A recruiting consultant meets with Tom about his daughter Julia's college soccer prospects. They discuss three service models for handling outreach, plan video content including a 2:30 highlight reel and full-game footage, and focus on D2 and D3 schools with an eye toward San Diego State. Tom chooses the collaborative approach and schedules a follow-up.
Chapters
So then I'd say to your father, I've known your daughter for 20-odd minutes. Why do you think she's the right fit to work with us?
It's going to come off biased, but obviously I see her putting in a lot of the work. She's been working with a lot of private trainers, and that was because she came to me asking for that, not because I said, hey, you should start working with a private trainer or anything like that. And she's built really strong relationships with these, these people. Going back to her JV story, uh, you know, she didn't mention it, but she won the Cougar Award there, which was like a, you know, all-around great person type of award. And, um, she started every single game, she played full minutes every single game, and her coaches pulled her aside and said, I think you have incredible potential and you should think about playing at the next level. And her assistant coach who just graduated from USD, and she was a D1 player over there, midfielder, uh, has been working with her, uh, 2 days a week since then. She basically said, I want to work with your daughter and help her get to A, ECNL team, and B, you know, help her get to college because I, I have that much belief in her.
Um, did you say where does that player play now?
She graduated, but she was at University of San Diego.
Amazing. Awesome. And I love that she believes in your daughter that way. That is excellent. Awesome. Really, really cool. And I can see why, like I mentioned in the video. Um, very exciting. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you guys, and your dad saw this already a little bit, there are 3 ways in which we work with students. I'm going to show you each one, and I'm going to make a little video describing what your first day would look like. And then after that, Dad and Julia, I'm going to say to you, would you like to work with us? And you'll say yes or no, or we need to think about it, or we have a question. And I'm happy to answer all those questions. So in saying that, the first option, Julia, is what we call the do-it-for-you model. This is where we will write all the emails for you. We will log into your Gmail account that we will help you make. You will give us the username and password and we will be you and we will do it all for you. You will sit there and wait for us to tell you what to do. The good news is we save you a lot of time and energy. The other reason it's difficult, it is more expensive, say, than the other models I'll show you. And the other, I would say, good news and mixed news, I would say, is, you know, if we tell you to go to an ID camp, you kind of have to go because like we're doing all this work for you and this is something that we're doing for you. So that's option number 1. Option number 2 is where we do it together. What this means is we will write the emails, but you're the one who will press send. Julia will be with you as a team here, working together with your dad to discuss what the steps are in the recruiting process. We still will make all your videos, we'll still meet every week, but typically we're a team. Now, one thing that's important for both of you is I'm an annual service, so at the end of the year you will still keep all the tools we gave you, but we will no longer be meeting and chatting. For 98% of my students, they don't need us any longer. They know what to do, they've gotten a really good start, and they've already started talking to coaches. And at the end of the day is not rocket science. When you get— they get— once you get the hang of it, you'll know what to do. However, you may have a question for us in the future, in which case, Dad, it ranges between here and here for future meetings depending. It becomes à la carte. You need a video edited, we'll sort it out for you, you know, those types of things. And we want to help you get through the end of the process. Yes, please.
My daughter needs to head back to class.
No worries, she's done real quick. You're good.
I can take over from here.
No worries, Julia, go, go to school. Good job.
Okay, thank you so much.
Good job. Bye. Um, and then Dad, the final option is a do-it-yourself model where you can still message us all the time, but if you want a meeting, it's, it's extra basically. But everything else is the same. We'll edit your videos, we'll chat with you, but meetings are extra. And those are kind of the 3 models which you saw already. And so at this point, I'm gonna make this little video still, basically going— this will go to your Call It Soccer gal coach as well as to you and me, so we all have a copy of it. And then after that I'd be happy to answer questions. Is that okay?
Sounds good.
