Parents: How to Help Your Student-Athlete Pick the Right College for Them

It feels like it will be the most important decision of your kid’s life: how do you know what is right and what is wrong when trying to pick the right college? This is doubly complicated when evaluating college soccer programs, since you want the school and the soccer program to both be the right fit. Here’s some advice based on our experience playing college soccer and then going pro:

Being an Advisor on Their Options

First things first, while it is tough for an 18 year old to make such an important decision, it still is theirs to make. Our job as parents is to help them think about what the options are and what they should consider. The factors we always encourage soccer players to consider when evaluating college soccer program optionsare:

What’s Your Goal?

Education You’ll Receive?

The Financial Support Offered

Location of the College

How Successful is the Program?

How Much Playing Time Can You Realistically Expect?

Ask your kid to answer each question and rank in order of importance to them. This will enable them to whittle down the number of college programs from the 1,500+ available to a few dozen that check all their boxes.

At the end of the day, no one knows for sure if their path will go as planned – it’s virtually guaranteed that some things will go wrong. To protect their future in the event of misfortune, their top schools should feature academic programs that fit their goals beyond soccer. Does the school have quality professors in their desired major? What are the options for them to switch majors to something else if/when they change their mind? Does the school seem capable of preparing them for the future, whatever that may be?

Other questions to ask your student-athlete:

What Does Their Current Roster Look Like?

 This is a great question to ask your kid – not homework for you to do for them. Have them do their research on the programs they’ve circled and ask them what their current rosters look like. If they are like every other teenager, the first time you ask the answer will be either an honest, ‘I dunno,’ or an evasive ‘It looks good.’

This is a great opportunity to ask follow-up questions. Don’t lecture them about not doing the work, ask them how many players do they have in their positions and when those players are going to graduate.

If your kid’s a High School sophomore and a midfielder and the current midfield corps at the program is full of freshmen, that means they’ll be seniors when your child is a freshman…which means the odds are that they’ll be recruiting midfielders heavily when the time is right. If their team is full of seniors now, they’ll likely be looking to bolster their midfield before your child graduates. 

But the key isn’t to do that research for them, it’s to ask them pertinent questions so they find out the answers.

Do You Like the Coach’s Style?

Again – a great question to ask your kid as a springboard to them doing the correct research.  

You’ll want them to find out what formation the coach prefers – if they like a 3-5-2 but your kid is a winger, ask them if they’re ok moving to wingback. If they are not, it likely isn’t the right program for them. 

Your child can gain additional insights about coaches on social media, where they can see what the culture is like among the team, and the kind of relationships players have with their coach.

The Path to College Soccer Isn’t Always Clear

There are so many factors that go into finding the right fit in a college for a student, and this is even more complicated for a student-athlete.  

At Beyond Goals Mentoring, we know that finding the right college is not easy. That’s why we’re dedicated to guiding young athletes through the various stages of the recruitment process to find the perfect fit. So, if your athlete is interested in college soccer, let’s set up a mentoring session and start building a plan for getting them into the perfect situation.