Hello all,
I work for a company that helps place international athletes (but mainly British) at programs in the US. We deal with a large range of colleges, from JUCO to NCAA DI. We currently promote athletes using the tried and tested emailing the coach route, however we are looking to streamline the process, with over 60 clients for 2018 enrolment. They are mainly soccer players, with 10 golfers.
Would paying for a service such as berecruited.com be a worthwhile purchase or should we continue contacting coaches directly? Has anyone got any other ideas? Ways they were recruited?
Thank in advance.
My son used berecruited.com only because he received a free membership thru his team. It was a nice place to be able to set up a profile, video clips of his play, etc., so that he could refer coaches who expressed an interest in him to his page. If it had not been free, we would not have used it. He mostly got interest from random coaches that were at schoosl that did not fit his interests- usually very small schools that were trying to build teams. He had much better luck with a direct contact approach. Most of his exposure came from large tournaments where there were a lot of coaches attending. He made a list of schools he was interested in (his priority was the academics) and then contacted those coaches to invite them to tournaments. He was pretty relentless in his contacts; contacted them before the tournament to invite them, after to gauge interest, and in between to remind them he was looking. I don’t really think berecruited.com is worth the money, especially for as many memberships as you are talking about. I’m not sure how international players get recruited. My son’s team played against Wingate last year and we noticed that all but 5 or 6 of the players were international-I’d be interested in knowing how they were recruited. I know that sometimes a coach might have a connection to a European team or is from another country and maintains ties with teams there.
I think coaches develop a pipeline after a few years and look to that as a source for new players. My daughter’s coach happened to sign two from the same club team (my D and another), and the next year got another, and the next year got two more. The college coach trusted recommendations from the club coach, and the club coach knew the players would be treated fairly. People I know who are high school or club coaches send their kids to their old colleges, to friends who are now coaches or assts at other schools, to friends of friends. Kids playing in college are encouraged to have their friends from school who are a year or two younger to apply.
Concentrate on a region or conference and get to know those coaches. For golf, maybe pick the SE (Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas) or the SW (Texas, Ariz, NM). Make your world smaller.
Thank you for your replies.
Takeitallin - The problem we have with that route is that of course, internationals can’t be seen at tournaments by coaches (or not very regularly/in person). We have placed 100s of athletes by directly contacting coaches, so I imagine, they would have been placed in the same way that we do it.
Twoinanddone - We have a good network of coaches already, we all went to College in the US on scholarships, so we exploit those connections too. We have been doing this for 5 years now, and have a good reputation with Coaches, but we were just looking to streamline the process. Sometimes we place a number of clients at the same school, however it doesn’t happen as much as it does for domestic students. I imagine this is because it is always more of a risk to take on an international. They haven’t seen them play in person, the style is very different over here than in the US, and it is much harder to see how they will match up standard-wise than if they were at a High School in the US.
Well, if that’s true then how would paying for a service help? The service is not going to get them ‘seen’ more but seems it only provides a place to gather all their information and videos. At @takeitallin said, the athlete still has to direct the coaches to the service. Coaches want it to be easy, for it all to be dumped in their laps.
My daughter attends a school with a very high number of international students, many who are athletes. There are no internationals on her team so I don’t know how the others are recruited but assume it is just the same as domestic students, that the students send in videos, get referrals, send in the stats. Our coaches do not have recruiting budgets to travel much. D’s coach goes to a few tournaments but that’s about it.
Are you targeting the right schools? Son plays soccer in the Sunshine State League (D2) which has many teams that are dominated by international players. The coach does make one recruiting trip abroad each year, but a lot is done by word of mouth. A number of the coaches or assistant coaches are international as well. The problem is the best international players don’t stick around. Two English players and one Swedish player transferred to D1 schools this year. They all have agents working behind the scenes to facilitate the transfers and get them the most money.
Daughter and son had access (free) to recruiting sites through their club teams. As @takeitallin posts, the contacts we got were not from schools my kids had any interest it. We had much better success targeting camps where we knew which schools/coaches would be attending and contacting the coaches ahead of time with academic and athletic info plus a link to a YouTube page with practice and game film. Since your clients are already paying you to help them get through the process, I just don’t see the value of adding for the most part a very mechanical service.
My kids did not play soccer, but if soccer is anything like softball and baseball, we found we got much more bang for the buck in terms of direct coach interaction at the camps rather than their club tournaments. While sending your clients to tournaments on the off chance that a coach of a school that they want to go will see them there is not practical for your clients, perhaps making 1 trip to 1 well attended camp is. As to golf, our friends who went that route pretty much had their kids play in the state and AGJA tournament tours in the summer. There does seem to be quite a few international golfers on a lot of programs, so there must be some well trod paths there.
@twoinanddone - I didn’t know if this is something that Coaches frequent very often, whether they search for players on there, or athletes use it to create a profile that they can then send to coaches. We do it the same way currently, but when you have to do this with 100+ athletes, it can become very time consuming. It was just a question of would this streamline the process or not - clearly not.
@Tyberius - We do a lot of research on schools before we promote, just to make sure they schools are right. We place maybe 50% of our clients at Leagues and Conferences such as the Sunshine State League - most of our clients are good D2 players. We facilitated transfers of 17 previous clients from either D2 or NAIA level last year.
@BKSquared - Camps are complicated for us, as you said, generally they are not practical. We do however have a trip planned with 15 of our soccer players later this year, with a good number of coaches coming to see us play. We are doing exactly what domestic students seem to be doing - which I think is a good thing. Golf is much easier as a process, as athletes have a proven track record that is tangible, rather than someones opinion if they are a good player or not - such as soccer. We can send tournament scores along with a CSS and Slope Rating, which coaches seem to have very positive reactions to.
Just as a general note, we have always managed to place our clients, with no problem. This was just an enquiry as to the effectiveness of recruiting websites, as we didn’t know the process that domestic students go through. We wondered if we could create a number of profiles on there, which coaches would come across and enquire about, but now we know that’s not the case, thank you all for your replies!
I checked the men’s soccer team at my daughter’s (D2, Sunshine State Conference); 19 players are international and the 6 US players are all local (local as in within 15 miles of the school). I don’t think the coaches are spending 5 minutes on recruiting sites.