverage that and get your high school coach to either help you with— in regards to the recruiting process, then ask them to call 1 or 2 coaches that already like you. You will then follow up with the coach yourself, the college coach, and say, hey, we just won this championship, I did really well, I won these awards, this is the level of high school we played, by the way, I also played for this level of club, here are my references. You have references of your club coach as well as the high school coach with their brief titles, and that can help you play college soccer. If you want more help playing college soccer, give me a call, links in the bio.
