Discover College Soccer October Update

On today’s episode, I talk about what’s new at Discover College Soccer, along with the latest on the NCAA settlement update.

Matt: [00:00:00] Hi, everybody. Welcome to discover college soccer today. You’re just getting me. Sorry. Uh, it’s been a nutty last week, week and a half, uh, as hurricane Milton. Bared down right here on Bradenton, Florida. Um, unfortunately, because of the hurricane, I had to cancel a couple scheduled interviews that, uh, I would have put up for probably Thursday and today, but, uh, hopefully we’ll get back on track with, with regularly scheduled interviews.

Uh, dropping this Thursday, uh, but today, since it is Tuesday and I figured I wanted to give you guys something, I just, uh, do a little hodgepodge, little, just me talking, sharing a few things and, and hopefully you’ll find that interesting and helpful as well. So, um, a couple of things, if you don’t follow me on some of the social media platforms, I highly suggest you do, um, on Twitter, Instagram.

And tick tock, I am at discover underscore C. S. and I usually post some separate clips. There’s some links to other information. I’m probably most active on Twitter and there are a few other people that I do a lot of reposting of their stuff because they’ve got a lot of great information. Um, there’s some.

Some wonderful accounts out there doing a lot of work, uh, maybe similar to different than what I do, but, uh, really good people to follow. So definitely, at least at a minimum, [00:01:30] go check out, uh, discover underscore CS on Twitter. Uh, just look through the feed, you’ll see some great info there. Give me a follow if you’re on Twitter.

Um, One of the things I just posted recently, well, I’ll give you 2 things 1 in case you didn’t see it. I, I’ve now done this twice. So we’ll call it the 2nd annual college coach survey that I sent out in the summer. I send it out to every coach to try to get as many of them to fill out. But it’s just a survey around things like, you know, how many kids what’s their average roster size?

How many kids do they usually travel? How many kids they usually play? Uh, what about financial aid and scholarship money? Um, how many people? Do they start recruiting and then whittle down, uh, into a final class, just a lot of different stuff. Uh, and I posted those results, uh, on my website. And if, if you haven’t been to it again, I suggest visiting, uh, discover.

College soccer dot com, um, and if you go under the resources tab, um, if you’re on YouTube, you’re going to see my screen here. Um, if you go into the resources, uh, tab on the, on the top there. Click on resources, you’re going to see a lot of different resources. Oh, it looks like I got to find, uh, looks like my maps have broken.

I’m going to have to fix that. Um, but you’ll see here under other items. Uh, it’s the, the 2024 college coach survey [00:03:00] results. It’s just a PDF and actually, I compare the data from 23 to 24. so you can see if things have changed. I think we had about 120, 125 coaches respond to the survey. So some pretty good information, men’s, women’s, all divisions.

Uh, it’s good to see there. Um, couple of the things here on the resources tab that if you haven’t seen, this is all free available to anybody who goes to the website. Check it out. Um, 1 of the things I like to share is the sample coach email template. A lot of folks say, man, I’m sending emails to college coaches.

I don’t know what to write. Um, this is a good generic template. Uh, it’s been looked at by a dozen different college coaches who, who, You know, marked it up, gave it there, you know, gave it their thumbs up approval. Uh, once we got it all said and done. So definitely check it out. Um, I had pulled coaches about highlight video do’s and don’ts.

Uh, so there’s a good list there. We have some checklists of things, you know, you can do each year, uh, to, to make sure you’re on, on top of it. Now those are generalized men’s and women’s together. Uh, I think most of, you know, You folks, if you’ve heard this podcast at all, you know, women get recruited earlier than men.

So maybe those are a little off, but, but it’s a good kind of overview to look at. Um, and then you got links to the different guides, uh, Massey ratings and things like that. I don’t know why these aren’t working this first time I’ve seen they’re not working, but, um, the. I do have [00:04:30] maps of, of all of the men’s and women’s programs.

I’ll check that out. I’m sure it’ll be working by the time this gets posted. Um, but one of the new things I just added, if you go into resources and you see, find your right fit, uh, on the website. So it’s discovercollegesoccer. com slash right fit. It it’s a quick, simple, uh, question and answer to help narrow down all the possible schools and programs that are out there so you can choose men’s or women’s, and then there’s criteria.

Um, there’s, um, geography, campus, city, population, what kind of institution meeting, public, private, uh, what division they’re in their enrollment, any religious affiliation cost and you get to. Decide what criteria you want to use, uh, say, I want division 1 and then now I want to make sure the total yearly cost is between 0 and 40, 000, 41, 000, and it’s going to show you all the schools.

