During the research my son attended and ID camp at the University of South Carolina in January of his junior high school year. The head coach Mark Berson gave a recruiting talk. My son had attended the Furman University soccer camp for 3 years before and heard many of the same things in their recruiting seminar. There were some interesting differences though. The biggest was in the method of contacting a coach. Furman suggested sending paper letter to the coach. South Carolina said email was fine. Furman said do not use any recruiting web sites. South Carolina said is was OK, but they didn't spend a lot of time on the recruiting web sites.
Based on the suggestions of Coach Berson, I helped my son develop a one page soccer resume. I like this suggestion based on my business and military experience. It showed his club, high school and ODP coach information, his academic information, his accomplishments in soccer at in other areas. We also decided on email as a contact method followed by a recruiting site.
So with these maps in mind my son and I picked 5 Division 1 schools and 4 Division 2 schools. He developed template email and then personalized it to each school based on his research on their academic programs. His selections were based on the degree program offered, the size of the school and how well they did in their conference. So off they went the emails with the soccer resume attached and he waited for replies.
I also suggested he create a web presence. Being a business person I understood how folks use the internet to create contact.... electronic networking.... as opposed to the old physical networking through conversations and phone calls. We first tried to create a web page on my business server. But we finally settled on using a recruiting site, CaptainU. CaptainU has a method to contact coaches. We decided to use this method as a secondary method besides emails just to be redundant for our 9 schools. We also used it for some fringe schools. These were schools that were high in the national soccer rankings and felt like would be a long shot to get into their soccer program and where getting direct email addresses is difficult..