DO NOT MAKE THIS MISTAKE

The number one mistake you are making if you want to play college soccer: you are not going to enough ID camps. Yes, they are money grabs. Yes, they suck, but many of them are necessities. 80% of students who commit to playing college soccer, including at the Division 1 level, went to the school's ID camp. So there is no way around going to the ID camps. The better question is, how do you pick which ones to go to? So the first thing I will tell you is, if you are in 8th to 10th grade, you should be going to 2 to 3 Mass ID camps in a given year, and you should be going to 2 to 3 individual ID camps in a given year. So that's about 6 camps per year. And then once you're a junior, you should pretty much only be going to genuine invitation camps, at which point you'd be going to about 4 to 6 of those. This is to ensure you get recruited to play college soccer. This does mean that if you go to those camps cold, you will likely not get recruited. So what you still need to do is send email and video leading up to the camps, following up from the camps, and sending more video even further after those camps, following them on Instagram. You can send them DMs on Instagram. But if you don't go to camps, you will not play college soccer. Now maybe you're thinking, well, Zev, don't you get like a kickback since you're encouraging camps? The answer is no, I don't get a kickback and I don't want a kickback because I know a lot of the camps suck. Like, I think Exact kind of sucks. Masters is okay, but pretty often the coaches just say, thanks so much, could you please come to our individual camp? Future 500 is actually pretty good because the coaches don't coach, they actually watch you at the camp. And then individual camps are pretty much fantastic, especially the Division III camps, they are amazing. Division II camps, they often recruiting internationals now and older players who transferred from junior college, so the camps are not as powerful. Division I camps are still really impactful. However, similar, they can recruit internationals and transfers. And if you go cold and you're not playing MLS Next or ECNL, then Division 1 camps can kind of be a waste of time. So if you don't know these traps per se, then yeah, you're going to be going to these camps and you're going to feel like they're a real waste of time. And if you look up the schools and go, I'm gonna go to this camp because it's my favorite school, that's not how you look up camps. That's one way, but the best way to look up camps is to email the schools first, find out if they need your position, find out if you can get some genuine interest in what your level is. If you keep going to camps where you're not the level, you're going to keep thinking they are money grabs and a waste of time. In a perfect world, the coaches should actually come up to you and speak to you and go, hey, you're not the level, I don't know why you're here, you need to go aim for this level. And then either you cry home and quit, or you go, wow, that's really good for me to know, I'm gonna go aim for this level instead. This is also to say that at certain camps they'll give you like a feedback form and they'll say like, you were technically this good and physically this good. And those are completely worthless, they're like trash. The only thing that could be helpful is at the bottom of those, sometimes the coach writes something genuine like, we think you can play Division 3. That's really helpful. Or we think you can play Division 2. Because if the coach says on there, I'm a college coach and I think you can play Division 1 or Division Division 1 school, every Division 2 school, or even Division 3 schools, and that has weight to it. But if they just say like you're pretty good at heading, they're comparing you to the kids who are also at the camp, which by the way is totally irrelevant. It does not matter if the kid— if you're better than the kids at the camp. They have, you know, many camps per year. They're not even recruiting kids only from those camps. They're also recruiting from other showcases and frankly other teams. So the camps themselves are really just for you to get noticed so they eventually come to your game. And they're not coming to a league game, they will come to your showcases. So what I want to do is I want to show you briefly what we're doing with one of our students to decide what camps to. At the end of this video, I also can explain, you know, what it is to look like it works with me kind of thing. So the first thing we do is obviously I give my students a list of schools. So this list of schools depends, and we have, you know, I have a number of students. I don't work with that many, but I work with, uh, you know, a handful every given year. So for example, this is one of our students, and what we'll do is we'll create a folder for them and we create a list of schools. So we have a list of schools, Division I, Division II, Division III. We also have a list of schools and we rank them these are in different tiers, tier 1, tier 2, tier 3. Then what we do is we connect them to my AI system. And what this does is it connects to your personal Gmail account. You click select all, you click write emails. Obviously you wouldn't select every school, but you'd select the schools that are on his list. You'd press hashtag coach, hashtag genuine, and it will automatically put the coach's name and it'll automatically put something genuine. Upon doing that, the next thing that will happen is We will then press send and we'll press send. When we press send, we start getting responses. As we get responses, the system will automatically begin to categorize with a prompt. It will ask you like, what did you think of this email? Now this little robot, if you copy and paste the email into here, it will tell you the answer and say this was genuine or this is generic. So right here it said this is a genuine email and here's how you should respond. And it's not through ChatGPT. I trained the AI because we get a lot of the same emails over and over again. So Saying that, it will then categorize it as genuine, and then it will tell you what school it was and when is their camp, and then it will make a note of it down at the bottom. So every time you send out this mass email, you get back feedback of, hey, it was genuine or generic, et cetera. And upon doing that is how we then begin to rank the camps. How genuine were they? Was it a school we'd want to go to? Again, we're just sending emails out, not spending any money, but then by getting the responses, that's how we decide which ID camps we would and would not go to. If you would like that program, that AI program, or you'd like to work with me, this is what that typically looks like. So you would go to this website, csgprograms.org, and you can watch a couple people and what they have to say, of course. But then you'll scroll down here, and this is one option, which is where we do everything for you. We send all the emails for you. The second option is we work on things together. But you still get a coach one-on-one. The third option is everything is the same, but it's a monthly model. Then same concept, but you only get one meeting per month. And then if you want the AI tool, this is the price for the AI tool. You still get to talk to us on an app that we have, but you don't get as, uh, it's from coaches who are in training. You'll still get the folder that I showed you, uh, but then you can press send. Just make sure your video's really good, cuz if your video's not really good, then this is a waste of time. Okay. If you want more help playing college soccer, give me a call. Links in the bio or click the description below. And don't forget to like and subscribe because it changes my life. Thank you so much.