A strategy for youth soccer players to get recruited: confirm elite status with game video evaluation, build a consistent Instagram presence from middle school on, attend ID camps and invite coaches to games, and send handwritten letters to top schools. Coaches rarely show up to regular games.
Number 1, you need to know if you're an elite level player. So you need somebody to watch your video, which means you need to have a video, and you need somebody to tell you, hey look, for your age, you're quite good. If you're playing ECNL or MLS NEXT, that's usually a telltale sign that you are an elite level player. Number 2, you need to have your Instagram page sorted. One of the best ways for these coaches to keep track of you is not only through email, it's also through Instagram, and especially for Twitter for girls, so that way they can just follow you. You post, oh, they notice you. They post, but this is a long-term play. This does not work if you start this your junior year and you expect them to follow your Instagram. They need to see your Instagram once as an 8th grader, fall back into it again as a 9th grader, and then follow you a bunch from 10th grade to 11th grade. That's how Instagram works. Number 3, you have to realize they're not going to come to your games very often. Even if you have a showcase, they're going to have to prioritize some other years, but that doesn't mean you don't still ask them to come to your game because that's how you keep the communication going. But more importantly, you must go to them. You must go to individual ID camps, and if you're a top academic, we recommend that you go to 60 and Master's ID camp. Letter. This doesn't happen very often. On the girls' side, this is actually much more popular and even more effective, but if you write a handwritten letter to your top schools, even if they don't respond, you can follow up going, "I wrote a handwritten letter," and it goes a long way. But you don't want to start a handwritten letter until you've already had some level of communication. You don't want that to be your very first level of communication. If you want to call me and get help with all this, comment "call," and we can schedule a call with you and your parents.
