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How to film a recruiting video that a coach will actually watch.

A phone is fine. What matters is what you shoot and where you stand, and almost nobody gets both right. Pick a position for the exact shot list. Every position player gets a hitting block, because a bat with no glove and a glove with no bat both get passed over.

Seven rules, whatever position he plays

1Film horizontal. Turn the phone sideways. A vertical video shows a coach two feet of sky, two feet of dirt and a sliver of your son, and it is the single most common thing families get wrong.

2Real speed, no slow motion. Coaches want to see it at full speed and will slow it down themselves if they need to. Slow motion reads as hiding something.

3No music, no graphics, no highlight-reel cuts. Overproduced video is a tell that the family is selling rather than showing. Clear and steady beats fancy every time.

4Open with him saying who he is. Full name, graduation year, high school and travel team, looking at the camera. Ten seconds, one take, no script.

5Best thing first. A coach decides in the first few seconds whether to keep watching. Do not build to it.

6Keep it under two minutes. Ninety seconds is better. A coach is deciding whether to keep watching in the first ten, and nothing after the two-minute mark gets seen. A short video that shows six good reps beats a long one that shows thirty, because he only ever watches the first six.

7A link, never an attachment. Upload it unlisted and send the link. An attached video file gets blocked by the college mail server and never arrives.

Add two or three in-game clips, if you have them

The skills work above is what a coach evaluates, because it is clean and repeatable and he can read the mechanics. But a couple of clips of real game action are worth having on the end: they show him competing at game speed against someone actually trying to get him out, which a tee never will.

Two or three clips, and that is genuinely all. A pitcher facing live hitters, a swing in a real at-bat, a play made in the field. Whatever footage already exists is fine. Nobody needs to go film more for this.

Watch it back before you send it. Most families have a season of GameChanger and assume that is their game footage. Open one and ask whether a stranger could pick your son out of it. Usually the batter is the only person in focus and everyone else is a shape, which is fine for a scorebook and no use to a coach. If that is what you have, film the clips above instead and do not worry about game footage at all.

What not to do: do not send an inning, do not send a whole game, and do not lead with game footage. Game clips are the last twenty seconds of the video, not the first. And if a choice has to be made, skills work wins every time. A coach who cannot evaluate the mechanics has nothing to go on but the result, and the result depends on who was pitching that day.

What makes a coach close the tab

Vertical phone video
A two-minute intro before anything happens
A five-minute video. He stopped watching at ninety seconds
A full inning or a whole game, instead of two or three clips
Footage from a fixed field camera. GameChanger and the cameras bolted to a backstop are built to film the game, not your son. The only person reliably in focus is whoever is at bat, and a coach cannot tell which player he is meant to be watching
Music, slow motion, or transitions
Only game clips, with no skills work he can evaluate mechanics from
A file attached to an email instead of a link
A link set to Private instead of Unlisted, so the coach opens it and gets a locked page

Shot it and don’t want to edit it?

Send us the raw clips, skills work and any game footage. We cut it to sixty to ninety seconds with the best thing first, host it unlisted under his own name, and check it opens on a phone for someone who is not signed in. $50.

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Rep counts and camera placements compiled from published showcase and recruiting-service guidelines, including Headfirst Showcase’s recruiting video cheat sheet and NCSA’s baseball recruiting video guide. Different showcases ask for slightly different counts. If he is filming for a specific event, follow that event’s sheet.

Last reviewed September 2026 · outreachrecruiting.com · When can coaches contact you?