A coach reviews an 8th grader's soccer highlights and says he plays like a high school sophomore, with Division I potential. The video is poorly formatted for coaches to watch. Elite middle schoolers should start recruiting now: attend ID camps, email schools, and build complete highlight reels, because D1 programs are already scouting players this age.
How do you know what level you can play based on highlight video alone? I'm going to take you through a highlight video of an 8th grader right now, and I told the family that they are a potential Division 1 soccer player. Now, when I look at video, I put their video into two categories. Category number one is what level can they play. Category number two is what will a college coach think of their video. So I told them their video that they showed to me is not okay to send to college coaches. It is not formatted correctly. It is not in a way that makes a coach's life easy to send, and I'll show you with that what I mean right now. So this this is the student's Instagram page, and I'm watching on a computer. On a phone, it's even worse. See how this is horizontal? You never post on Instagram horizontal if you want the footage to actually be seen. In this clip, for example, I don't even know who he is. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. I still don't know who he is, so this is not going to work. Of course, I spent time watching, so I figured out who he was, and I know that he used to play MLS Next and now he's playing ACNL, but both teams he's playing for are really top-level teams. And then I saw this video, and in this video you can see this. He's got amazing, he does not look like an 8th grader. That's the point. If I saw this, I would go, that's a sophomore, but he's an 8th grader. That's what makes him so special. And the fact that I thought he was a sophomore, watch him do some scissors here, means, wow, he can play Division I. So when you look older than your age, either physically, technically, or maturity-wise, watch how he passes this nonchalant. I'm sure it was a through ball and it was pretty good. I could just tell by the way he struck it. So right off the way, I'm going, this is a potential Division I soccer player. Now, he's only in 8th grade, mind you, and I already feel this way. But the family are like, look, I think it's too early to begin this process, he's only in 8th grade. If you're not good, you should not start in 8th grade. If you're playing at a high level of MLS Next and ECNL, you should start going to ID camps, you should start emailing schools because they are going to like you. And the way I know this, this is one of our students texting with Middlebury in 8th grade, and he's playing for, he was playing for Gosha, then he went to BlackRock. He's a really good soccer player and he's already talking in 8th grade. This is a girl who's already talking in 7th grade. I'm in 7th grade, players and D3 coaches are already responding to my emails. Should I start emailing D2 and D1s? The answer is yes. You wanna start this process ASAP. And the reason I know this is college coaches message me and say, did you work with so-and-so? She played for this level. I'm asking because they already have an every-touch video and a self-interview. Gathering those things and getting interest takes time. You're not gonna get them to come to your game right away. So the answer is you should start ASAP. If you'd like help playing college soccer and you're an elite level player, give me a call, link's in the bio. Talk soon, bye.
