How To Send Highlight Videos To Colleges?
As a high school athlete who is doing everything possible to be noticed by college coaches, I’m sure you’re curious about how to send your highlight videos to colleges and their coaching staff.
When it comes to sending your highlight videos to college coaches, it is most effective for you to upload it to a streaming service like YouTube before emailing it to various programs. The email you send should be clear and well-written, and include a direct link to a high quality version of your highlight video.
Coaches receive lots of highlight videos every day, so it is important that you follow the correct sending procedure, or else it may be lost underneath other emails and highlight videos they have received. To help ensure that you understand how to send highlight videos to colleges, we’ve included a more detailed explanation below.
Sending Highlight Videos To Colleges
Highlight videos, if well-made, can spark a college coach’s interest. In order to increase the likelihood of them watching your highlight video, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to find.
Uploading Your Highlight Video: Before sending your highlight video to a college coach, you should upload it to a streaming service like YouTube. This makes it much easier to access - both for you and the coaches you plan to send it to. When you upload your highlight video, make sure the video is high quality and relatively well-filmed. While it doesn’t need to resemble a Hollywood movie, coaches should not have struggle to evaluate you using uneven, poor filming.
Proper Etiquette: After you have uploaded your highlight video online, you can begin distributing it to college coaches. You should send them an email with a clear subject indicating that your highlight video is included. In the email, make sure to include a sentence or two about your interest in their program and thank them for taking the time to watch the video you attached.
Highlight Videos: The purpose of highlight videos is to emphasize what makes you a good athlete. Look at your highlight video as an opportunity to show off your talents to coaches without them having to come to one of your games. A quick review of your highlight video can help coaches identify you as an athlete of interest to them.
Skills Videos: Skills videos, on the other hand, give you an opportunity to display your skills outside of a game scenario. This could be a video of you juggling a soccer ball, shooting a free throw, or kicking a field goal. While these are not needed for all sports and positions, they can be useful to highlight a specific skill that coaches care about.
By uploading your highlight video to the internet and then sending a well-formatted email to various colleges and their coaching staff, you increase the likelihood that the coach will take the time to watch your video.
What To Include In Highlight Videos
While it is important that coaches take the time to watch your video, it is even more important that they like what they see when they do. To help, we included some tips about what to include in your highlight video below.
Include The Right Sort Of Highlights: Coaches will be searching for certain types of footage depending on the sport you play. If you play softball or baseball, send in more footage of technical skills. If you play baseball and football, in-game footage is more important. Often, coaches won’t even watch highlight videos if they don’t include the type of footage they are looking for.
Consider The Number Of Highlights: When you send highlight videos to coaches, it’s important that you don’t overwhelm them. You want to show them your impressive moments without giving them too many moments to sort through. It is best to aim for about 20 highlights in your video. This gives you the best chance of making a good impression on coaches while not taking up too much of their time.
Keep It Simple: Coaches are interested in evaluating you as a player - not as a film producer. There is no need to include special effects, audio, or transitions in your video. In fact, these will often distract the coach watching your video.
Unnecessarily lengthy videos, or videos without relevant highlights, are the two largest reasons coaches are not interested in prospect’s highlight videos. By following the tips above, you can ensure that your video will be neither of these things, and increase the likelihood that coaches will be impressed by your video.
Tips For Acquiring Footage
Acquiring enough film to put together a strong highlight video can be a daunting task. We’ve included some tips below to help you ensure that you have great footage to choose from when creating your video.
Start Early: Start collecting footage as early as you can. While you probably don’t want to use footage from your middle-school games, filming early on will be good practice for when the footage really matters. Make it your goal to finish making your highlight video by the end of junior year, but make sure to feature only varsity-level competition. Don’t be afraid to update your video later on with good footage from the first few games of your senior year!
Get Others Involved: A great way to start collecting footage is to ask your club or school coach if they film games. Many coaches film games in order to strategize later, so your coach’s footage might be a great resource to you. Your teammates also might have family members who have taken footage at games. It would also benefit you to invest in a good camera and tripod so that you can film yourself, or hire a video company to record an important game.
Things To Remember While Filming: Your equipment will not be useful to you unless you use it in a smart way. First of all, you’ll want to be sure that you have plenty of footage to choose from, so it is wise to film several games. It’s also important to be strategic when you’re choosing a place to film from. Pick a spot that not only gives coaches a clear view of the action of the game, but also a clear view of your action. Lastly, make sure that the sound quality turns out well. If the person filming your game is cheering loudly in the background, consider including no audio in your highlight film. Coaches will appreciate no sound over distracting audio as they view your highlight film..
You can’t make the best possible highlight video without great film. It is important that you film all your high-level games to give yourself the strongest set of highlights to choose from- this is something your support network can help you accomplish.
Things To Keep In Mind
Keep It Short: Highlight videos should be roughly 3-5 minutes long. College coaches receive lots of these videos, so you want to make sure that you don’t take up too much of their time.
Don’t Worry About Music: Music may make your highlight video more aesthetically pleasing. However, it is not something that matters to coaches. They are very busy people and often watch your video while doing other tasks.
Start Off Strong: Coaches often stop watching prospect’s highlight videos after 20-30 seconds if nothing caught their attention. For this reason, you should begin your video with your strongest highlights.
Vary The Skills You Show: Coaches don’t want to see you perform the same skill or action over and over again. Including varying types of highlights in your video will increase the chances of coaches being impressed by you.
Follow-Up: After you send in your highlight video, it’s important to keep communicating with coaches. It’s a good idea to follow-up with coaches a couple of days after you send them your video to build and maintain the relationship. When you follow up, be ready to resend your video.