Recruiting 101 — Highlight Film

January 6, 2019

A recruitment video is the most important marketing tool to promote yourself to college coaches/recruiters.

Since most coaches and recruiters don’t have the time to travel throughout the country and visually evaluate recruits in person, a highlight film will often be used for evaluation purposes. Evaluators will only need to take a few minutes to determine whether you have obtained the skills worthy of further consideration or not. This gives well-trained recruits an excellent opportunity to introduce their skill sets.

How to Create an Engaging Video

There are multiple important steps in the process of publishing a high-quality recruitment video:

Length of Video

College coaches and recruiters don’t have the time to review all your plays, so make sure to only include your top-tier plays which demonstrates all of your talents and a variety of throws (ideally 15-25 plays). With this in mind, recruitment videos should be 3 to 5 minutes tops.

Choosing What to Include

When coaches are looking for prospects, they will be looking for some combination of our 9 Skill Steps Evaluation Criteria: Accuracy, Arm Strength, Release, Throw on Run, Footwork, Poise, Pocket Presence, Decision Making, and Touch. Try to catch the viewer’s interest by including your best plays first, followed by plays that exhibit the 9 attributes listed. The most important abilities to demonstrate are throwing mechanics and poise under pressure.

If you’re a Pro Style QB, show off your ability to make plays within the pocket, 3 & 5 Step drops, and precision passing. If you’re a Dual Threat, mix up the running and passing plays and make it well balanced (not 80% run 20% pass, 50/50).

Editing the Video

Try to avoid any special effects, especially slow motion and freeze frames. Make it short and sweet; If you’ve got talent, it’ll show.

Don’t be too concerned about the music: when I evaluate films, I put the videos on mute.

Posting the Video

You should then link your HUDL film onto social media posts as well as your profile page on QB Hit List and other recruiting platforms.

Make sure to always include updated highlight video links on your QB Hit List profile page. Our platform gives college coaches the ability to use one resource for all of their QB needs, they can search our profile database by filtering state, class, or style which takes them directly to a player’s profile for review of their highlight film. As a Premium member on QB Hit List, your game film/season film is continuously posted to our follower via Twitter.

Also, make sure to have your highlight videos posted on your twitter profile and your most updated film as your pinned tweet (very important). When I’m viewing twitter accounts without pinned highlight film, the extra step of having to search for the player via HUDL to review film can be rather tedious.