We have been contacted by representatives from college athletic recruiting sites (NCSA, etc.). Are these services worthwhile? Do coaches really use them? I like the video prep services and the fact that they post it, but other than that, I’m not sure there is much value. Looking for advice. Thanks!
I personally got much more of a response from personal emails than from NCSA. It wasn’t even close but I didn’t mind putting in the time.
We did it all ourselves. I don’t know what sport you are in, but with a little research I feel like we did everything we needed to, and with good results. I put together a 5-minute hi-lite video. I have absolutely no experience with making videos and was able to do it easily with software that came on my hard drive and some free software I downloaded. I looked at a lot of videos on-line to get ideas. Our son came up with a list of schools to target and put together a resume. He did all of the coach contact both by e-mail and phone. He is now playing his sport at his top choice school. We don’t know anyone from his team who used a recruiting service other than a few who used them to make the video only. I feel like we were able to personalize the search by doing it ourselves.
We did not use a service for my son, but he is a track athlete, so we had the benefit of having a very clear and specific way to measure his performance. It is obviously much harder to show how good your athlete is if they are in a team sport.
We posted a few videos of key track meets to YouTube so coaches could see his technique (he does a jumps event) and sent an email with a link and his academic info and interests to both the event coach and the head coach at targeted schools. He was looking at mainly D1 schools and a handful of DIII. In the case of the D1 school he eventually went to (but then transferred from, which is a whole other story…) the coach found him via results from a larger, national level event and made initial contact through the HS athletic department.
I am a little bit of a control freak so had no issue tracking things for my son. Not using a service worked just fine for us and we never felt a need to pay someone else to do this. Getting lots of exposure to schools he had no interest in attending was not of any value to us.
I don’t think you need to hire someone if you are willing to do a little prep and follow up. My daughter’s sport had 4 ‘showcase’ tournaments and she played 4 games in each which were all available to the coaches to look at for free on a specific website. You could also pay $400 or so to have a highlight video of just your child play and send to coaches but most of us didn’t.
If you are really a top athlete, you probably don’t need it unless you just don’t want to deal with the coaches, but most people like more control, more input. If you are an okay player, great student, and have a few top schools in mind (athletic team and academics), you might want the extra help, but I’d see what the high school and club coaches can do for you first.
His sport is baseball, and he’s really targeting only a few top schools with a priority on academics. We can make a highlights video. Do we email it to coaches? It seems to me that some coaches may like the convenience of watching the videos on a website rather than sorting through emails. I don’t mind spending something to post the video to a common site if it makes it easier for the targeted schools to evaluate, but I’m also not sure that we need the elaborate school matching that they offer. S would not attend a school that is not a good academic match just to play baseball.
@gourmetmom, you don’t have to email a video file to a coach. Put it up on youtube or vimeo and send the coach the link after establishing a dialogue.
IMO, there is no advantage to enlisting a service. Having spoken with a few coaches, one of the common themes you hear is, “I want a kid that is genuinely interested in our school and my program because he knows what we have to offer.”
Gourmet,
It seems like there may be two different questions here: the use of private pay site services and the use of a professional paid video services. I don’t think you need the former, but you definitely should consider the latter depending on the sport and position.
I don’t think coaches troll private sites to recruit, although I do think it can help some to have all tapes in one location that you can refer the coaches to if they ask to see tapes. Some recruiting questionnaires do ask for tape locations. So, I think there is some value. It is up to you how that value equates with the amount you will need to pay for that service. I would not use private services to make an introduction to a college coach at any price.
But, more consideration is needed for the parent-made versus professionally made tapes. Parents are far more apt to make “highlight tapes” rather than skills tapes. In a sport like baseball, parents tend to take game tape and often are reluctant to get inside the “fence.” I have heard stories about coaches complaining “if I get one more tape shot through a chain link fence . . .” So, ask yourself, do you know enough about baseball to know what the coaches are looking for. Will you get out of your seat and onto the field to get unobstructed views? If you don’t, I encourage you to consider a video service (making sure that they know what they are doing). At a minimum, I recommend that you ask a college coach what they are looking for. Is it a skills tape or a highlight tape? What angles are they looking for? How much time should be spent on one skill? How long should the full tape be?
Take for example hitting. I thought it might be helpful to show an athlete’s “eye” or pitch selection during a live game. Wrong. That (apparently) is a complete waste of time. Coaches are interested in mechanics. Therefore, showing your kid hitting two doubles on a full count may be of less interest than watching him take 25 swings in batting practice. Also, the tape has to be taken from a certain angle (depending on whether he hits right or left) to get those mechanics. Some professional services use multiple angles on the same series of hits to get full mechanics.
I have learned that certain sports and indeed certain positions call especially for skills tapes. For example, I have learned that coaches would prefer a “skills tape” rather than live game tape for goalkeepers.
Additionally, you may find that the cost of a professional tape is not that high and that the quicker time factor (it takes a long while to weed through game tapes) justifies the cost for professional video.
In sum, the professional video can be helpful provided the professional knows what he or she is doing. I simply encourage you to look into the options for your son’s position and skills. Ask coaches. You may be surprised by the answers.
@gointhruaphase , good points re the content of the video a coach is interested in seeing. I have a good friend that played D1 baseball (shortstop) and he provided a very basic video of fielding practice. Coach said he appreciated it because it showed his range, arm and athleticism over many reps. More effective than showing one spectacular diving catch during a game.
Which brings up another point, there’s an NCAA bylaw that says a college may only subscribe to a recruiting service that provides video if the video “…is restricted to regularly scheduled (regular season) high school, preparatory school or two year college contests”. So batting practice or any skills video that isn’t from a regularly scheduled high school game is not allowed. As a parent, though, you are free to provide any sort of video that you’d like, since the coach isn’t paying you for the video.
