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How can I join college soccer? What is it that you need to do in order to be on a college soccer team? So to play college soccer, technically speaking, all you need to do is take the correct classes in high school and you can be quote-unquote eligible to play college soccer. Now, being eligible and being on a college soccer team and quote-unquote being recruited are 2 separate aspects. You need to be eligible in order to play college soccer, but just because you're eligible does not mean you'll get to play college soccer. You need to be recruited. So how is it that you can be recruited to play college soccer? I'm The College Soccer Guy. I help you play college soccer, and at the end of this video, I'm going to give you a spoiler into what I'm going to talk about in the next video, so that way stay tuned. As the College Soccer Guy. My role here is to explain to you what it takes to get recruited. To get recruited to play college soccer, the number one first step I want you to take is, can you be playing club soccer? Once you're playing club soccer, we'll dive into the nuances of that in a minute, then we've got your video. You've got to make video, whether it's you in your backyard, you hopefully you playing on a team, you have to make video. And the video is for a couple reasons, which we'll get into in a minute. Then after you've made your video, now it is time to start contacting coaches, which there are some nuanced rules to that which we're going to talk about as well. And then finally, it's deciding what school would be best for you. So let's dive into each one. First one, when it comes to picking your club soccer team, there are multiple different levels in the youth soccer world and they are not all very friendly, meaning you have to keep in mind that they're hard to make. They're hard to find. There's different levels, and the highest level is what kind of what we call MLS Next. Then there's ECNL, and there's a bunch of levels below that. The main thing you want to do is start by finding your local team, ideally around the age of 8, 9, 10, where you're playing club soccer competitive. Do you like it? If you or your child is recognizing, wow, like, I love this so much, I want to do this for a very, very long time, Then you want to start easing them towards the higher levels of club soccer. And then I would encourage you to start recording as soon as possible. Not necessarily recording so you can then send it to somebody, but put it on Instagram even. Not even for that. Just start recording. First of all, you should record because you need to get better at soccer. And the best way to get better other than practicing is by watching yourself. So you want your son or daughter to enjoy watching themselves go, look, Mom, look at this great kick I did. Look at this great goal I had. That's how you want to start the process of video. Now I'm going to be frank with you. If your son or daughter is good for their age and you're posting about it, it can happen where it will spread and now people will be talking about your son or daughter. Now the types of videos you want to put on Instagram, you want to be mindful. You know, if it's just tricks and flicks and just cone drills, coaches are like, this person just wants to be famous. I don't even know if they want to play college soccer. So you have to be pretty specific about that. You want more help being, you know, spot on. Give me a call and I can talk, walk you through like what videos are good to use and what videos are not good to use. Then as you're starting to record video, you're working up the club ladder. Now let's say you're a freshman in high school. Now it's time to start contacting schools. Now you're like, well, Zev, I can't contact schools because they're not allowed to talk to me. Not true. If you're playing, excuse me, if you want to talk to Division III or any high schools, you can talk to them as much or as little as you please. and they can talk to you as much or as little as they please. So I want you to start it right away. Now if you're like, look, my video's not good, I'm not the level, then you can wait, but there are consequences to waiting. The more you wait, the less opportunity there is. Now some of those coaches will come back to you and say, it's a little bit too early, we're still focusing our such and such. That's perfect. That's the exact sentence I want you to get, because what I don't want you to get is the sentence, oh, we actually have already secured 3 or 4 students, and it's gonna be difficult for you to find a team. And there's no in between. There's I'm a little bit too early, and now you're too late. There's no like perfect on time. So guess what we should rather wanna be? Too early, 'cause then if we're too early, at the very least they're saying, you're a little bit too early, but let's keep in touch. That's all I'm asking for, keep in touch. Then all of a sudden, 3 weeks later, now you're being talked about, or 4 weeks or 2 months later, now you're on time. And you couldn't then be on time because that would be your first conversation with them, and they'd be like, well, we've already started with the process, why don't you come to camp? And that's not where you want to be. I want them to know who you are well before the ID camps, otherwise they can feel like a money grab, as you've heard in the past. Okay, you've got your club soccer, you've got your video, you've started to reach out to teams. Now, what teams do you pick and what do you not pick? The simplest thing is if you say, Zev, I'm a college soccer guy, I really want to play college soccer, and I know I want to go to these schools. Odds are those schools that you're thinking about, just like when I was your age, The biggest schools, UCLA, Stanford, Berkeley, if you're from California. If you're from the East Coast, maybe it's Wake Forest, UNC, NYU. Those, 'cause they're schools you heard of. I ended up going to a school I never heard of, and it was the best time of my life. So, and I got a full ride scholarship to play Division I soccer, and it wouldn't have happened had I not been open-minded. So you guys are starting the process with the schools you know, that's very normal. So there's two ways to create this list of yours to decide what schools you wanna reach out to the most. One of the ways is you pick your favorite schools that you've heard of, which is obvious. The other way is you create a mass email list with schools maybe you've not heard of in different conferences within regions of the country that you might be interested in. Maybe you've never even heard of them, but you still put them on your list. Now, as time develops, schools are gonna respond back to you, some schools are not, and that's how you start to pick which schools you like. The other way is you do the same concept where you say, I'm gonna spend a lot of time deciding which schools are my favorite, research the academics, but then what if the coach isn't a good coach and you don't like that coach? You've done all that research kind of for no reason as a college soccerer specifically. In terms of academics, that's a very helpful piece. So that's why I actually encourage kids to focus on the soccer part kind of first, even though academics are the most important and that's what I care about actually the most is the academics. If you go towards the academics, you go, this is the school I want, they have my major, that's a great That's a good starting point. But if you're like, after that, you're like, well, this school's really good and all of these have my majors, so I'm gonna focus on those schools. Picking, using your major to pick what schools to focus on is the perfect scenario. That's ideal. But if you're not sure what major you want, or if you're deciding between business and communication, or journalism, or engineering, or biology, or pre-med, or pre-law, and you're just like, I know I'm gonna be in this field, but I'm not sure which field, and I wanna play soccer, Then I can tell you now you're going to have a miserable experience if you don't like your college soccer coach. So for the time being, what I would recommend is let's have you start to reach out to schools that have your major or majors you're considering. So start with that list. Then you can ease your way into the more specific schools, and I'd like to do that by the coach. And the way you get to know the coach is by sending them emails, seeing if they respond, going to maybe an ID camp, maybe in a visit, maybe go to a fall game. And that's eventually how you grow your list. I like that you get your list kind of started early, 8th grade, 9th grade year, just starting to explore it because then you can develop such a bigger relationship with the coaches. Now here's the thing. Let's say you're like Zev, or I know this is what you're gonna say. You're gonna go, I Googled every single school with biology. Well, some of those schools don't have soccer teams. Not every single college has a soccer team. In fact, Valparaiso, which is the school I went to, no longer have a men's soccer team anymore. So I have, if you work with me, I have a website that I have created and partnered with to, I'm not a coder so they help me do it, but basically it allows us to look up every single school with a push of a button by their major. And that's really what enables us to create that list super quickly. We put in their major, we put in 2 or 3 majors, then we highlight and copy all those schools into a document, then we start reaching out to those schools. So then it the creating the list process takes 15 minutes as opposed to like 3 years, which is not what we want. We don't have time for that. If you want to play cold soccer and you would like help with that process, give me a call. Links in the bio, links in the description, and I'll talk to you soon. Peace.