Your highlights suck [Here’s how to fix them]

Your highlights suck. And no coach is going to recruit you after you watch them. And that's just the brutal, honest truth. And if you don't know who I am, I'm Trent Lora. I'm a former college quarterback and now I run your first scholarship where I help families get their first scholarship and more. And so one of the most important things that you need to focus on in recruiting is your highlights. Because if you don't have good highlights, then a coach is never going to want to recruit you. Because the first step in evaluating a recruit is, is taking a look at their highlights and seeing if their best plays are actually worth recruiting. Because if your best plays are not what they're expecting, then your potential isn't even there. And so if your best plays are what they look at as a player should be having as average plays, then it's a pretty telltale sign that, hey, we should recruit. And so I see a lot of mistakes that recruits make and parents make when crafting together these highlight reels that cost them probably interest from tens of coaches that are watching their stuff. They're getting them in front of the coaches. Then the coaches are clicking off five seconds in because you know, they're either wasting their time or just not showing the right stuff that actually gets them recruited. That's the biggest thing you can make and that's literally just throwing opportunities in the trash. So let's dive into it. So the first one is the clips, the clip length. And I'm not talking about the entire highlight length. We'll talk about that next. And so the clip length is the biggest, one of the biggest issues because the last thing you want to do is waste time in a highlight reel. You have a limited amount of time of college coaches attention. And so you can't have a clip that has five seconds before there's anything even happening and just wasted space. And then like you make the play and there's 10 seconds after that. Because realistically, a coach is going to watch the first 30 seconds a minute of that highlight video on average, probably 30 seconds less than 30 seconds on average. So that means you have 30 seconds to squeeze as many plays or moments in there that are going to grab their attention, make them A, want to watch more and B, want to recruit you. So how can we do this? You have to think about how can we maximize that time. Number one is the clip length. You need to shorten the clips as much as possible. I mean like to the, to the second, to the tenth of a second. How short can you make it. It should start right before the snap and then right after you make the play. So a good example of that is, like, if you're a quarterback, you throw the ball, like, obviously you start at the snap. Okay, cool. You hike it, whatever. You make your play. Boom. You throw the ball. Guy catches it wherever he's at. You should cut it pretty much right after he catches it because a coach doesn't need to see him run to the end of the touchdown. They don't care about that. That a God that the receiver made the rest of the play. They just care about your part of the play. Same thing of your offensive lineman. You make a play, you pancake them. Cut it right after the. After the pancake, they don't need to see the running back run for another 50, 60 yards. And so this can literally save you five to 10 seconds per play just by doing this. And even if it saves just a one second by you making sure that's right, that is one second is crucial because literally just half a second can cause the coach to want to click off that video and go to someone else. The last thing you want is them to recruit someone else, right? They want. You want them to recruit you. So the second piece from there is the length, the length of the highlight video. Because again, like I mentioned, a coach is realistically only going to watch the first 30 seconds. So why are we out here normalizing five to six minute highlight videos? I get it. You want to have a big highlight video because you think like, oh, if I have a big highlight video, that means I have really good highlights. But that's not what that means. It's quality over quantity. And so what so many people get wrong is they craft together this super long highlight reel with as many possible plays in there, but most of them suck and they aren't highlights. And so your highlight reel is a highlight reel. That means they should be your best plays. And so if you're showing average plays on your highlight reel, a coach thinks that you are an average player or even worse than average player. Because if these are your best plays, then what is your average place or what are your worst plays like? Ugh, they don't even want to get into that. They're just gonna, they're just gonna hop off and go watch someone else. And so realistically, like the sweet spot is probably like two minutes or less. You can always craft together like a longer highlight video that you have like a. You can do the six minute, seven minute highlight reel. Really, it should be like a six Minute, seven minute, like game tape kind of thing. And then you have a shorter tape that you send out more consistently. And then if they want to check out a longer one, you're like, okay, coach, hey, here, here's a longer tape in case you want to see more plays. Like, these aren't necessarily all highlights, but I just feel like they give a better representation of who I am as player. And they'll appreciate that because, number one, you're going to save their time because what if they don't even like your short tape? And number two, if they want to see more, they'll add. They'll. They'll want to see that. And so it's just a better way to organize things. So cut down your length. You don't need a freaking six minute long highlight video. Okay, so we're back. Camera went out of focus. All right, so the plays, the plays are super important because again, you have the clipping light, right? You can have the highlight length light, right? But if you're not showing the right plays, then coaches aren't really going to be interested in the first place anyway. So you need to make sure to be showing the right place. The key here is you want to show explosive plays, the big place. This is anything that is you doing big things on defensive side of the ball, it's pretty easy. It's stuff like sacks, interceptions for fumbles, TFLs, tackles for losses, solo tackles, stuff like that, big hits, everything on the offensive side of the ball, it's pretty much anything over 20 yards. If you're offensive lineman, then it's stuff you being explosive off the ball, the pancakes, all that stuff. And so the key there is you want to show again your best play. So you should basically be showing the top 10%, top 5%, ideally, like even like top two and a half percent, you know, as top as it is to pass that threshold of your best place. And so it shouldn't be like, you know, a five yard hitch or an assisted tackle, because that's what I see so many times is they put on plays that like, they're just like, I need something on here. But it's like, okay, the coach isn't going to really want to see that in the first place. So make sure you're including really good plays on there. The ordering is huge because then you can have the right plays. But if the ordering is incorrect, that kind of messes it all up too, because if you have your really good plays at the back, the coach is probably not gonna get there. You want to Order it. Literally best play, your best, best play. That's as simple as possible. It should be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Like this shouldn't be. You shouldn't be saving anything till the end because they might not even watch the end. If they watch the end, cool, whatever. But if they never get to the end and you have your best place at the end, then it never matters. And so your first play should be the best play because you want to keep their attention as long as possible. And so that's a big thing I see is recruits save it for like, you know, the two minute mark and the three minute mark. They're like, oh, yeah, I'm really saving this. So that way they see that I'm like, oh, wow, that's a really good. Like, it's not a movie. You're not crafting together a movie here. There's not a lot of thought put into it. There doesn't have to be a lot of thought put into it. It's just first best play, second best play, third best play, and so on and so forth. Should be ordered as that. Simply put, the last thing I'll jot down on here is titles. You do not need a title screen. The only time I think title screens are acceptable is if you have really impressive stats that the coach probably doesn't know about. Even then, you don't really need it because most of the time a coach is coming into that already knowing things that are going to put on the title screen. They already know your name, they already know your position, they already know your graduation year. So you don't need to put all that unnecessary information out there that's probably gonna waste anywhere from five to, if you have multiple title screens, gonna waste 20 seconds again, 30 seconds. That's how much time you should be thinking you have in your highlight reel. And if you're wasting 20 seconds or 15 or 10 or even 5, you're wasting a drastic amount of time on something the coach already knows and doesn't care about. Right now they want to see you play and be able to evaluate you on your highlights. So make sure you're making the most of this time. Make sure you're avoiding those five mistakes. And if you're making those mistakes, go fix your highlight tape now because coaches are watching their highlights, your highlights as we speak and you don't want to miss up any other opportunities. So make sure you get that stuff done. Hopefully you got something out of this. Maybe you liked it. Be sure to leave a comment or subscribe. And I'll see you later. Peace.