Today I finished sending film of a Tiffin University player to the France professional teams that I had previously found. After this, I then wanted to find a different country that would be a good fit for him. I knew Greece had a decent number of teams so I decided to start there. I did some research through eurobasket.com to find as many direct contacts for their teams. Like the countries before, this was quite difficult to find as eurobasket.com sometimes doesn’t have the information or their team website doesn’t have it as well. But after sifting through a couple of their leagues, I was able to find a handful of direct contacts. I then decided to look at Germany as I knew a lot of college players will go there and I was able to find some contacts for some teams there after searching through a couple of their leagues. I let the player know that if anyone reaches out to me at any point in time that I would let them know in a heartbeat. This assignment has really opened my eyes to what sports agents do in trying to help their clients accomplish their dreams and goals. This was truthfully a lot of fun and I felt as if I had a purpose and was really helping this player out. That has been my goal ever since going to college to help student athletes in whatever way I possibly can and if that means sending out a bunch of emails then I love doing it.
0 Comments
Today I finished up all of the France professional teams that I found in a previous assignment. I made sure to attach Darryl to all of the emails so if we get a response, he can be the point of contact. I also reached out to Darryl about one of the graduating seniors from Tiffin who used all of his years of college eligibility and is now looking to play professional basketball. I sent Darryl his highlight tape from his time here at Tiffin and he told me to go ahead and send out his information on my own to see if I can help him get in contact with coaches. I think this experience will really give me an idea of what Darryl does on a day-to-day basis and lets me feel like I am an agent myself. I started by using the same format that I did with the other emails and just replaced the name and the stats and other accolades for this Tiffin player. I then downloaded the film that the player has sent me and started emailing teams that I already have contacts for. After I finished Italy I then started over to my France contacts that I have. This player mentioned to me that he is not picky about where to play so I thought it would be a good idea tomorrow to look at some other countries with teams and send them out there as well. I made sure to sound professional in my email but also keep it short and to the point so I am not wasting the coaches time. Tomorrow I am going to finish the France professional teams and then look at some other countries as well.
Today I finished up sending for the teams that I found in Italy. For the coaches that I did not have a direct contact with via email, there were some that I found and Instagram for. I decided to send a direct message to the coaches that I could find in order to make sure this player has as much exposure as possible. If I were to get any responses from anyone I reached out to via Instagram, I will make sure to let Darryl know. I also decided to check some of these teams’ websites again in order to find some more direct contacts. I got back on to eurobasket.com and went to some of the lower league teams and once again looked for direct contacts. I was unfortunately unable to find anymore. After completing my section of Italy coaches, I got started on completing my coaches that I have from my list of France teams where I have much more. Tomorrow I will finish this up and will let Darryl know if I get any responses. I have found this assignment to be a lot of fun as it makes me feel like as if I am an agent and with my time at Tiffin coming to a close, this could be a route that I may look into more to see if I would like to pursue a career in this. Darryl told me that there are plenty of agencies out there looking for people to help their clients so this intrigues me as a career option.
Today Darryl emailed me back and said that he thought my highlight tape was great and that I can now start sending it to the coaches direct contact that I found in my previous assignments. I first needed to think how I was going to format my email. As a college coach, I have gotten a thousand emails from high school recruits and college transfers explaining how they would be a great fit for our program at Tiffin University. I found it to be a good idea to go through my emails and to look through all of those to find take certain things from those emails and construct it into my own for this player. I started by sifting through my email. For the most part every subject had the players name, which is something I will need to do in order to distinguish the different between my name popping up from sending the email and for this player that I am sending the emails for. I also noticed that in a lot of the emails that in the subject, the sender will put their height and their position. I also think this is a great idea so then the coaches can get an idea of what they are getting before watching the video. I then decided to search NCSA as this is a recruiting site that I have gotten a lot of emails from in the past that sends out emails to college coaches for players that subscribe to their services. This will get me a good idea for how to promote a player in the email. Much to the same, they had similar subjects with the players name, height, position, and some stats so I know I will be using that for sure. In the body of the email they also stated some of their stats and personal information which I plan on doing as well along with the players accolades. I then decided to put this all in a word document so I can copy and paste it to each of the coaches that I am sending it to. I then decided to send out my first email to a team in France. I made sure to include Darryl in all of these emails in case we were to get a response. The worst part about this email is that it takes 15 minutes for the video to upload to the email before being able to send it.
Today I needed to put this video together on Canva to send to Darryl so next week I can start to send them the coaches that I found from my previous assignment. I got on Canva and decided that I wanted to start the video off with the graphic I made for this player first. I have it set for the graphic to stay on the video for 5 seconds so the coaches can read his stats and accolades from the season. I also decided to put on a little animation for it as well just to see exactly what canva can do and to make it different than just a straight 10-minute video. After this I uploaded the film to canva which took a while considering it was over 9 minutes long. After this I put the video in there and formatted it the way I wanted and in the order that I thought would be best to keep the attention of the coaches who I will be emailing. After this I decided to put some music in from canva. Unfortunately, I do not have the premium version of canva so I had to improvise. I decided to get canva on my phone, screen my video on my phone, and then put it into iMovie on my phone that I downloaded. I then uploaded the video to iMovie and was able to upload music onto the video in the background. I made sure the song wasn’t too overwhelming but was upbeat with the video. After this I downloaded the video and put it onto my computer and I sent it to Darryl to see what he had to say about it!
