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Marketing can take the form of connections or self promotion. Also, starting early in the recruiting process is important. Send the coach regular e-mails, game schedules and tourney dates. Even though they cannot reply until a certain date, you stay on their radar and they can see you play.

I suggest taking the spring of your junior year and compliling a highlight DVD and soccer resume'. Send this out to coaches and include any summer plans for camp, Regionals, ODP and other soccer activities. Follow up with an e-mail shortly after.

Some of the biggest clubs in the nation have full time staff who handle the production of these things; however, you still have to tell them what you want on the tape and what to put on the resume'. You may even need to supply your own game footage for the DVD. In addition, at showcase tourneys clubs sometimes submit brief descriptions of a player's accomplishments to put in the tournament guide. However, a coach is probably not going to go to a tournament without a plan of action. They know who they want to see and when those players play.

Coaches either know those players through connections(Coach A tells Coach B that a cedrtain player may be able to help Coach B's program) or because the player contacted the coach and showed interest in the program AND the coach believes the player has the skill to help the program.

Of course, if the objective is to get scholarship dollars to help pay for college, athletes of all sports would quit and concentrate on their grades, cause the amount of academic $$$ awarded is 100's, if not 1,000's of times greater than $$$ awarded for sports. <.......as he ducks the incoming missiles.......>

Soccer Watcher === "NAIL ON THE HEAD"

BUT, if you enjoy soccer and want to make it a part of your college experience, then all the other posts are accurate too!

My point was that JUST because you play for a top club team that gets a lot of exposure, you are not automatically going to be recruited by every big time D.1 school.

Even if you have the skills to play at Clemson (for instance), you still have to market yourself so that the coach knows who you are and is made aware of your skills, AND you have to have the grades to qualify. You cannot be a top level player and have a 2.0 gpa and a 1000 on the SAT and expect to be recruited to a big time school.

That is why i added academics as part of the whole recruiting process.

From what I have heard, college coaches DEFINITELY want not only outstanding players, but also outstanding students.

If your child has excellent grades, coaches can often help locate academic scholarship monies to supplement what they might be able to offer from their limited athletic scholarship funds. Also, the better the student, less likely is that student going to be a problem (grade-wise) for the coach.

I wasn't trying to hijack the thread, I was just feeling a little frisky after the Panthers put a major whupping on the NY Midgets.

Thanks to everyone who responded so far on this thread. I asked the questions I did because I've been working through some data and I'm trying to make sense of it. I took the 40 women from SC currently playing for SC D1 schools and analyzed it from a club perspective (note: I used D1 only to keep the data collection task simpler; I hope later to do this at D2 as well.) I counted the challenge and premier teams from the fall of 2005 so I could get a rough "prediction" of how many girls might be playing D1. Then I took the actual results and looked at the deviation.

First I looked at the upper, mid, and lower state in terms of clubs where these girls played. The upper state fell into line with prediction; the lower state was much higher than the prediction; and the midstate was much lower than prediction.



Next I broke this down specifically into clubs. Here are the results:



CUSC, CESA, Northside, and MPSC led with a positive deviation, i.e., there were more girls playing D1 than you'd expect given the number of teams fielded. Coastal put the number of players onto D1 teams that you'd expect.

The remaining clubs showed increasingly more negative deviations; the bottom of the pack was LCSC and Bridge (in this case think JIYSC/SSC) with multiple teams and no D1 players.

My guess -- and it's only a guess -- is that the men's side would not show such wide deviations.

So, if you assume everything else constant (e.g., academics, self-promotion, etc.) what you're finding is that there is a tremendous difference in clubs (on the women's side at least) in terms of playing D1.

This makes sense with what has been said earlier on this thread -- during this time, CUSC, CESA, and MPSC had some superb teams that were regionally competitive (i.e., Fusion, Premier 18G, Ice, respectively).

[Update: Version 2 of charts; moved one girl from DSC to Northside and cleaned up a few relatively minor math errors; all trends stayed the same. Only 34 girls were used in this analysis; 4 were unidentified by club and 2 played for clubs no longer sponsoring girls teams.]

Chico - super research and statistics! Really appreciate your contributions to the board.

Chico,

40 South Carolina women playing on 11 South Carolina D1 womens soccer teams. On average, each of these teams will "sign" less than one SC player per year.

Of all the U-18 girls (high school seniors) playing soccer this spring in the Palmetto State, on average, only 10 of them will end up on South Carolina D1 rosters in the fall.

going a little further with the hs/club difference.... while attending soccer camps at Clemson and other colleges, they all had a college meeting to ask question about recruiting and so forth. when asked which did they see as "more important", high school or club soccer, the coaches all replied with club. this makes sense seeing how high school is defined by school lines and zoning, and club is not (even if it means driving hours to practice). then this issue gets into the tangle of financial problems with club being the MUCH higher cost of play, and kids whose families just do not have the sources to pay for it. however i have never heard of anyone being recruited soley on high school play. from my experience, it's almost always been based on club play. one of the girls on my club team was actually "recruited" the very minute after our team won state.