Low GPA? 3 Mistakes Killing Your College Soccer Dream

3 mistakes you are making if your grades are below a 3.5 GPA and you want to play college soccer. So first of all, if you have below a 3.5 GPA, many of you think, oh, all the money is in athletics. And I'm going to show you a video really briefly that pretty much says otherwise.

Generally speaking, the vast majority of your child's financial aid for college will not come from athletics, even if they are incredibly good at what they do. So, um, so don't be thinking it's like we're hitting the lottery, because it's not.

So then where does the money come from? If it's not coming from athletics, then how come I see people getting scholarships? Well, that's because most of the money actually comes from academics. The reason I know this is because we've raised a lot of money in scholarship, and messages I receive are like this: this is a Division III school, this student's receiving $300,000. This is a Division I— Division III school, and she received $100,000. The money is in academics. So when you have below a 3.5 GPA, you have to do a couple things differently. One, you have to understand you will get less money. That's number one. Number two is you must be open-minded to the types of schools. In some ways, you actually have an easier way of playing college soccer because there's a lot more schools out there who don't require require, say, a 3.7 and above. There are less schools out there who do require a 3.7 and above, which means if you have a 3.7 and above, likely you want to go to those schools, and there are less of them. So if you have a lower GPA and you're more open-minded to the colleges you go to, there's more opportunity to play college soccer. On the bottom end though, you get less opportunity to get a scholarship. Now, the more interest you have from different schools, the better off you will be. So the way we begin, for example, I have a student right now, they just joined us, MLS Next Player, have a 3.0. They go to a top academic high school, but they're just not doing great in school right now. So It's a weighted 3.2, it's an unweighted 3.0, and weighted is what matters for the college coaches. So in saying all of that, what we're gonna do with this student is we're going to start off by actually emailing many of the top academic schools because we think he's a sophomore, that he'll get his grades up in time, so it'll actually hopefully work out for them. But also depending on the school you email, like if you email Chicago, they cannot get you in unless you have the grades, or MIT. But if you're emailing St. Olaf and you don't have the perfect grades, the soccer team could help you get into the school. So in saying that, he's actually gonna email some of the best top academic schools, not all of them, but some. He's going to email a list of tier 2 schools that I give him, and then he's going to email even a tier 3 list that I also give him. I actually can show you that example right now, uh, so you can see it. So this is an example student for that we're working with, and what we're going to do is we have a list here of division 1 schools that we categorize and we put them in a certain order. Red means they're reach schools, bold means we're going to send an email to, non-bold means they're a reach school, but maybe later on they could become a school that's a bit more realistic. Then what we do is we give them a list of top academic. This is the tier 1 and the tier 2. So here is, for example, here is the tier 1 list based off of, you know, our, their major and things of that like that. And then you also have the tier 2 list, and the tier 2 list is a little bit different depending on a couple things. And then the final list is actually a list specifically based off of major, not just soccer, of course. And this is different for each division that we're going to give the kid as well. So that's how we're able to basically send out all these emails. Now the beautiful part is we have this really cool system where when I work with students, they get to log into this email system and this AI email system will connect to that Google Drive I just showed you. And once it connects to the Google Drive, you will type in the major that we gave you. So that student's case, they were a math major. So I would click math. Once I click math, I would click select all, click write email, click dear hashtag coach hashtag genuine hashtag school, and it will automatically put the coach's name, something genuine. I'll click preview. It will automatically put something genuine. It'll put the coach's name and the school's name and it'll send to all these schools. So that entire list I just gave you, which was pretty overwhelming, you know, that will take us 2 or 3 days to send out all those emails, and then we decide on follow-up. And then what the system does is the system will automa— I designed it myself— the system will automatically mark it as genuine or mass or generic or follow-up, etc. So that way we know what the email was. Was it a generic? And then it will prompt us and say, did you get invited to camp? And then you would make a note of it, and the camps will pop down here to go, these are the camps we were and/or were not invited to. So that way, with this student, with his group, despite his grades, we are actually going to email a lot of schools. Now we'll also email Division II schools. There is a Division II list on there as well that we gave him. and we want to make sure that they find the right school for them. So in saying all of this, if you would like more help playing college soccer, give me a call. Links in the description or links below. And don't forget to like and subscribe because it really helps with the algorithm so I can keep making you guys these videos. Okay, I'll talk to you soon.