Two speakers break down a recruitment email to a high school soccer player, spotting red flags like missing attachments and generic phrasing that suggest it's a mass template. They explain why coaches use camps to scout talent and generate income, with assistant coaches earning $40-$50k, then advise student-athletes to attend camps anyway for exposure while staying skeptical.
Is this a genuine or generic email? Let's find out. Thank you for your schedule and highlights. I like the way you're composed on the ball, but also can tell you are a leader of the team. I hope you are able to work together. A great way to see if we are the perfect fit for you is to come to camp. So this is a tough one because they do say thank you for scheduling your highlights. That would theoretically mean that you attach your schedule and your highlights. Now this particular student did not send their schedule, they only sent their highlights, so that's kind of a red flag. Then they say though, I like the way you're composed on the ball, but also could tell you're a leader on the team. So if they're saying we believe that you're composed on the ball, that means they probably watched your video, which would tell us it's genuine. But the sentence you're a leader on the team is like really strange. It just doesn't really make sense in my opinion that they would say that.
Now it's also possible this is a semi-genuine email, meaning that maybe this is the email they send out to all the players who they like. I'm gonna be honest, I think this is a BS email and it's copy-paste and it's fully generic. And I kind of know that because a lot of my students have received it. And here's the really frustrating part. If you sent this email out to young children, I think that should be illegal because young kids cannot decipher between whether it's genuine or generic, and then they think it's genuine, and then they fly all over the country to come to that school. And to say that you watch their highlight video and like their leadership just makes me think that that's not really what happened. And so that's really frustrating. And like I said, it's so— to me, it's horrible. That's just a horrible thing to do. So in saying that, if you're a player and you're like not sure if it's genuine or generic, obviously that's where I'm here to help. You can call me in the link in the bio. We can do that and look at your other aspects of getting recruited. But unfortunately, you do have to be really mindful because they're difficult. Their coaches are good. Look, here's the deal. College coaches do use the recruiting camps to find players. Guaranteed fact. That's how it goes. At the same time, assistant coaches get paid $40,000 to $50,000 a year. Head coaches at Division III schools are in the same area-ish. The only way they can make a living is if they do another job, another club soccer team, a director, or also run camps. So yes, they do have to make money during camp. So yes, they do often push the envelope as we see here. So you come to camp. Our job is to go, which are genuine, which are not, but then also say to ourselves, look, sometimes we really want to go to that school. And it's not like going to that camp's horrible. You're going to learn, you're going to get better, you have the opportunity to get coached by college coaches, which is an amazing experience. The problem is your expectation is I'm going there to get recruited. And in order to increase our chance of that being the case, We try and get a hold of them before the camp as best we can, but sometimes you should go to the camp even if you don't get a hold of them because it's your dream school. Imagine if you could just go try out for Chelsea and just show up. Yeah, you wouldn't need a genuine invite. You would go because you're like, it's my favorite school. If you need help, or it's called team— if you need help, call me. Link's in the bio.
