College Recruitment and Sports Scholarships: What You Need To Be Doing Right Now
Thursday, July 16th, 2009Your an athlete about to enter your last year of high school and training is probably set to start sometime in the next few weeks. Playing college sports is an incredible opportunity. As an athlete you are challenged at an entirely different competitive level. As a student, you are automatically enriching your college experience with college sports in a way that most people never have the chance to.
Getting into the college of your choice by levering you athletic skills requires some self-marketing. Yes, there are recruiters, but you may not be on their radar. Yet. There are also thousands of sports scholarships out there to help you pay for college. Here are a few tips for college sports that you can get started on right now, if you haven’t already.
Put together a highlights tape. You should do this after your junior year. Good highlight tapes display your versatility during play and at practice. There’s probably someone at school who’s offered his services in putting these videos together. Whether you outsource or cut and edit the video yourself, you should be integrally involved in its creation. You want the tape to show your most impressive plays but not you doing the exact same thing over and over. Make it compelling to watch. Include stats, or any pertinent and impressive information that you think colleges should know. Show it to your coaches for feedback. He might have some good insight. Post it on your Takkle account and on YouTube. You can’t have too much exposure.
Another reason why you should show this tape to your coach is that he is going to be very important for connecting you with college recruiters. Start talking to your coaches now. Make sure your on good grounds with them. If there are new coaches coming in for this season, make the extra effort to get to know them. Hopefully in the last few years of play you have established a relationship with your coaches so when it comes to asking them for help applying to college and getting scholarships they’ll be more than willing to.
Do scholarship research. Find out when the applications for all the scholarships you may be eligible for are due and put them in your calendar. Once you have your highlight DVD, start preparing packages for the college coaches and for scholarships (if applicable). Having all of these things prepared will allow you to pursue the more important tasks of establishing connections with coaches at different universities.
One last piece of advice: keep your marks up. Off the field is just as important. College coaches and recruiters look for individuals who are well-rounded. Show that you’re good for something other than scoring goals, or whatever it is that you do. You can lose NCAA eligibility if your college marks are no good. Recruiters don’t want to waste space and scholarship funds on someone who won’t even be able to play. Your job is to be amazing. Now you just have to market yourself so that everyone knows you are.
