A college soccer recruiting advisor breaks down how Division III players can move up to Division II or I programs. The strategy: build full-game and every-touch highlight videos, contact coaches you've faced, and leverage their networks. Moving up divisions is rare, but acting fast in the transfer portal matters.
I'm The College Sarcai, and it's story time with a student who's a transfer. So this particular student is transferring from a Division III school to hopefully a Division— another Division III school that he likes, or another Division II school that he likes, or another Division I school that he likes. Now, I'm gonna be frank with you. I'm currently still working with this student. We have not been successful yet, but we'll find the right place for him. The point is that in his case, he has a dilemma because we really have to work very quickly in the transfer portal to find him the right place. And going from Division III to Division II, like, it's really unheard of. Now, I'm the college soccer guy, and I want to be the first to kind of break that barrier. It does happen, but it's a challenge. The best way to go about it is if you've had prior connections and those coaches have since become Division II coaches, that's a great one-off and great way to transfer. Really though, even though as a Division III soccer player you're probably way better than a senior out of high school, who's never played soccer called soccer while you should be a, like, a higher level recruit than them, the system just doesn't do it because it's annoying to transfer, it's difficult, it's expensive, and it's just a lot of work, like a ton of work to transfer. With that in mind, this particular student is ready to put in the work, and so we're going to take this head on. One of the secrets to what I assume our success will be is obviously communication with coaches. We're going to build them a great package, video, email, everything else, but it's that he has full game videos against colleges with college coaches that have all coached at all different levels. Every single team he played against, it's like going on trial with one of those teams. So first of all, that's a no-brainer. We're gonna send videos to teams that he played against. If they're in conference, there's a bunch of rules about that in terms of transferring and if you have to sit out a year. The main thing you need to know is that's a huge thing, is when you play against the team, that's a huge opportunity. Because if you do well, or if you just do well in a way that the coach likes you, then that's a team you could go play for, and you don't have to go to an ID camp, you don't have to go on trial, 'cause you played against their team, so they know if you're capable of being good enough to be on their team. The other thing we can do is the college coaches that are Division III that he played against, they all have resumes, they all coached probably at some point a Division I school. So we can reach out to them and say, hey, you saw me play, I'm looking to transfer, your school's not somebody I'm interested in, or I don't know if you're interested in me, but I saw you have a connection with so-and-so, would you be comfortable connecting me? Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but there's nothing in harm in asking. Then of course I have my people in mind who I would like to help this student get to. And then the big one is he's going to create what's called an every-touch video or a timestamp video of every single game he played this year. And we've already done that with my transfer students, uh, at the Juco level as well as from the Division III level to Division II and Division I. And that is massive because like I said, those coaches you played against all know each other, and if you show that video to other college coaches around the country, they can say to you, wow, that video is very good. It's not ECNL, it's not MLS NEXT, it's a college game, and that's massive. So that's gonna be the secret, I think, to this person getting transferred to the school he wants. If you'd like help with this process 'cause you wanna transfer or you just need help getting recruited, call me, link's in the bio.