Okay, excellent. Um, all right, this is perfect. All right, so I'm just going to make this really quickly. Hello everybody, I'm with an awesome family. Julia was there or here earlier, but she had to go to school, which is excellent. Um, dad is here and I've already kind of gone over a few things. I just want to go over their video really quickly. First of all, if I want to say like It's a very good video, like, meaning she's good at soccer. When I fix it, it will be better, but it's, it's good. So I don't want to say this is not going to be the game changer for us of the many things we're going to do. This will be— I think this will help us 25%, which is a lot, but there'll be some other things that will help us a lot more. So in saying that, when it comes to her video, she's got 3 videos. One of the videos— and I'm going to share this with our team so they have it— um, one of the videos is like 5 minutes long and the level is a lot worse. She does have some goals in it, but the levels like considerably not as high. Um, this one, and this is really long. Nobody's ever going to watch that long video, so it's kind of useless. The level she's playing against here, at least in this instance, uh, there's one instance where she scores a really good goal. I'll go over this later with you in more detail. Anyways, my point is this: in this video and in this video, there's some really, really good moments. So I want all this on YouTube. It can stay on NCSA also, that's fine. But I want it all on YouTube in a, in our version, in our customized way. And I also want to make the best of this. So we'll take the best 2 minutes and 30 seconds of this, make its own, and that'll be our traditional highlight video. Then from now on, no more highlight videos unless it's like a surf cup. I only want full games because her daughter's really good. And while she does score a lot of goals, she's a playmaker. So that is to say 3 videos combined into our version with a self-interview, correct cover page, all those things. Then, excuse me, then every-touch video galore because she's a really good player. Then, um, you know, their ECNL team gets very little exposure, so what's going to be important is camps. Um, now given her grades, there's a couple camps I think she should go to that I'm going to put on this list. Um, this one, this one, maybe this one. I have to do a bit more research on that for them, but There's a couple I want her to go to, just in my opinion. The other thing is we want genuine— now she wants to play at San Diego State, which, you know, on paper is not easy playing from Eastern RL, but it's not out of the question. So to make it inside the question, this camp's really important for that particular school. But the other thing is I want her to get a ton of interest, which she should totally have at this point already, from D3s and D2s. I mean, D2 should be asking her to train with her. That's how good she really is. And if that happens, the D1s will, will, will change their, uh, tune pretty quickly. So will the ECNL team. If we can say to an ECNL team, D2 school already invited me to train with them, that also changes a lot of stuff. So we can go directly to the college coaches to get more ECNL interest, per se. And then finally is I want to send the fall email template to San Diego State, um, because that's her dream school. And I also want to send it to a couple other D1s They will have limited ability to respond, but I— they do break the rules, so that could happen. And then I don't want to tell you, Ken, it's illegal, but it's possible. And then finally is we do want to email the D3s, and I do want to email the D2s with the same one, which is very aggressive. And I want to do it once we fix our video, and then we can pick out from genuine invites and decide which camps we want to go to based off of who likes us, which is always ideal. Okay, talk soon. Okay. Um, Tom, does that make sense in terms of our strategy? Excellent. Um, that leads me to you. Let's say I said you got to pay me right now, which you do not, but hypothetically, uh, what questions come to mind?
So I watched all the videos. Uh, my wife and I were thinking we would do number 2, um, option, um, and, and kind of work through you on that. Um, So that's not really a question, but that's helpful.
That's what I—
that we're looking at. And then, um, she's got a ton of other videos, so I can send you some other stuff that's helpful. Um, yeah, the 5-minute video, that was just her year one high video. It wasn't like made for any other reason other than if she didn't make soccer at the school again, at least she had those memories.
Well said.
Um, let's see, I think, uh, I guess just really understanding how do you— how do we know that it's genuine, right? And the answer I'll give you is, um, like many of your students, we bought the NCSA thing because we didn't know there was anything else out there. And, uh, you know, we've gotten invites for camps, like she went to the camp at UC Davis, she's I've gotten emails from Alabama. Of course, it looks like it's coming from the head coach, but I have no idea. How do we— do we just kind of shelve NCSA and just say, okay, we just go here, or do we do both? I know that you said something like there's a way if you do both it could work too or something. I don't know what—
Good question. So, good question. I guess I should pause. Have you paid for the highest level service of NCSA, or where are you with them?
No, we bought the middle or the lower tier.
