College Soccer Scholarships by the Numbers
The recruiting process for college soccer is going to be experiencing significant changes as the elite club teams seek to identify the top recruits as freshman in high school. This means it will be even more critical that you contact coaches on your own. If you are not contacting coaches before they can contact you, or attending camps at schools you are interested in, getting recruited will be almost impossible. Use our graphic below to identify where colleges are and how many scholarships are available at each division level.
When looking for schools that might be the right fit, you should start with a geographic location where you want to go to school. You can tell with our graphic above that “wanting to go anywhere” is not good enough. There are too many programs across the country for you to be able to effectively communicate with each coach.
Once you identify an area where you want to go to school, you can get a sense of how competitive recruiting is in that region by seeing the number of schools in that region versus the number of elite club teams. For example, if you are in the northeast, you will face one of the most competitive recruiting areas in the country.
One of the best ways to get a recruiting advantage in highly competitive regions is to look at the club teams that schools have recruited from in the past. Typically, college coaches have very strong connections with their local club teams and use these teams to scout players. If you want to play for a school that recruits from the same 3-5 club teams, you need to get on one of those teams.
If you are in a region that is less competitive, you are going to need to be prepared to looking at colleges further away from home. If you only have 5-10 colleges within 500 miles of your hometown, you will want to expand your initial search to include at least 25+ programs. If there are not elite club teams in your area, be prepared to create high quality videos and be more proactive on contacting coaches through email and phone.
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