With the increasing costs in college these days – parents are looking for their student-athletes to gain scholarships from either their academic achievements or athletic abilities.
As a high school soccer coach, I see all the work that parents and players are doing to get noticed by college coaches and recruiters. Looking around the web, businesses charge a premium to put together highlight reels on DVD to send to coaches. When I was approached by one of our players’ parents to put together one of these DVD’s – I suggested something different. A website.
After I suggested a website, I scoured the web to see if there was anything like what I was thinking. I spent the better part of two days looking and only found over-priced film production or free (and justifiably so) profile services that ‘guarantee’ that you’ll be seen by college coaches and recruiters.
With all of the clutter out there, and with parents & players sending out so many DVDs to college coaches and recruiters, why not do something different?
So what I did for one of our players was create a college recruiting website. Sam’s site has a film room, a blog for him to be introspective about his progress and games, sections for his achievements and goals and a contact form for prospective coaches to get in touch with anyone including his parents, Sam, his club coaches or his high school coaches.
The cost is far more affordable than a highlight reel and has a lot more flexibility to go with it. The question I posed to Sam’s parents was if we put together a highlight reel and he scores 5 goals in the first game of the season – all of those DVDs we sent out are outdated. With a website, all we need to do is add the new film to the ‘Film Room’ and email the coaches that they are in contact with and they can view it at their leisure.
I think (and the people I’ve discussed this with) that this is a revolutionary idea that will really help a lot of student-athletes get found by colleges and hopefully earn a college scholarship. Of course, this idea works with any sport – not just soccer. Football, basketball, golf, lacrosse.. any sport. Even sports that don’t necessitate game film like Track & Field could use this concept. Having a video of a coach explaining how dedicated an athlete is to improving on his/her skills or hearing directly from the athlete on what they are working on to improve would be a welcome addition to the website.
If you know someone that is interested in creating a site, please head here to get in touch with me.