By Casey Burdsall
Alert: Do not read this if you have 40 or more field hockey college coaches filling up the bleachers at your home games, because this article will not apply to you. However, if that is not the case, read on, because ultimately, you need a large number of college coaches to see what you can do on the field. As you may have guessed by now, the best way to go about that is to create a highlight video.
A highlight video is different from full game film. College coaches do not have an abundance of two things and one is time. College coaches cannot sift through an entire game to evaluate your ability in eight plays. Those eight plays should be shortened into a three to five minute highlight video, which hopefully, can create more interest in you as a student-athlete in the eyes of that particular coach.
For field hockey players, video is crucial for many reasons, and the first of those has to do with the other thing colleges coaches do not have an endless amount of, and that’s money. Consider the money that would be involved in traveling from high school to high school, evaluating athletes that a coach is interested in. Unfortunately, field hockey coaches are not allotted as much money as they would like or need in order to see every talented athlete in the country, or even in their state for that matter. Colleges are given a fixed recruiting budget that they divide among the different sports at their school. Once the top two revenue-producing sports—football and men’s basketball—get their share of of the budget, the remainder must be split among approximately six other men’s sports and seven women’s sports. That boils down to a minimal amount to the head field hockey coach. Some field hockey coaches only have about $500 a year to use towards recruiting!
Without video, all a college coach could base your skill on is any field hockey awards you’ve received, along with statistics. Herein lays the next problem. Besides goals scored and assists, what statistics can you really pass along to a college coach that would allow her to accurately know how you would perform on her team? What if you are a midfielder who only has a handful of assists a season, or a talented defender who doesn’t have any number besides games played and started to account for the fact that you were actually on the field for an hour?
College coaches must see you play, and based on their limited budget and minimal time, sending them video is of utmost importance in field hockey recruiting.
