College coaches create individual filtering systems to consolidate the high volume of inquiries they receive from prospective student-athletes into either “active or inactive” recruiting files. Developing an effective and streamlined recruiting highlight video that makes the job of skill evaluation by a college coach an easy one, is a great step in showcasing a prospect successfully.

The highlight video offers college coaches with first impressions of a prospect from an athletic standpoint and it is a great evaluation tool. Typically, a college coach can roughly gauge a recruit within the first 2 minutes of the video…and they need to! Along with the volume of recruiting inquiries college coaches receive, they are being bombarded with hundreds of highlight videos.

Therefore, a good strategy is to present a crisp video that demonstrates your skill as an athlete efficiently and in a streamlined format. Make your video succinct, professional, and yet attention grabbing. Below are suggested guidelines:

• Game highlight video should include a collection of standout play at your position. Offer a well-balanced evaluation on both sides of the ball.
• Avoid editing video to “camouflage mistakes.” Good, bad or indifferent, the highlight video should be accurate, seamless and identify your true skillset as an athlete.
• Provide coaches with video updates that include both “half and complete game footage throughout the regular season and follow-up with a “blow by blow” end of the season highlight video.
• Individual skills video should be roughly 1-2 minutes long and include standout performances at your position.
• DO NOT be afraid to show early season video where you may not be at your best. Each subsequent video will hopefully demonstrate robust progress.
• Your summer video updates should include both tournament play and highlights from prospect showcases. Use these highlight videos as “stimuli for success” when truing to impress the coaches.

When editing highlight video, avoid the “Hollywood bells and whistles” and circumvent any remote distractions. The quality of the video should directly reflect the imprint you want to make with the college coaches you are trying to impress.

When presenting your polished video, keep the format simple and easy to evaluate. The rule of thumb is simple… “the less “clicks” the better.” Avoid sharing large video files as e-mail attachments. Instead, utilize hosting platforms such as YouTube, Google Drive and Snapchat that will present your highlight videos at little or no cost and offer you the opportunity to share online links (1 click) with the college coaches.

Additional Tips:

• Use a personal digital camera or the camera on your smartphone to capture game and/or training video.
• Download the video from your camera to your laptop.
• Edit your highlight video with the video/movie software that is already built into your laptop.
• Identify specific training clips you want to share with the college coaches.
• Notate the exact time of each segment you want to share (i.e. 1:20 - 1:29; 2:10 - 2:22 etc.).
• Copy and paste the identified video clip into a new video file (like copying and pasting content into a Word document).
• Give your new video file a name and upload it to your hosting platform.

Whether you want to combine several highlight video clips, or create a specific game video, dedicate yourself to making the final product clean and seamless. From there, develop an e-mail to the coaches you want to evaluate your video and drop the video link into the body of the e-mail.

High quality and simple to view highlight video will provide college coaches with the opportunity to do both a snapshot or in-depth athletic evaluation and determine where you potentially stand as a prospect. The final product should be crisp, clean, and polished. Provide the coaches with regular video updates and give them every reason to filter your information into the active recruiting file.