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Most kids who want to play college tennis will need to send prospective coaches a DVD that shows off their game. Often, coaches will see the DVD before ever meeting the player face-to-face, so it's important to put your best foot forward when creating your recruiting video.

Over the past year and a half, Fuzzy Yellow Balls has worked extensively to create college recruiting DVDs for the Champions Center, a high-performance juniors program at the Tennis Center at College Park, in College Park, MD. Throughout the process, we have learned that putting together a great college recruitment DVD requires a lot more thought, planning and execution than you might think. The purpose of this article is to take what we have learned and walk you step by step through creating a quality DVD you can send to coaches.

Step 1: Ask Yourself Some Important Questions

Before you pick up a camera and head to the court, you need to sit down with your family, your coach, and a pen & paper. You need to make a realistic assessment of your game. What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? How well do you compete? A thorough evaluation of your current game - the more you know about your strengths and weaknesses - will help in determining what you want to highlight in your recruiting DVD and will show you in your best light.

Step 2: What do all Coaches Want to See from You?

Your video will end up being about 15 minutes long: approximately a one minute introduction, five minutes of strokes/technique, and the remainder match play.

Based on conversations with several college recruiting coaches, we've come up with a framework for shooting our college recruitment DVDs that includes the three fundamental things that coaches want to see from your video: