Are these worth it? I have a Junior looking to play in college..not going pro or anything. Is on ECRL, gets plenty of playing time but not a stand out. Does well academically with some honors classes and honor roll grades but not at the top top of class either. Thinking D1 would be big stretch, but maybe D2 schools possible. Was thinking these apps might help with marketing and exposure. Thoughts to those experienced with this and looking for tips to help in this process.
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IdiotOriginally posted by Guest View Post -
The only colleges using these apps to search for recruits are tiny bottom-of-the-barrel schools. If your kid is in some honors classes, s/he probably has higher ambitions than the type of schools that will be searching for recruits online.Comment
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For a player who is being proactive in their attempt to play in college, it doesn't really matter where they host all their information and highlight videos. If it is all in the same place online and they can send coaches one link to everything, then it doesn't matter if they're using NCSA, SportsRecruits or any of the other 200 platforms out there.
You can publish a Google doc as a webpage with all applicable info with links to highlight videos on a Youtube account for free, for example. And that's just as good as anything else.
These recruting sites all have loads of complete nonsense about having the best exposure, knowing the "secrets" to recruiting and blah blah blah. All nonsense. The only "secret" is the more thought and effort someone puts into the process the more likely they are to end up having a good experience in college.
And yes, from experience of spending way too many hours on NCSA, the only coaches actively searching through hundreds and hundreds of accounts are ones at schools that are difficult to recruit for.Comment
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Agree here. First, we built a profile and had a conversation with one of their experts. Total high-press sales job. Gets on the phone w/ my daughter, and my wife & I. Reads her profile, sees she's 5'9" as a freshman with a very high GPA. Sees she plays for a (at the time) Girls DA team. Tells her "she could play for any school in the country". He never saw her play a single second. It was ridiculous. We never moved forward with them, but the profile remains up. She gets emails occasionally from some random JC or Dort or a notification that a DIII school in Nebraska viewed your profile." Pure comedy. We did find it helpful to track down school sizes and costs and some general information as it was in a single place, but you can still get it elsewhere with some effort.Originally posted by Guest View Post
TGS and some others, if run through your club/league makes it easier for schools when going to events for one-stop shopping. Seems to get some views off of that, but I'm not sure we really saw any value. You can store your videos on YouTube and if you do your legwork, nothing else is needed.Comment
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Similar to my experience. -^
But we can't have a thread like this without mentioning what is important - targeting, and adjusting your targeting during the process as you get feedback / responses / lack of responses.
Also, ID camps, again on a targeted basis.Comment
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NCSA is mostly a scam. They do have good, consolidated info on their site. But like other poster mentioned, you can get it anywhere. It is a nice place to consolidate everything.
Where they really lost us was when they told us that the higher the premium plan we purchased, the higher up in the search results they'd move us for recruiter searches.Comment
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From my experience coaching high school aged players, most kids and families need a single one hour meeting with someone who knows the process and isn't interested in BSing them and can lay out all the ways they will be misguided and give them a road map to make a list, narrow the list and make a choice. That's it, sit down for an hour, listen, ask questions and off you go, own the process, enjoy it and make the choice you feel is right. But no one can make a profit off people's dreams of playing in college that way, so we all to suffer with the loads of BS and wasted money and time that is out there.Comment
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Some clubs offer a College Night, which suffices. Either that, or they also have resources internal to the club which can help. If your club isn't offering that type of activity, they aren't a good resource for college recruiting.Originally posted by Guest View PostComment
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No, they're all scams.Comment
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Agree that NCSA isn't worth the money, but we actually found some value in the "consulting sessions" with the advisor they provided. Our advisor (a former college coach, actually) gave good feedback on D's highlight videos (we made notable changes to what we included and how we ordered the highlights based on their feedback), had a good "mock interview" for D on how to talk with coaches at ID camps, and believe it or not, the advisor did forward D's profile to some specific coaches (D3) who did actually reach out to us as a result. I suppose much of this could have been provided to us by our club coach and DOC, but it was good to get feedback/input from someone who didn't actually know D so would have a fresh take on what impression D was making.Originally posted by Guest View Post
We ended up thinking the website stuff was useless, and that creating a 1 page PDF with all that info was more effective for sending to college coaches than sending them a website link. I guess with a website link, you could see whether or not they looked at it, but it felt like coaches were more inclined to open a PDF file than click on a link (IMHO of course)Comment
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Clubs should provide someone to all their U15+ players as a recruiting advisor. They should allow for each player to have 2-3, 30 minute meetings per year, a yearly club wide college night and one team meeting per year. I worked in what was sold to me as that type of position at one club but all they really wanted me to do was up sell to our inhouse con artist "consultant" and push summer clinics.Comment
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Complete scam. Don’t go near it. It’s hard to believe the college coaches lend their names to this site. Is it for their profitability, trying to make an extra buck? This whole industry is just really shady.Comment
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To the thread OP: most D2 schools are weak academically. If she's a solid student then D3 is probably a better target for academics. Start with a long list of academic schools then look at their soccer rosters, where players came from etc.
If they really want D1 for academics but can't land a spot, a good option is club soccer - they play other schools, travel and the soccer is pretty solid.Comment
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When it comes to these recruiting sites it all depends on the club and league your daughter plays. Coaches will look at players who play for higher rated clubs in higher rated leagues. When my daughter switched clubs and leagues it wasn’t a coincidence that more coaches started to follow my daughter and eventually contacted the coach to discuss. It really matters!Comment
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