Creating soccer highlight videos for college coaches is a painful process.

Not only do athletes have to wade through hours of footage to find their best moments, they also have to figure out how to edit (or hire someone) to bring those moments into a cohesive video that will capture the attention of coaches. And this doesn’t even take into account the stressful process of sharing the videos with coaches. 

But what if you didn’t have to review, cut, and edit the footage yourself? What if you didn’t need to ask your coach or parent to edit your footage? More importantly, what if you didn’t have to pay for a video editor to create a one-time soccer highlight video? 

Trace is a simple solution for the biggest pain points faced by high school athletes during the college recruiting process. Because there are enough things to be stressed about, without needing to learn professional video editing skills to craft a highlight reel.

The Price of Traditional College Soccer Highlight Videos

Whether you’re the one doing the editing, or paying a professional to do it for you, there has never been a truly seamless solution to help players create recruitment reels.

Creating a traditional highlight video for a high school athlete is costly, both financially and in terms of time. Most soccer highlight videos are short in length — 2-5 minutes is ideal for coaches. But the rigorous process of editing, importing, and uploading video is a hours-long headache — and those who have done it likely all agree it’s a process they’d prefer not to repeat.

If you aren’t creating the video yourself, you’re probably paying someone to do it for you. That solution isn’t cheap. First, you have to take into account the filming process: you’re looking at a few hundred dollars per game to have someone filming field-side, and you may only receive raw game footage. Then, you need to get it professionally edited: provided you have every moment timestamped, you might be looking at another $300.

The Problem With Traditional College Soccer Highlight Videos

Price isn’t the only issue to consider. The process described above only takes care of one video (and often only shows highlights from a limited number of games). Next thing you know, you’re somewhere down the line and in need of another video of the same quality.

That’s because the recruiting process is long, and you will likely need to share with coaches on an ongoing basis. The top players make recruiting a conversation with college coaches: the more they see you improving, the better. This means you could end up paying for several highlight videos, rather than finding another solution that you can control and update on your own. 

Benefits of Trace iD for College Soccer Recruiting

That’s where Trace iD comes in. If you are not familiar with Trace iD, the best way to describe it is as a living and breathing playlist for each player. It’s easily shareable to all coaches and individuals with the click of a button. Here are some of the key reasons why players and college coaches around the country prefer using Trace iD: 

• Players can effortlessly add moments to their playlist, or effortlessly replace moments at any time. This gives you the ability to keep your playlist consistently and constantly up-to-date, without worrying about the time needed for filming, editing and organizing your traditional game film.
• Share one URL to your profile. Every time you add a new moment or re-arrange, your Trace iD is updated for college coaches. If you have an amazing game after you send out your Trace iD, you can add those moments and they’ll see it all.
• The goal of Trace iD is to remove the editing process entirely, but there are simple tools available if you want to manually edit a moment. From any moment, you can “zoom out” to see the context of the game surrounding it. That means watching the entire build-up for an amazing team goal, or simply reliving a particularly joyful goal celebration!
• Trace iD+ allows you to create multiple playlists, and with family sharing you can easily manage playlists together. By organizing moments into designated playlists (all under one profile), you can tailor playlists to showcase exactly what you want college coaches to see: goals, assists, best attacking plays or best defensive plays, even playlists made to showcase particular positions where you thrive… the list goes on and on.

But don’t take our word for it. Tanji Sarver used her Trace iD profile to save time, impress college coaches and get recruited to play Division I soccer in college. Read her story and advice here, or go check out her Trace iD profile!

Need another reason to use Trace iD? 

No downloads needed. Due to the fact that all of our game-results and interface are web-based, you don’t need to download any footage on or off your personal devices. If you’ve ever downloaded a video, you know how long it can take to download, and how much space each file takes up on your hard drive (especially if it’s a full game).

Check out this sample Trace iD:

Trace, with its full suite of features, is here to make your life easier. Use Trace iD to simply copy & paste a link to share your moments. And if you want to download a playlist to post to Instagram or Youtube, you can download the full playlist as a single video with one click.

To learn more about the benefits of Trace iD during a complicated college recruitment process, watch this workshop from our Director of Coach and Player Education, Tim Bennett.

Or, if you’re already using Trace to make life easier on the road to collegiate soccer, check out the Top Five Things College Coaches Want to See in Soccer Highlight Videos.