8 Steps to Become a Top College Soccer Recruit

With the explosion of college soccer, coaches now have more kids to choose from than ever before. Coaches receive hundreds (if not thousands) of emails weekly. Each email looks like a basic form - the equivalent of today's "Spam" email sent to everyone and anyone. These emails are promptly deleted, because they aren't personal or relevant. Coaches today can choose anyone so they're pickier and harder to contact. Because of the huge amount of prospective college soccer players, they begin to build their recruiting lists in a player's freshman and sophomore season!

But don't lose hope. You don't need some expensive recruiting program or service to be a top recruit. Those services can't help you, because they aren't tailored specifically to your needs and unique capabilities. Most recruiting services fail because college soccer coaches recognize them as generic solutions meant for baseball, football, and basketball - which all have scouts and a wide network of personnel to aid in recruiting.

The key to college soccer recruiting is to become more relevant, personal, focused, and responsible. You can be a top college soccer recruit by embracing these qualities, and managing your own recruiting process. You will be a top recruit by marketing yourself more creatively and systematically than anyone ever could.

In 2006, the NCAA did a study of Men's Soccer athletes. The results are shocking.
-High school senior athletes 91,800
-NCAA freshman roster spots 5,200
-% of High school to go pro: 0.08

If that's not bad enough, according to a recent college coach study provided by NCSA Sports, 84% of prospects are identified by Division I coaches by the end of their sophomore year of high school.

Reality Bites

Actively recruited athletes are like a needle in a haystack.
-The reality is that only 2% of athletes are actively recruited by leading college coaches, leaving the remaining 98% to market themselves (The Sports Source).

Soccer recruiting is unlike any other sport.
-College soccer coaches do not relay on high school programs as a primary recruiting source for potential student-athletes. Unfortunately, high school soccer is vastly unproductive compared to club soccer (US Youth Soccer).

Prospective college soccer players have to market themselves.
-MySoccerImage.com exists for this purpose. Coaches begin identifying prospective athletes during their sophomore year of high school.

High profile tournaments, teams, or high schools are only the tip of the iceberg to attracting college coaches.
-To be a successful recruit, you need to directly contact your college coaches and let them know who you are! There are too many talented teams and players for coaches to keep track of everyone.

College coaches can be looking at 50 different prospective athletes for 5 spots.
-You must be successful both athletically and academically to play college soccer.

College coaches are recruiting the players - not the parents.
-College athletes are expected to manage your own life. College coaches want to make sure you're responsible and mature.

Here are some thoughts to get you started building your own soccer recruiting personal brand.

Brand Identity - What do You Stand For?
Creating a brand identity is about thinking of your value, your goals, your mission, your purpose. What do you stand for? What do you enjoy? How do you want people to see you? What type of a player are you? How would you describe yourself? Hint: Everyone is hard working. What sets you apart?

Positioning - How do You Stand Out?
Once you start critically thinking of your brand identity, determine how you would position yourself in your crowded marketplace. What sets you apart from your teammates, competitors, and other hopeful college soccer players?

Soft Assets - What are Your Intangible Qualities?
What are your soft-assets - your special empathetic qualities, or your passion for helping others? A resume can't communicate these intangible qualities that each person possesses. If a picture's worth a thousand words, then how much are videos worth?

Presentation - What are People's Perception of You?
Unfortunately, people's perception of you does matter - it matters a lot. We've all heard the axiom first impressions are lasting impressions. This could be your appearance, your handshake, your ability to hold eye-contact, your ability to communicate, and on and on.

Reputation Management - Your Own Personal P.R.
Managing your personal reputation is like public relations. Personal reputation management is making sure people are saying great things about you, it's about making sure your friends on Facebook aren't saying inappropriate things or posting inappropriate photos. A college coach can find you on Google, Facebook or MySpace instantly. Job interviewers constantly do it. It gives them a better idea of who you are, what you stand for, and how you behave. So managing your reputation is vital.

Tip #1 Ego Feeding
Want to learn an effective and simple way to manage your reputation? Sign up for a RSS (Really Simple Syndication) account - my favorite is Google Reader. You use a RSS reader to "subscribe" to specific channels - called "feeds". Every time this feed is updated, it is delivered automatically to your RSS reader. Use Google Alerts to search for a specific keyword, like your name, soccer club, high school, or any other that you'd like to monitor. Subscribe to the search results. Then do the same with Twitter Search. Subscribe to the search results, and any updates picked up by search engines (Google) or social networks (Twitter) will be delivered automatically to your RSS reader. This technique provides a great opportunity to monitor your (or someone else's) online reputation.

The key to finding potential schools is by segmenting. This simply means dividing the schools into groups based on common characteristics. You should be dividing the schools athletically - by caliber of play, type of play (in relation to your style), and need (how many current players play your position). You should also divide the schools academically - be geography, size of school, and academic admission standards (average GPA and SAT/ACT results). This will give you a good starting point.

Next, you should segment them into groups we'll call "Reach schools", "Probable Schools", and "Sure-Thing Schools". This will give you a great starting point, and let you balance your expectations just in case things don't work out as planned.

