A college soccer recruiting reel is a 3-4 minute video showing your best match moments, front-loaded with your strongest play, captioned with your name, position, jersey number and club. The standard workflow: film 5+ full matches across the season with an AI camera like Trackd, bookmark your moments after each match, trim to 5-10 second clips, order by impact, render under 4 minutes total, and upload to YouTube as unlisted for direct sharing with college coaches.
Step 1 — Film the season
You can't edit a reel from footage you don't have. Film 5 to 10 matches across the season. Use Trackd or any AI camera that records hands-free so you don't have to find a cameraman every weekend. Half-way line, 2.5 to 3 metres high, match preset. /how-to-record-kids-soccer-game has the setup details.
Step 2 — Bookmark within 24 hours
Memory of which moments mattered fades fast. Within 24 hours of each match, scrub through the footage and bookmark your bests. Goals, assists, defensive interventions, completed passes that broke lines, attacking runs, set-piece deliveries. The Trackd app has a timestamp bookmark feature; the iPhone Photos app trim tool works as a fallback.
Step 3 — Trim each bookmark to 5-10 seconds
Each clip should show: a beat of context before, the action itself, a beat after. Don't include the kick-off or the player walk-up unless it's directly relevant. Recruiters know what happened — they just want to see whether you can execute. Tight 5-second clips are usually stronger than 20-second sequences.
Step 4 — Order by impact, not chronology
Don't put your reel in match order. Put it in best-first order. Most coaches watch the first 30 seconds and decide whether to keep watching. Your single strongest moment goes first. Your second strongest goes second. By minute three you've shown enough — anything else is bonus context.
Step 5 — Name card
A 5-second opening card with your name, position, jersey number, club, age and graduation year. Plain text, white on black, large font. Recruiters cross-reference this with the rest of their database. Skip the music, the logo intro, the highlight-reel-style flying text. Coaches want to see soccer, not your editing skills.