Today I needed to figure out how to download my clips from synergy onto my computer in order to make sure I can put it on to Canva. One of the graduate assistants told me to download synergy editor in order to be able to download the videos onto my computer. Of course, when I tried to do this, my computer would not allow me because my computer did not have the latest software update. I had to get creative. I tried to see if I could download a screen recorder on my computer and I ended up finding one, but I found it very difficult to use and to edit it after. I remembered that I could download synergy on my phone where I could have access to my edits. I decided that I can download this app on my phone then screen record to my phone. This took some time as I would get a notification on my phone that would ruin the screen recording, so I had to turn my phone on to airplane mode to make sure I did not have any notification pop up and ruin my recording. After the 10 minutes’ worth of clips was recorded on my phone, I then airdropped them to my computer so I can easily put it into Canva. I plan to put everything together on Canva and get the highlight tape sent over to Darryl so he can make sure it looks good before I send it out to coaches overseas.
With today being one of my last days at work here at Tiffin, I was able to set aside the day in order to figure out what application or software I am going to use in order to make this highlight tape. The other Graduate Assistants here at Tiffin have more experience in this realm than I do so I was lucky enough to be able to pick their brain now that I am at the home stretch of this assignment. One of the graduate assistants mentioned iMovie. I thought this was perfect because if I had questions, I could ask him and because most apple products have it on their laptop and considering I have a MacBook, it would make great sense to use. Well, I came to realize that I did in fact not iMovie so I could not use that application. The other graduate assistant mentioned CapCut, which is an application that he has used to make videos for players in the past. So, I decided to get on the app store on my computer to download this application. Turns out I could not download this application because my computer was not updated with the software update it needed to run this application. I then took some time to update my computer but then it shut down on me and locked me out for 45 minutes to an hour. Once I was able to get back on to my computer, I decided that I should use Canva, as it has an option to edit videos on there as well. Considering I used Canva for my graphic earlier, this seems like the best option. I decided to mess with some of the clips I had saved and put it on Canva to start to get an idea on how to use the video editor option so then I can have at least a little idea on what I am doing.
Today I needed to shorten my highlight tape by about 15 minutes in order to make sure that it is not too long or showcasing the same thing over and over again. The last thing I want to do is for the coaches to get bored or annoyed with the video, so it is crucial that I take my time to find the best clips that show what this player is great and capable at but making sure it keeps the coach’s attention as well. I decided that it was best to just go my old tape I have and to pick the ones I liked most. I did my best to try to remember what clips I have saved in the new file in order to make sure the video was not repetitive. After going through my old clips, I watched it over and over again to make sure I think it is acceptable to send out to professional coaches around the world. I also remembered that Darryl sent me some clips from Twitter of some of this player’s highlights as well. I decided to go through those videos that I were sent and to screen record certain plays that I did not have or that I liked more because it gave a different angle that I might not have seen. Screen recording will allow me to airdrop the clips from my phone and airdrop the file onto my computer where I can put the highlight tape all of together.
After adding defensive clips to my clip tape on synergy yesterday, I decided today would be a good day to go over all the different shot types in synergy again to see if there was anything I missed. I wanted to make sure I had all of the best clips of this player in order to give him the best chance to play overseas. I knew this was going to be time consuming, but I thought this was the best idea in order to make sure I covered everything. After going through all the shot type clips, I decided to watch back what I clipped myself in order to make sure I like what I saw and also to make sure that it was intriguing enough to keep the coaches’ attention for the duration of the highlight tape. While watching this highlight tape, I realized that this highlight tape was entirely too long. In total, it totaled over 18 minutes long. After talking to another GA that has experience in making these types of videos, he said it would be best to keep it within 2-3 minutes. Keeping it short and sweet and getting the point across to the coaches is the best route in order to help this player. Because of this, I decided to make remake the clips into another folder within synergy, and just choose my favorites and then put them in a good order so then I can make it into the actual highlight tape. Going through the old tape will take some time but once I have the clips narrowed down to the ones I like the most, I will then decide how I can download and make the video to send out to coaches.
While a lot of people want to see players score in a basketball game, there is much more to the game than just putting the ball in the hoop. I decided to find some great defensive clips for this player in order to put a couple in the highlight tape. While there doesn’t need to be a lot of these clips, I still think finding the ones that showcase his defensive capabilities is extremely important. There is no direct tab to see exactly the clips where this player was a primary defender, so I thought it would be best to go through his most recent games to showcase his abilities. I decided to start with the most recent game, which was in the first round of the NCAA Tournament against Iowa State. I thought this would be a great game to showcase his abilities considering Iowa State was coming into the tournament after a great regular season and being a number two seed and making it to the sweet sixteen. While the game didn’t go necessarily well for South Dakota State, this game still provided some great clips that I think professional coaches would like to see. While watching this game, I really wanted to make sure I found some great clips considering this Iowa State team was very good. I wanted to take my time and rewind clips that I wanted to in order to make sure I can add some to this tape. After watching this game back a couple times, I decided to go to the game before this which was the Summit League championship. I also watched this game multiple times in order to make sure I found great clips for this player.
|
|