A college soccer coach walks through his recruiting checklist: tournament scouting, campus visits, multiple calls, and character assessment. He emphasizes kindness over cockiness, then covers highlight videos, email outreach, and how to respond to coaches in ways that keep conversations going.
What is a college soccer recruiting checklist? So one of our students was sent this recently. So these are the steps that this particular school takes: identify the player at a club tournament, clinic, or camp, and video, academics, soccer recruiting, break the ice, they want to set up a phone call, evaluation with feedback, live play— so this probably means a showcase— character building, the foundation. So this is where they get to know you as a person, come on campus, and then Zoom call with the head coach behind the scenes of our program. So these are the steps for this school. Every school is a little bit different, but this is pretty accurate, which is to say, you know, you're going to do 2 phone calls. According to this, you'll do 3 because you'll have 2 Zoom calls and 1 phone call, a campus visit. So that's 4 meetings with the coaches, and they would have seen you twice. That's 6 opportunities to really communicate with them. You always hear college coaches go, we want a player that fits our culture. It's so important they fit our culture, that you're nice and kind and everything else. Of course, we don't want you to be cocky when you go to these events because obviously that's not good. But most of you, at least the people that like contact me, you guys are lovely people. So really what it's about is them finding out how lovely you are And to do that, you need to contact them with the strategies we talk about— highlight video, every-touch videos, fix your emails, etc. And then the big thing that you guys most struggle with is how to respond to the coaches. So like right now, I'm helping a student write a ton of emails, and the biggest dilemma with this student is they don't know how to respond to the coaches that encourages another response and moves the needle forward. You— that part is really important, and that part happens when you get a lot of responses. If you want more help, give me a call. Thanks, bye.
