The ECNL is the most successful youth soccer pathway to college, but elite recruiting ends by junior year, sometimes earlier. Start with top Division III ID camps alongside elite Division I options, not just national-team-level camps. The speaker is at UCLA observing the girls' team and available to help.
This is the entire youth soccer pyramid for women, including this new GA Aspire League, and I'm gonna at the end explain which camp you should go to based off of this, so just stay tuned. Okay, number 1 and at the top is ECNL. I get some DMs saying, hey, can you just tell me if GA is better than ECNL or vice versa? And statistically speaking, ECNL still dominates the college soccer field. Now, some ECNL teams are definitely better and some GA teams are definitely better, but remember, this is about exposure. It also means you don't just leave your GA team for an ECNL team just because your coach your playing time. There's many factors. So you've got ECNL, then you've got Girls Lead Academy, then you have ECNL RL. Now what's special about ECNL RL is you're in an environment where the ECNL team is ideally right next door or above you, so you could go play for their team or earn your way onto their team. This is why as young girls I really strongly encourage you to get involved within a club where there could be an ECNL group at the top. Now you have this new league called GA Aspire. Now GA Aspire is basically a glorified DPL. But the good news is how ECNL RL is to ECNL, GA Aspire is supposed to be that to GA. So this means that if you're playing in GA Aspire, your club is supposed to, or will have in the future, a GA team. So now it's like a second team, which is great. DPL, NPL, E64, EDP, all of those are okay levels. You're not going to play Division 1 soccer. And for boys, there are exceptions. For girls, it's very rare for there to be an exception. Mainly I think because in the girls game, if you're going to want to play college soccer, you started earlier and you want to be in the ECNL world, and you probably knew about that. I had a family who reached out and they had a girl who had a 4.0 GPA, was playing EDP, and said, I want to play top academic D3. And I had to tell them, look, you can't start this process as a junior to play top academic D3. They are done recruiting with juniors, you know, girls' sophomores' years or at the beginning of their junior years. Girls are recruited a year earlier than all the boys. Now finally, that comes to the ID camps, like which ones do you go to? If you're playing ECNL or GA, you have to go to ID camps for sure. But if you're only going to the Pepperdines or USC or Stanfords, it's still going to make it very difficult to get recruited. Those are national team-esque or very high-level teams. So what we recommend is start with the Division III schools at the top academic level and then also go to Division I, but don't only go to Division I schools. If you want more help playing college soccer, give me a call. Links in the bio. I'm currently on the UCLA campus to, uh, go watch the girls train, as a matter of fact. Okay, talk soon. Bye.
