Creating a College Recruiting Tape

Provided by Active Team Sports and Coach Brian Whitney
For Active.com

Need to send a tape to show off your skills? Since every player is unique in their strengths and weaknesses, tapes should be done slightly differently to highlight your positive attributes. Heres a breakdown of things that should be on a tape and also things I liked seeing on tapes.

The basics

Make sure to introduce the player in the video. Give the player's name, age and grade. Remember that colleges also want a student, so include information about GPA, SAT scores, intended major and scholastic goals. Show that the player is well-rounded by including any extra-curricular activities they participated in and any other positive elements that make the player special.

Also, to be sure prospective coaches know who the player is on the court, make sure to include a jersey number. I always have my players wear their club jersey in the video since that is normally where the coach will go to see them play in person.

Overhead Passing

With Overhead passing, I show all the different movements where a player would use this skill. Movement forward, backward, and laterally.

Forearm passing

As with Overhead passing, I show the same movements with Forearm passing. In addition, you should show serve receive skills in there as well. The one thing I look for from a good passer is how well they maintain a flatform always facing their target and how well they adjust to high balls and balls outside their body.

Defense

Hit medium-speed balls so the coach gets an idea on how the player prepares for and takes a driven ball. I usually do this from position two (coach) to position four (digger). Add some movement before the dig to show how the player reads and prepares.

Floorwork

Unless the player is weak with floorwork, I find it crucial to know how comfortable a player is with diving and rolling. Show enough of this to give the coach the confidence that the player can fit into their program right away with this skill.

Hitting

Show hits off a toss to give consistency and repetition for the coach. Add in a setter and show how the hitter adjusts sets. With middles, be sure to show the variety of sets the hitter already understands.

Tell your players to hit the ball hard and don't focus so much of your attention on where the ball goes, but rather more on the technique and aggressiveness the player puts into their approach and swing.

Blocking

Blocking is a tough skill to replicate. I tend to focus on block movement more so than actually blocking the ball. That is up to you though. Make sure to cover sidestep footwork as well as crossover footwork while closing the block.

As a coach, the only other main thing I like to see is if the player penetrates the net properly and without swinging into penetration. It is extremely rare to see a polished blocker at the high school level and I always assumed I was starting from scratch with most of my new players. What I can see in regards to blocking from watching a player, I prefer to see in person.

Serving

Only show a few serves. Serving is probably the easiest thing to coach and most coaches don't waste their time studying a player's serve technique. Showing how they can hit each zone ten times is really too much. I don't even pan the camera to where the serve goes and keep it on the player the entire time. Some coaches might care about whether or not the ball floats when the players serves but it is tough to tell that on tape, anyway.

Anything else

Any other skills you'd like to show. If a player is a setter, then you should focus 5+ minutes on presenting their skills here as they are different than just showing overhead passing.

Notes about game footage

1. Showcase a player's strengths. Do not spend too much time on floorwork if the player is weak in that area. If they are a strong hitter, spend more time there. A player's strengths are what gets them noticed.
2. The order above is only a template, not concrete. Feel free to move things around. Some people prefer to impress right away and put the strongest skill first. It is a fact that many coaches will quickly resort to the fast-forward button as soon as they get bored. So keep their attention!
3. Consider a brief highlight intro. Taking clips of great plays sequenced in a 30 second intro is a great way to get attention. Many coaches will turn off a tape after the first few minutes once they know if a player is not a fit.
4. If you have footage of great blocks, spikes, or hustle plays, this is a great place to put them. I always liked recruiting kids that knew how to win, so I loved seeing players make championship-winning plays resulting in celebrations.
5. If your player has any footage of winning a championship, put that in. That always got my interest. A college-coaching friend of mine says that if he sees great highlights of an exciting, big game, he'll break out the popcorn!
6. Make sure your game footage is good quality. Most coaches I know dread this portion if it is not well done. Having to strain to find the relevant player or dealing with bad camerawork will induce the finger on the "stop" and then "eject" button syndrome for coaches. If the camera is too focused in on one player and not at least half of the court, it is difficult to see how the player is really responding to the game situations.
7. With game footage, add 2-3 short games only. If a coach wants more, they will ask or you can offer to send more. Also: this might save you on tape costs.
8. Do your best to link your footage. One more difficult way to edit a tape is to show the skills listed above by including game clips showing the skills being executed. This will give you a headache but this form of tape can be quite impressive!

Good luck in your pursuit of the right college!