That meet that criteria. In a list, and you can even click download, and it’ll download that list of schools. So you have it to work off of as a way to initially initially start building your list of schools based on the right fit for you based on those criteria. I know somebody mentioned. Hey, be great.

If you had majors, unfortunately, that is a massive data set that I don’t have access to every major that every school offers. So I didn’t add that if you are [00:06:00] looking for. Other tools, though, because I do get questions people ask about tools. Uh, I did a, uh, an interview with the folks from sports recruits.

Um, and I really like the sports recruits platform. People often ask, oh, I’m getting calls from N. C. S. A. Do I need N. C. S. A. No, you don’t need N. C. S. A. Um, but they have a free profile platform and you can use their system to message and all that kind of stuff. Although you’ll Consistently get sales calls from NCSA.

If you do that. Um, I do like the sports recruits platform. I, I really do. Uh, and I’ve become more of a power user of it now that I am, uh, the college recruiting liaison for, for my kids soccer club. I, I see the back end of it now. Uh, and I really, really like it. So, um. Thumbs up to sports recruits. They do have the ability for you to filter schools by major.

Um, they have a lot of the same filters that I have available on this website in sports recruits, but they also have the major one and then you can favorite, you can message their platform, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a very handy platform. Uh, so thumbs up to sports recruits. Um, The other question I get a lot of is how to make videos, right?

Uh, we’ve interviewed, I think it’s Stafford productions. Who’s an external, uh, group of former college players who can make videos for you, um, you know, thumbs up to those guys, but if you want to try to do it yourself, um, there’s a lot of [00:07:30] video editing tools that are out there. Um, it’s really what you’re comfortable with.

Um, I. I work on a PC, uh, and I downloaded the CapCut app. So CapCut, C A P C U T, uh, if you ask your kids, they’re familiar with it because they probably have it on their phone, uh, to help them make videos, but they, CapCut has an app for your PC that you can use, um, and I use that For, for helping my daughter with her videos and some other video work that I have to do.

It’s free. It’s fairly easy to use. There’s a lot of good tutorials on YouTube. If you need to learn how to do specific things, um, so if you’re looking for, uh, a free software on a PC to help with videos. I personally, I use CapCut. Um, let’s see other news that has dropped recently is the, you know, the NCAA lawsuit, uh, and all the settlement stuff people’ve talked about roster restrictions and things of that nature, um, looks like that will be moving forward.

Um, so expect division one to have a 28 person roster limit. Uh, the big question now is what schools will opt into the settlement versus opt out of the settlement way too much nuance still left to figure out in that regard. Um, but we’ve already seen schools decommitting 2025 and maybe even [00:09:00] it, it hasn’t necessarily slowed down 2026 recruitment.

For some schools, I will say it has for others. Um, I, I know of 1 mid major who sent an email out saying because of the NCAA legislation, we have pressed pause on our 26 recruiting, um, on the girl side. So, there’s still depends on the school. Some are just. Continuing to press forward. Some are slowing down, it just depends on the school.

Um, and there there’s a handful who didn’t look like they’ve done any 2026, uh, signings. But, but at last, I saw today on Twitter, somebody posted that they’re on the girl side. 208 schools have have announced, or someone has announced a, a 2026. So at a 350 some odds or about 3 40, 3 49, whatever the final count of division one women’s uh, programs is right now.

So. It’s still a good number of 26 recruiting going on, but for this NCAA thing is just messing things up. Um, one of the things that’s come out of that now was announced last week, or I think, sorry, Hurricane Milton, I don’t know what day anything is or happened last week at this point, um, that there will no longer be the National Letter of Intent.

Um, Which probably is good because everybody talks about NIL and the National Letter of Intent is NLI and people, you know, mistype them and you don’t know what people are talking about, but luckily we won’t have to [00:10:30] deal with the NLI acronym anymore. Um, so what does that mean? I think if you’ve seen, uh, or heard anything recently on social media regarding, um, the NLI being, uh, Done away with it means you won’t have that 1 singular signing day that that everybody promotes.

Um, people I say, well, I still sign something. Yes, you will, but it’ll be specific to the school. It’ll be the 8 agreement with the school or whatever else paperwork that the school puts together. Um, that is. Your agreement with the school pertaining to that scholarship and that commitment. Um, and again, from what we understand.

