7 film mistakes costing you scholarship

So these are the seven most common mistakes I see in highlight videos and I'll be breaking down each one. So mistake number one is the biggest one. It's the bad first three plays or just not your best plays as your first three plays. Because with a college coach, they don't have a lot of time. So they're not going to be spending hours on hours looking at highlights. They wanted to spend, you know, really 15, 30 seconds each recruit kind of evaluating, figure out if they can even play for the program. And really most coaches can figure it out in the first three plays. Usually that's about anywhere between 15 to 30 seconds. And so if you have a bad first three plays because you're saving other plays for later on or something like that, then you are going to get less interest because what's going to happen is the coach is going to check out those plays, go, nope, don't need this guy and go to the next guy and completely forget about you. And so instead you want to put your best plays first so where you can grab the coach's attention from the start, maybe get a couple more plays in than you would otherwise and hopefully get that coach's attention, get his interest and hopefully he'll respond to your, to your message or follow you or wherever he found your highlights or whatever made him wanted to watch those that he takes that next action. The second thing is excessively long, long highlights. Now really you can have a 15 minute highlight most of the time it just doesn't make sense because you, you don't have enough good plays. The whole point of highlights is that they're highlights, they are really good plays. And so what too many people make the mistake of is they focus on length and quantity instead of quality. We have had recruits that have gotten recruited with 30 seconds worth of highlights. It doesn't matter about the length of the highlight, it matters about what is inside the highlight. And so there's really no exact ideal length. I say three to five minutes because usually if you reduce it to three to five minutes, you're really only putting your best play in. The whole idea here is you want to trim the fat, you want to cut off anything that's not that best of the best stuff and then only keep in the really great stuff, the best plays, the best skills, the best stuff that you need to show. That way you can maintain the interest of the viewer who is ultimately a college coach. So make sure you don't need a seven minute highlight video, you don't need a five minute, you don't need a three minute highlight video. You really only need again three to five really good plays and that will be enough to at least capture their interest. You'll need more stuff later on, but when we're talking just initial stuff, you don't need these excessive highlight videos. You don't need a bunch of other stuff I'm going to go into later as well. Mistake number three is this overuse of slow motion. This is not as common as it it once was, but hopefully we can continue to hit this on the head. Slow motion is bad. Same with speeding up stuff. Don't do it either way. Coaches can tell the slow motion. You may be thinking like it breaks down the play more, shows them what they want to see, but they want to see you fully into the flow of the game. They don't want to see any stoppage, they don't want to see any speeding it up or slowing down throughout the entire play. They just want to be able to see it plain as is so that they can see how fast you act on things, how things played out in real time and then make a better evaluation off of that. If you do, slow mo makes their evaluation harder, which is annoying to them ultimately because they just want it plain. It's the same reason why like you're not going to get recruited off of like cool edits because it's hard to evaluate off of those because it's a different angle than just that sideline angle or an end zone angle. Next one is excessively long clips. Now this is a different thing than the full highlights because a clip is one play and so you want to compress each play to make it as small as possible. So if you have a play that is 10 seconds long, you want to shorten up as much as possible second by second. If you can get to 9 seconds, 9 seconds is going to be better than 10 seconds because. Because each second that you get with a college coach matters so much because again, like I mentioned, may get only 30 seconds, you may get a minute long. You don't know how long it may be. And so you want to fit that as many great plays in that short amount of possible time. If you can show enough that you know it's just great stuff and you get, you know, seven plays in the span of 30 seconds. That's awesome. Realistically, you're not probably going to get that, but you want to shorten them up as much as possible. You don't want to leave any dead space and in there. And so what I mean by the stead space is usually when people have too long clips, it's because they're starting the play before the snap of the ball. So you want your clips to literally start right at the snap of the ball, the snap of the center hiking the ball, and then you want the clip to end pretty much right after you do your play. So for example, if you're offensive line, you paint a good guy, do your pancake, show that you clearly pancaked him, and then cut it right there. You don't have to show your running back running for a touchdown or anything like that. Same with a quarterback you don't like. Once you make your throw and it's clear it's complete, you don't need to show the receiver running another 30, 40 yards because that's going to take another, you know, three, four seconds to show that. Instead, cut that off and then save yourself those 3, 4 seconds to show another play. And so it should really be like the right highlights. You can just tell because they just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Like they just float seamlessly into each other and just like this really nice compilation of your best plays. And it's like, dang, this guy's making a lot of plays. Because it, it provides this feeling of like, oh, wow, this is a lot of plays in a short amount of time, which makes them feel like the highlight is better than someone else as well as you're just able to squeeze a lot more into a little bit of time. And so that, that gives you more advantage