Being more relevant and personal is becoming a huge factor in college soccer recruiting. Gone are the days when you could spam 100 colleges with your tournament schedule. Coaches want to know why you want to go to their school, why you think you'll fit in with their soccer team, style of play, and school's culture. They want to know what makes you special and how sincere your efforts are in contacting them. The more personal and relevant your communication with them, the better chance they will want to heavily recruit you.

If you wanted to find information about a school, a new movie, or song, chances are you would head straight to Google. This is because search engines are great at recognizing what you're most likely interested in seeing - or how effective they can deliver the right information to you. By creating information hubs on the internet, you make it incredibly easy for a college soccer coach to find information about you.

How many hubs do you need? The more you put up, the more effective. This is because of synergy. Search engines recognize that the more information about a topic (in this case - You), the more credible and reliable the sources are; thus a higher search engine ranking. So where should you start?

Create Player Profiles
You should be creating as many player profiles as you can. At MySoccerImage.com, you can register for a free player profile in seconds. You should always complete your profiles to the fullest extent. You should add multimedia - pictures and video - to make your profile more effective and personal. You should also update your profile regularly, after big games and before tournaments is essential. You should also make it easy for a college coach to contact you (via email, Facebook, etc.).

Personal Websites
In this day and age, it's becoming easy and effective to have a personal website put up. This will allow you to control the content, and present a more professional presentation. This will allow you to upload an unlimited amount of videos, all the information a coach would ever need, and give coaches immediate, direct contact with you - and only you!

Tip #2 Recruiting Videos - Best Practices
Coaches typically want game footage filmed at half field. This will give the coach the ability to see situational context - not just highlights but your decision making, movement, and play in a team system. Only use videos up to 5 minutes long. It's better to provide 10 videos that are each 5 minutes, then one long video a coach has to sit through. Most college soccer coaches know what they're looking for and what type of player they like, so they can usually tell within a minute or two. Make it clean and simple (no fancy effects or editing) - coaches are looking for content, not flash.

Team Options
Make sure you're playing for a club, and high school that understand these principles. Unfortunately, too many club or high school soccer team pages aren't updated frequently and usually have outdated information on them. Making it easy to find your club team and high school soccer team online will allow any college coach to find information about you and contact information. This is helpful before big tournaments and games where coaches are trying to see if their schedule will allow them to attend your game. If they can't find this information easily and quickly, they'll move on to the next team.

It's important to establish an on-going communication channel with a coach, and regularly update them on your progress and latest updates. Remember not to be too pushy! Usually, you can see how often a coach will want to be contacted, or how they like to communicate (email, text, phone) and you can act accordingly.

You should also develop some type of contact management system. This is basically a Coach Relationship Management system that includes a coaches contact information (email, phone, address). You should also record every time you communicate with a coach, how you communicate with them (email, text, phone, social network) and any significant details of the conversation. Also record a "Next Action" item that will help you figure out what the next step is. This can simply be done through a Calendar application, and you can set an alarm to help remind your of what to do, and when to do it.

Social proof is a psychological incident that is validated by references and testimonials. Social proof underlies our need to seek peer evaluations and what makes us seem more or less knowledge about something. Essentially, social proof is like a form of stereotyping.

You should be getting references and testimonials from your club coaches, high school coaches, and even teachers or administration. The key is to develop good relationships with these people, so they will be more than happy to provide you with a glowing recommendation. The more good references you can get the better. This will give college soccer coaches more confidence in you, and make you more desirable. It's also a good idea to have your club and high school coaches contact college coaches directly because it gives you more credibility having top youth coaches recommending you.

In Malcolm Gladwell's successful novel, The Tipping Point, he identified three types of people that are necessary for helping a product, service, or brand to be spread by word of mouth. These people are:

Connectors: They're the people who link different groups together, connecting our world and bringing people together.

Mavens: They're the people who specialize in information knowledge. They provide us with the latest information, and are the most knowledgeable about certain subjects or topics.

Salesmen: These are the persuaders and negotiators.

By identifying with these people and developing relationships with them, you improve your "Stickiness Factor" or your ability to be memorable. Expanding your network will help you get in contact with influential people and groups that will provide opportunities to shine.

Here are some other types of people that you should also get to know:

Gatekeepers
These are the people you need to woo in order to gain access. These include assistant coaches who are responsible for recruiting, and admissions personnel who screen you as an applicant for the school.

Sneezers
These are the people who give you access to their influence and large network of people. This is a term I'm borrowing from Seth Godin's Ideavirus. Sneezers are usually influential club coaches who have credibility and lots of personal relationships with college soccer coaches.

Mastermind Groups
These are important groups that again provide access to college coaches. These can be ODP (Olympic Development Program), exclusive tournaments such as Nike Invitationals, or other special, invite-only groups.

Ability in the classroom may not get you recruited to play college soccer, but it will prevent you from playing and getting recruited. While in the past college athletes could slide by with getting bad grades, the increasing competitiveness of college is changing that. More people are trying to go to college than ever before, so college athletes are expected to also be able to compete academically as well. It's imperative you have an idea of a college's minimum GPA and SAT/ACT scores. This will help you keep your grades up in high school and ensure your ability to remain academically eligible during your college career.

Find this information and much, much more now by visiting College Soccer Recruiting 101: Your Guide to Becoming a Top Recruit.

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