Okay, so the short answer is I can show you a video right now if you want, literally from parents telling you that coaches hate NCSA. So the short answer is we will never send that one. Okay, so we will never send an email from NCSA. So that should part we will put aside. However, look, NCSA is like website and how you can search schools, you know, that's awesome. So, you know, my system has my version that I think is good But I'll admit, you know, they have millions and millions of dollars to make whatever the hell they want, so keep it. You know, it's not going to hurt us. We can also happily— anything we make, let's put it on NCSA. There will be coaches that will reach out to you. They typically are low, low level, but it's like a Facebook page, not going to hurt us. So I'm not against NCSA being on our team. I just will say the only thing I am— I draw the line at is all emails will be from our own account. That's, that's it. Other than that, that's good. We can keep NCSA, and if there's a person that you're allowed to talk to You know, from my perspective, you want to talk to us and then have a conversation with them, and you go, hey, here's where we're at, and they give you a nugget that's helpful, that's great. Um, we're definitely not against that. Sometimes you find a good person, and that's great. I will tell you that it is mandatory on our perspective that your daughter meets with us almost every week, or we will fire you. On their perspective, it's a little different. So the short answer is you don't have to shelf it, meaning we will encourage you to put whatever we give you on NCSA because it's like a Facebook, it's like a social media, like page. It's not gonna hurt. But most of my attention now will be— I probably won't say, hey, uh, email them through NCSA, or let's look this up using NCSA's profile. I'll use my own, but only because, of course, I built— in fairness, I built mine copying NCSA, literally going, hey, they said they were— because I bought them too. They said they were gonna do this, they didn't do it. What if I did it? Done. And so on and so forth. Um, so in that way, on paper, um, That's like definitely what I wanted for sure.
Got it. Yeah, I don't think I have any other questions at this point. Um, uh, my wife is texting me that she wants to talk about it some more, so why don't we— yeah, here's the next step. Let me have that conversation with her and get back to you this week.
No problem. Here's my one dilemma, um, but I want you to talk to her. I don't want you to make any decisions without her, of course. Is here Um, is my schedule. Typically speaking, I need to know within the next kind of 24 to 48 hours if you want to work with us. And so I'm happy to also have a meeting with your wife if she would like. So what I would like to do, if it's okay with you, is I'd book a follow-up call with just you or just your wife, or, you know, your Julie doesn't have to be there. And I can also answer any other questions. Uh, so my question to you is my brother's getting married, uh, Thursday, Friday. So are you around, uh, sometime tomorrow or earlier in the day on Thursday? Um, ideally at a quarter till. So we're on— we're both in California, so 1:45, 12:45, something like that. Um, tomorrow, like, I could do 11:45.
I'm actually at the office.
I can also do later today. I'm only— my only concern is if I don't get you booked on my calendar and then someone else of these people say yes, I, I, you know, I'm— I can't continue. I can't say there will still be a spot.
All right, I'm just looking at my calendar.
Um, it'll be pretty short too.
Can we do Thursday morning?
Yeah, yeah. Uh, 10:45, that work?
Yep, I'm open from 10 to 1.
Perfect. Thursday, let's do 10:45 on Thursday.
Okay, and I'll give you my wife's Yeah, that'd be great. Email account, that would be excellent. C-R-I-S, C-R-I-S-B-R-A-N-C-H, C-H, uh, no, branch, B-R-A-N-C-H.
Thank you.
Like a tree branch.
Thank you.
At Gmail.
Perfect.
Again, Julia won't be able to make it, she'll be at school.
No worries, that's good, she should be at school. All good. All right, so I just sent you that invite, all guests, and I will talk to you on Thursday.
Sounds good. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Talk soon. Bye. Okay. Hi everybody. Which is better, University of San Diego or San Diego State? San Diego State. Um, but it could vary, but typically that's true. Uh, Autism Whisperer, you're back. Good to see you. Club soccer, high school soccer? Club soccer all the way. Where did you play soccer? I played at Valparaiso, and then I played in the USL, and then I played in Sweden. Are you seeing freshmen getting half or more scholarships? Seems like actual dollar support is down. Way down, 100%. Did you go— did you get most of your looks through high school club? All through club, none, zero through high school. How do you get in college from Norway? Book a call, Toby. Click on international. How can I find Lexington College ID camps? Typically, if you search it you should be able to find it. Um, okay, I think you guys are pretty good here. Okay, I think you guys are good. You don't need anything from me. I'm gonna take a break. Our next call is in 30 minutes. So I will see you all in 30 minutos if you want. Bye. Recording in progress.
