Hey, what’s going on everyone? I hope you’re doing really well. Welcome to Tuesday, July 25th. I’m recording this early because no one has reached out to me for questions, which is all right, unless you want an answer to the questions that you have. Then it would not be all right. But what I want to go through today is how you could use chatGPT to navigate your entire recruitment process. I know you’re not allowed to use it for school, but this platform is on a different level when it comes to supporting you in different capacities.
So let’s start from the very beginning. What the hell should I do first? Like, I’m lost. So let’s jump into chatGPT and write a prompt. A prompt is simply inputting what you want to get out of the AI. So typically, when you’re creating a prompt, you want to make sure that you are going about it in a specific way. That is, you want to give it direction, and you also want to let the AI know who they’re speaking to and about, so that they have a generalized understanding of the relevance.
For example, I’m going to write a prompt about where to start throughout the recruitment process. It’s going to look something like this: ‘I’m currently a sophomore in high school, and I want to start the college soccer recruitment process. I have no idea where to begin. Let’s take that off. I want you to create me a comprehensive and in-depth step-by-step guide outlining how I should navigate the college recruitment process for men’s soccer, starting in the 10th grade. Let’s see what that response is.’
Alright, so start by researching colleges with strong men’s soccer programs that match your academic interests and aspirations. Also, consider factors like location, size, division, and coaching staff. Create a list of prospective schools. Great, now if you have a platform like Recruit Tracker, I would go in and create that list of target, reach, and safety schools. Target schools being right on point with your academic and athletic standards, safety schools a little bit below both, and reach slightly above where you believe you are academically and athletically. Remember, there are not a lot of scholarship opportunities on the athletic side, so the better you do academically, the more scholarship money that will be available to you.
Develop soccer skills if you haven’t already. Attend soccer showcases and camps that are attended by college coaches. These events are an opportunity to showcase your talent in front of multiple coaches at different colleges. Great, I would add on there that you should be going to your target, safety, and reach schools’ ID camps. Let the other people find you, and then you could look into those schools.
Create a highlight video. Put together a well-edited highlight video that showcases your best skills. Make sure it’s successful online so you can share that with your college coaches. Good, boom! Let’s get in-depth there. Keep it short, make multiple. Do an introduction, personal statement. Your opening line of your personal statement could be a really good unique value proposition to start. Videotape it up against a green screen or a white wall and practice it multiple times.
You go from there into your highlight video. Keep it short, really sweet. If you’re a forward, scoring goals. If you’re a midfielder, distributing into the final third, winning 50-50 balls, communicating, pointing, and gesturing. Think outside of the box, not what everyone else is showing. Defenders, hard tackling, good timing, good posture, good ball distribution into the forwards, finding the weak side outside midfielders. That might be tucking in or staying wide. Show your diversity in the air. If you’re a keeper, split up game tape but also incorporate very fast training sessions that you’ve done where you can show coaches your hand skills, your footwork, your maneuverability, your agility, your athleticism.
Register with eligibility. Go to the NCAA website and register to get an ID number, which is your eligibility number. Stay organized. Use Recruit Tracker to document everything. Attend college matches. Observe the team’s playing style and interact with the coaching staff. Great! Let’s dig into this. College coaches are going to listen to college coaches or former college coaches or former professional coaches. They’re not going to listen to someone who has not at least coached at that level. Maybe a former player, great, but even a former player, they know that they don’t see players the way that guys who are really in the industry see them every day. So it’s important to have your highest-level coaches reaching out to college coaches.
Consider multiple options. You need to have five to six schools at each level. D2 is a little weird unless you want to play against 25-26 year olds. I’m not sure that it’s necessarily the right path for most players. It is in some circumstances, but make sure that you have multiple options. If you don’t have multiple options at Division III and you have one or two at Division I, you are out of luck. Things are not necessarily going to pan out the way you think they are. So be smart about it.
You’ve got to stay persistent. You’ve got to stay on top of this the entire time. You’ve got to reach out to coaches, let them know where you’re going to be, what you’re doing. You need to be on top of them. There are too many kids out there that fall through the cracks because they’re not proactive. Follow up, follow up, follow up. So you could use chatGPT to just get a general outline. I hope you got a lot out of this. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. Speak to you soon!
