Club soccer at big schools like UCLA is competitive but trains only a few times weekly with no NCAA tournament. Varsity teams at smaller schools like MIT and Bowdoin offer more training, longer seasons, and actual NCAA play, though with less academic flexibility.
What is the difference between club soccer at a university and college soccer at a university? If you're going to play club soccer at, say, UCLA or Georgetown, the club soccer teams are really competitive. They're like Division III level. There's 500 kids that will try out, and you actually need to send video to them too and kind of do a recruiting process, because if you just go to open tryouts and you're not the best one, you may not get picked. But the biggest difference is you're not really part of a team in the same way you are when you are recruited. So let's say you go to a Division III, MIT, and it's a very good school. You're part of a team. It's like a fraternity. If you go play club soccer at, say, Georgetown or even UCLA, honestly, that team might be almost as good as an MIT-level school because how good these big Division I schools attract players because they're very high level. But you only train twice a week or 3 times a week. You play a season that's very short. You don't get to play in stadiums. You don't get as much free gear. You're not going to the NCAA tournament. They're scrimmages. They're just games for fun. So a lot of players— I just had a student recently call me and go, hey, we're gonna go to Georgetown because we can get in and we're so smart. I go, look, that's pretty amazing. Then go to Georgetown. Academics come first and go play for the club And the dad was like, was the club team any good? The club team at Georgetown would be pretty darn good, actually. However, you're not going to really be part of a team team like you would be if he decided this player, you know what, I'm not good enough for Georgetown as a soccer player, but I am good enough to go to Bowdoin or Middlebury or Tartago where you get to be part of a team. So you have to decide what is it that you would like. You want more help, give me a call at the Bio Byte.
