Playing for an elite high school program like Harvard-Westlake under coach Michael LaRouche opens doors to college soccer because those coaches have direct relationships with college programs. But high school play alone won't get you recruited. You also need to attend college camps, get references from your coaches, and contact college coaches yourself.
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.