I believe some recruiting companies have managed to get around this by separating the video from the paid subscription service and making it free to watch for anyone. Sort of like Youtube.
^^^good points by the last 2 posters! As far as sending the video, we posted it on YouTube and then our son sent the link whenever he sent an email out. While our video did contain game footage, we made sure to include examples of specific skills. This was soccer though and we were lucky because many of his games had been professionally shot for the team and we were able to use very good footage. Our video also include both an intro and a closer shot with academic stats, some still shots, and coach statements. If you go to YouTube you might be able to find some good examples. If it is a scene of him playing in a game, just be sure it is clear to anyone watching which one is your son. We have seen too many videos where a shot shows 5 kids and you have no idea which one is the target. We actually drew a bubble around our son at the start of each play, and then again if the view changed.
He’s a pitcher. H understands that the video needs to be a skills tape that shows his various pitches, rather than game footage. He’s focusing only on a few schools and not looking for scholarship money. It sounds like the recruiting companies are a better fit for students casting a wide net and looking for the most $$$.
When you send the video, I would suggest the subject line include name, position (RHP or LHP), class year, and video link included. You’ll have a much better chance of getting that email opened. Baseball coaches often receive far more emails from potential players than they want and tend to not spend a lot of time looking through them for the info they need. I would highly recommend the video have documented velocity from a radar gun, it will matter. They tend not to care much about high school accomplishments unless they are truly special, so I wouldn’t recommend bogging them down with a lot of that stuff. Make sure you also include height, weight numbers, they will want to know.
@nhparent9 Great advice - thank you!
As an athlete, I thought that coaches had to approach me or actively recruit me, so I joined a couple recruiting websites. I am currently going through the recruiting process with four schools, but of those, only one came from the recruiting website. Honestly, I don’t believe that the recruiting website really helped me or hurt me… If anything, though, it did help a little bit. A recruiting site is not, however, worth paying for.
After I went through my athletic baby phase, I finally started contacting coaches on my own, and got a much better response. I had the luck of having a former college coach as our program’s aquatic director, and he turned out to be the best recruiting source I could ever have.
From my experience, the best way to contact coaches is to make your own recruitment letter (email, in my case) explaining your interest in the school and in the sports program itself. Coaches want to know that the athlete isn’t just joining the sports program for scholarships or whatnot. In the email, include stats, academic and athletic… I included video of my best races as a link.
So. Worthwhile to join a recruiting website? Maybe. It can’t hurt unless you pay. Just expect a bit of junk mail to come with it.
NCSA seemed a waste of money, but mainly because my son was more worried about academics than sports, and there was a huge push to go anywhere as long as they offered money.
It’s your son or daughter’s drive to play sports in college rather than how much money you spend. My son is content to play club soccer in college, his team travels between colleges but has much less of an impact on his academics.
Free services can’t hurt. And if your child is not in a stat-based sport, take some video on your own and have it available to send to coaches.
NCSA is not worth the time and effort, much less even a penny of your money, in my humble opinion. My son is a basketball player and he just finished his sophomore season. NCSA wanted videos to look at, so that they could rate him. They rated him as just an average high school player. As a result my son will never get any interest from any NCSA search for anything other than a DIII or NAIA or JUCO level school ( actually that’s not quite true, he has had a few DII look at his profile, but they have no interest because NCSA has rated my son so low.)
But the fact is, my son has quite a resume already. In his freshman season he averaged almost 18 ppg and was voted to the SCISA All State team. This past season he averaged almost 28 ppg (in spite of being double-teamed every game) and again made the SCISA All State Team as a sophomore. He came in 3rd place for Player of the Year Award for his region. This spring he will play in the NIKE EYBL D1 circuit for a 17U team (as a sophomore).
But NCSA has never seen him play and in spite of talking to local scouts, coaches and basketball reporters (initiated by us, not NCSA) they still think he is D3 or JUCO material. Don’t waste your money! You can accomplish far more on your own than NCSA will ever do for you. I wasted $950.00 bucks on them and got nothing from them that I couldn’t get for free elsewhere.
We actually had a very good experience with NCSA. We did their lowest level package and found the coach assigned to our daughter to be of significant help. Our daughter is a track athlete so times/distances are more concrete than other sports that are more subjective. NCSA is a tool, but you still have to do the work having your child identify and email colleges that they are interested in. But, we had a significant number of D1 programs email our daughter without our initiative and all responded to emails sent by her. Her coach did several mock telephone calls with her because she was quite nervous to speak to a coach on the phone and this alone was invaluable.
Could we have done all this without the service? Sure. But having all the information in one location with assistance all along the way made it so much easier. We don’t have money to throw around but found NCSA to be an excellent investment for us.
Of the 5 official visits and 2 unofficial visits our daughter accepted (all D1), she got 7 offers and chose the one that was the best fit for her. Good luck to everyone going through the process. It is certainly harrowing!
You are much better off looking for a personal re recruiter that can assist with the specific contacts. Shoot me a pm and I can give you a few. I find the national recruiting is a waste of money and mostly get blocked by the coaching spam filters.
The one thing a good recruiter can do, that you cannot, is call upon personal contacts at the schools. That is worth it’s weight in gold IMHO and worth every penny.
That being said you need to be as realistic as possible regarding the level of play. Once you have that, narrow it down to the schools (or divisions) your interested in and go to town with emails, calls, visits.
Coaching staff is inundated During recruiting season. Start early and get the tape reviewed. Be creative.