there. So make sure you're shortening up your clips. Mistake number five is mixing offensive defense. Now, I will say it makes sense to have them together if it's a shorter highlight tape. What it doesn't make sense is when you have these massive highlight tapes of you have essentially your offensive and defensive in different sections. And so that is where the things cause an issue. Because what I see some people do is they'll do these massive highlights where it's like 8, 10, 12 minutes long of all the highlights, which is awesome. That's awesome. You haven't many highlights, but then the first six minutes is offense and the last six minutes is defense. But you may think like, oh, that's good that they have, like, it sectioned up. The issue is coaches have no clue that you have sectioned up that way. Even if you tell them, they may not know that or they just don't care and they don't want to, like, have to go to that exact point to find your defensive highlights. You're just causing a Lot of friction there, causing a lot of effort to be in put in by the coach. And you want to make it as easy as possible. Instead just make two separate highlight videos and share them with them both. Ideally you make three. You make a mixed one that's probably a one to two minute highlight video of combined. Your best place you have an offensive highlight tape that is just your offensive highlights and you have your defensive highlights and that is the best way to do it. You can't. Again like I said, you can mix it up but it shouldn't be the super long mix up. Version number six is focusing only on scoring plays. Now on offensive tape it makes sense like to focus on scoring plays. Those are going to generally be your highlights. But a six yard run is not better than an 80 yard run. That is, that is not a touchdown. You want to focus on number one, showing your best play stuff that's really impressive and makes a coach say wow. But as well as showing certain skill sets because what might look good in a stat book does not necessarily going to show the kind of skills that they're looking for. So like you could have for example as a running back, we have a running back that we're working with from Florida that's a 2025, just got his first offer the other day. And so what we did in his highlights is we actually shifted one of his plays more forward because his strength is speed. Runs a 45 which isn't necessarily like top tier but just good and he shows it on film. And so like his first couple plays are all like really long runs where he's showing his speed. But he has this really good play. I think it was around play six or seven that coaches probably just weren't seeing of him trucking guy. And it was a really nice play showing physicality. And so we moved that up to play number two because you may think like, oh, this play isn't necessarily better for terms of yards and touchdowns and etc. Than the other plays, but it shows a certain skill set that coaches are looking for, especially from a guy that's speed. They need to know that he's also physical. That showed that clearly. So make sure you're focusing on more so on the skills rather than the stats. And number seven, the last one is just infrequent updates. So this is a big mistake. I see during the season, out of the season, whatever, you're not updating your phone enough, you're not providing new video as well even outside the season. And so really right away after game One, you should initially make a game one highlights and then game two make a game two highlights and you should combine those. You should be constantly producing and updating your film because that is the lifeline of your recruiting. And so if you're not on top of that, then you're always going to be behind. And then you do that continually week after week, and so make sure you're on top of that. I mean, I'm recording as February, we're not in season, but even though we're out of season, just talking not about highlights, but video, you need to be constantly making new video every single week. Whether it's workout stuff, training stuff, even it's new content on grades or, you know, just personal stuff, community service. You need to be constantly showing what you're doing to college coaches so that way you can cut through the noise, build a brand, build relationships, and show that you're the guy that should take over everyone else. So with that all being said, hope you got something from this. If you're looking for a more one on one help with the recruiting process, you can work with us. Number one, we provide a full customized game plan where we take a look at your highlights, your Twitter profile, your goals, the problems that you're facing, your current situation right now, ultimately combine all that and give you a full game plan of what you need to do right now to get ultimately get to that goal come signing day next February, if you're a 26 or if you're 27, 28, then it would be a little bit more in the future. With that, we also give you our done free exposure machine. This is where we send over 500 messages per week to college coaches. And it doesn't look like it's coming from us because no one cares about your first scholarship. They want to hear from you guys. So we send it looking like it's coming from you. And this is on both the DMs on the side as well as the email side. It saves you a lot of time, probably hundreds if not thousands of hours, and gets you really good results. The last one is the guaranteed scholarship playbook. So it's our playbook from everything from A to Z as far as, I mean, we do the highlights for you, so you don't even need the playbook on that. But as far as Twitter posts, how to post it, the captions, what to post, how to edit together, what questions to ask coaches, all that good stuff, that's really just a snippet of it. So if you're interested in that go to the link in the description below. There's a video kind of going more in depth than that. Tons of results and interviews and testimonials if you're just curious what other people have to say. But you book a call, it's all free, and my team will kind of walk through what we do in more detail and answer any questions you have and then go over any of the other details as well. So hopefully I'll talk to you soon if you like this. Also, be sure to subscribe like and we'll be putting more content out like this, so peace.