Sunday, March 14, 2010
Football highlight videos have quickly become a must-have for any aspiring college football player. They have become a very effective tool for college recruits and scouts across the nation. It isn’t likely you will receive a scholarship from your highlight video. But, highlight videos are a quick way for scouts and recruits to assess your skills and determine if they want to see more. It is important to make a great first impression and a professional highlight video is the perfect tool for first impressions. Smaller colleges and universities simply don’t have the budget to fly around the country seeing all the prospective athletes and need a quick way to identify which athletes warrant further investigation. There are a number of components to a highlight video that scouts, recruits and coaches want to see, they are discussed further below.
A highlight video is a critical part of the recruiting process. It is true, that a player will not be evaluated entirely on a highlight video but instead will be further pursued if the highlight video impresses the coach, recruit and/or scout. A highlight video should contain the best-of-the-best highlights of your career. 10 – 50 plays are more than enough to showcase your talent and should be no more than a few minutes long. Again, the use of the highlight video is to entice the observer to pursue you and/or convince them that you are a potential recruit for their organization.
It is critical that the highest quality video is used to create your highlight video. The majority of the time your school’s copies of your games are far superior to a video recorded by a parent of family member. The team’s game film is typically at the best angle to the field and is professionally done. It is very simple, go to your coach with a stack of DVDs and ask for copies of all of your games. Coaches are usually more than willing to help out.
As we have mentioned, it is very important to have only the highest quality plays on the highlight video. We never want a scout or coach to say, “well if that is the best he has, he doesn’t have anything to offer us.” At Dominant Recruit we can assist in selecting your best plays. We take the time to go through every single game you provide to pick out the best of the best. Naturally, you are going to know when these plays took place and we appreciate the direction to find them, but we still take an in depth look to capture the best highlights.
A quality highlight video makes a very clear first impression, the impression that you are serious about playing at the next level and are motivated to get noticed. This doesn’t mean you need to have Sony produce your video but a professional highlight video speaks volumes. Dominant Recruit creates clean, professional and highly focused videos. We “highlight” you, the player, on every play so that the scout or coach can easily identify where you are on the field. We use a number of special effects but try to keep them at a minimum unless a Premium Video Effects highlight video is specifically asked for. Our feeling is that the special effects are best suited for team highlight videos or personal highlight videos, college/recruit highlight videos should be powerful, clean and intense.
Providing the highlight video on a DVD is great and is often what is requested by a coach or scout. As the internet continues to be a powerful recruiting tool, many colleges and universities have switched to online videos to do their initial assessments. Dominant Recruit provides a customizable Recruit Profile System which allows you to publish your highlight video (and other athletic videos and information) online. You will be able to send a physical DVD or direct them to your online portfolio.
Since you will not be asked to play football at a college or university just from your highlight video, it is important to have full game films available. A number of our packages include full game DVDs in addition to your highlight video to provide the coaches and scouts with the information to assess your skills. Scouts and coaches look for effort, consistency, athletic ability and much more and use full length games to do a full assessment. The full game films are very important and as such it is recommended to always select your best whole games to include in your recruiting package. Although we create football team highlight videos, do not submit them to scouts or coaches.
Although film and a highlight video are critical to the recruiting process, it is important to provide additional information. Every highlight video or online portfolio should contain your name, position, height, weight bench, 40 time and anything else pertinent to the coaches evaluation of your. We give you place to display all of your lifts, speed and test results. We also give you an area to list your credentials (All-State, yardage, records, etc.). That’s not it, we provide you with the ability to provide photos additional videos and letters of recommendation. Our Recruit Profile System is the premier place to highlight your talent and give the scouts and coaches the information they need to make you their next recruit.