This may only be division one, but I, I think it’s still up in the air. Whether division two will still have their NLI. Uh, I haven’t seen that. So I could be misspeaking. Don’t. Don’t crush me, I haven’t looked into it that much yet on the division 2 side, but you will, you will have an agreement with the school.

But I think the thing that most people are concerned about is that the agreement is. Is only for a short time could be a semester could be just 1 year and then you get to realize, are you resigning that? You got to resign the agreement. So with the transfer portal, uh, the transfer portal is going to be massive, [00:12:00] uh, here next month, uh, as schools are going to have to cut people to get to roster limits.

Um, I think that it’s just going to be the way of life now. Well, you know, you’re on a 1 year deal and coaches may decide that, hey, we’re not going to. We’re not going to give you the scholarship in year two because we found somebody else and you may, you may have to find, find another home. It’s just going to be a little bit.

More chaotic in every, every way, shape and form, um, but we’ll still see what, what the NCAA, you know, the final guidance, the final, how it gets implemented, uh, who ops in and all this stuff is, is still, you know, it’s still coming down the pike. So the next 6 months, it’s going to be very, very interesting to say the least, um, in terms of, will, will programs be cut?

Because of this, um, yeah, you might see that, um, how title 9 affects this is still going to be interesting as well, um, and will schools decide to drop divisions? Uh, you know, we may that may be a possibility for some for some schools. Um, will the N. C. double a allow schools to be [00:13:30] different divisions in different sports?

As of now, they don’t minus a couple of grandfathered, uh, programs like Johns Hopkins is a D3 school, but they’re D1 and lacrosse and from some, some stuff back when there was only 1 division or, or, or certain areas where there is only 1 division. Um, there’s some differences, but but overall, you can’t pick and choose the division of an individual sport.

Um, but will the NCAA change that as part of this? Hard to tell. I just don’t know. Um, so. Continue to keep, uh, keep your eyes and ears peeled as, as more information drops. Um, but the one thing I will say is don’t let it change your approach to the recruiting process. Um, Nat, you know, it’s mid October. Uh, it’s the heart of the conference season for everybody.

Some schools are in the, you know, they’re fighting for, for qualification in their conference tournaments, or they’re on the bubble for the NCAAs, depending on what division we’re talking about and the timelines we’re talking about. So. Things are crazy. Don’t be surprised if you don’t get emails back or calls back from from coaches.

Um, because things are nuts, but you got to be on top of it and and see where these schools are at. And when they’re done, you got to be, you know, be right in front of them, uh, so that they can start. Really, really hopefully start those conversations or continue the conversations, depending on where you’re at, get ready [00:15:00] for, um, the winter showcase season, winter ID camps.

Um, so we’re, we’re discovered. College soccer, um, you know, we have our camps right here on the website. Basically, I email the college coaches every month or 2 and just say, hey, if you have an ID camp, please list it here. Uh, so I leave it to them to to fill out. Um, you know, I’m not. I don’t unfortunately don’t have the bandwidth to be going out and clicking on every school’s website and trying to find their ID camps.

But if they want to post them, um, I let them do that here for free on our website. So you can see who’s having an ID camp coming up, um, which is great.

Start scheduling those ID camps. I think more and more schools seem to be having them in that November, December, January timeframe. Um, but then obviously we’ve got a bunch of big, big tournaments, uh, coming up with, with, um, in those, in those. Months as well. So. Uh, best of luck to everyone hope, uh, everyone’s fall is going well, uh, whether you’re in high school season or still just club season.

Um, best of luck to all the colleges out there as they wrap up their seasons. And hopefully, um, any college coaches out there that are listening. Uh, if you haven’t done an interview or haven’t been on the podcast yet, please make sure to reach out. [00:16:30] Uh, I know it’s hard to do during the season, but if you could spare a half hour.

Uh, we’d love to have you on, um, as we approach episode. Well, I think I have more than 300 episodes, but as I approach school number 300, uh, here on discover college soccer, uh, we’ll be excited to, to reach that milestone. So, uh, appreciate everybody who, who listens, watches, however you consume. Uh, the podcast, uh, again, please visit the website.

Please follow on social media. If you haven’t subscribed on YouTube or Apple podcasts or wherever you get this, please do that. Leave a review, leave a comment, um, share this with folks in your club, uh, share this with coaches. Um, you know, I, I’m just trying to be as helpful as possible to everyone out there, um, and do the best we can.

So good luck and, uh. Be, be ready for, for another new, hopefully, fingers crossed. I have one on the schedule, another new episode dropping, uh, this Thursday. So thank you much, everybody. Take care. Bye bye.