Two coaches explain how high school soccer players get recruited at Division III and Division I schools. Play on top clubs like ECNL, attend showcases, and send coaches "every-touch" videos that show your full game, not just highlights. Email coaches repeatedly with updated clips, include a mistake and recovery to show character, and start early.
Yeah, for sure. For the high academic Division IIIs especially, because sometimes budgets aren't the same, not able to go fly everywhere sometimes in some cases. Of course, they'll be at the major showcases, which goes a little bit to you want to make sure that you're playing on as high level team as you can in general, right? It doesn't help if you're on a team and you don't play, but can you be able to get into, can you get into a top level team, right? Whether that's ECNL, GA, again, all the levels, right, that happen on the girls' side. So just doing your best to make sure that you're in a very competitive team that goes to these showcases. Because especially from Division III perspective, is those coaches can only go to so many events and they're probably going to the biggest ones where they can get the most availability to see all these players, right? So it helps if you're in those environments.
Rod was saying in regards to the video, because that's what I do is I edit all the videos for all of our students, is he talks about the highlight videos, which we love. One of the things that I have found in, and Rod is the one that taught me all of these things, is every-touch videos, which is like, you know, it can be hard sometimes to be like, how many highlights can you possibly have? Once I've seen, even as a striker— striker is a bad example actually, because they just have goals and assists, that's their job. But let's say you're a right back, you're not going to have goals and assists. So we don't expect you, if you have one, of course, have it in your video, but you might need to give us a full game. But a coach, that's not making our lives easy as a college coach. So then what you need us to do, or what we'd ask you to do, is shrink the game to every touch you took. But also don't put your worst touch at the beginning if that was the beginning of the game. Change the order of that video so it's the best stuff at the first. But I'd love to see a mistake you make and especially if you run back afterwards. And the more you can teach us who you are as an entire individual. This is partially why we strongly encourage families to start as soon as possible because you will email a head coach and they will not respond and you'll have to follow up with another video and another video and then they're gonna look at you at the camp And they go, "I liked you." Then they're gonna go search your name in their email inbox and see how many emails you sent them. And if you have 15 emails to them with lovely video, they're gonna go watch it. And now you get recruited. And so what I wanna just reiterate is the video here, especially for— Rod will correct me, but high academic Division IIIs have to see you often. Division I schools have to often see you more often. So video for the high academic DIIIs is like, you don't have video, you don't get recruited. So Division 1s, you need the video so they come and see you in person. It's true for both cases. That's why we're at the camp today or this weekend, but video is really, really important. Comment the word review and I will tell you what level you can play based off of your video.
