When I was coaching women’s college soccer, there was this one opponent that we had to play each year because they were in our conference and let me tell you, they…were…awful. At halftime of the game, one of my players made a comment that the player she was up against was a “statue”, meaning that she wasn’t moving at all. I could barely contain my laughter as when I replayed the first half in my head, it was true. This player might have taken 25 steps all half.
Why do I mention this when I talk about making highlight films for recruiting? Level of play is a real thing. Having highlights versus bad teams is sometimes very obvious to college coaches and is an immediate turnoff. They want to see you playing against good opponents where you are challenged. When making highlights, it is particularly important to think about level of play. If you have a clip you want to include and it’s against a lower-level opponent, does it pass the look test? Can you tell immediately that the opponent is not very good or if they are “statues”?
Having a very good 2-3 minute highlight video that shows your strengths and does everything that might be expected of your position is very important in the recruiting process. Most coaches will want to see a full game video too. Having a good full game video where you played well, against good competition is good to be able to share with coaches too.
Here is a recording I made talking about why a good highlight video is important for your college soccer recruitment. Take the time to watch it to learn what you need to be doing.
At a minimum, collect video and keep track of games where you played well. Throughout the season, keep a log of timestamps in your game film of clips that you think could be worthy of a highlight video. It’s better to do this as your season goes as opposed to trying to go back and do it after the season. If you wait to do it, it will make the process very time consuming. To learn more about this, watch the video above where I go into further detail.
One thing TSA Recruiting specializes in is making highlight videos that coaches want to see and that will increase your exposure. We can take video from any platform, Veo, HUDL, even your parents cell phone. Watch the video below to see an example of a highlight video we’ve made for a client.
Feel free to reach out if you want help with video, have questions or want to find out more about how TSA Recruiting can help your college soccer recruiting.