What Does NCSA Do?

You may have heard of NCSA in the sports world and wondered who they are and what they do.

Next College Student Athlete is the leading athletic recruiting website in the United States. They provide a platform that offers all kinds of integrated tools that will guide you through the recruiting process and allow access to coaches in many different sports.

The NCSA platform hosts a robust variety of different tools, features, and options that will be described throughout this article.

Pros and Cons of Using NCSA

Like anything else, there are both pros and cons to NCSA. Whichever side you are on, there are always clear benefits and fair criticisms of any product or service. Here are the pros and cons I’ve identified:

Pros of Next College Student Athlete

1. NCSA is a full-service recruiting company. While many have pieces of the process figure out, NCSA really does offer tools for each part and cover all the different aspects of recruiting.
2. You can begin with a free profile. This allows the athlete and their family to dip their toe into the NCSA world and get an impression before investing in it.
3. Your profile links everything you want your coaches to see on NCSA. Not only can you enter athletic information, but you can fill out information about your transcripts, your grades, your ACT or SAT scores, your extra curriculars, link your highlight videos, contact information, write a personal statement, and more.
4. Your NCSA profile will be sport-specific. While some other services may accumulate all their athletes and coaches in one large pool, in the NCSA platform everything you see is tailored to your sport. All schools, coaches, and programs that you are seeing are those withink your sport.
5. Many recruiting education modules available. Because the recruiting process has so many different parts, it is very easy to feel stuck at some points. Although I never used them, there are many training guides for different stages or parts of recruiting within the platform that you can use as needed.
6. Link your highlights from many platforms inside your NCSA profile. If you have a Hudl account, YouTube videos, or Vimeo, you can link all of them in one place so your coaches can see them all together.
7. NCSA offers templates for several things. When you are building your athletic resume or emailing your coach for the first time, it really helps to have an example or template to get you going.
8. NCSA prompts you to flow through a recruiting timeline. It’s hard to know what to do first, and then what’s next… and next… and next – you get it. NCSA will have your next steps laid out for you, just log in and do the next step over and over and you’ll find pretty quickly that you’ve tackled all kinds of tasks that will set you up for success.
9. NCSA has an incomparable network of coaches. Since Next College Student Athlete has been the leading platform for so long, they have coaching relationships all over the country in nearly every sport that’s played at the college level. At the time of this writing they have over 35,000 college coaches in their network.
10. The NCSA team is predominantly made up of former college coaches and athletes. Just for fun, ask your representative when you speak to them, what they played or coached. They can really offer good advice and perspective because this is their world.

Cons of Next College Student Athlete

1. The free level of membership is fairly limited. While you can still gain a benefit from creating your profile and poking around and exploring the learning modules available, the best tools and features are restricted to the paid levels of membership. This is no different than all kinds of other services, but could be considered a negative attribute.
2. The cost is a mystery until you interview with them. I will agree that this made me uncomfortable as I was signing up. BUT, take a look around the industry and the large majority of other recruiting services do the same thing. While it’s not the business model I would personally choose, there’s no harm in it – just have your call with a representative and ask them straight up! You can always choose to turn down their offer and I would even encourage you to try and negotiate.
3. While NCSA has a mobile app, it doesn’t have the most amazing reviews. I’ve never personally used the app because the website worked so well for my daughter and I. I never felt the need to use an app for our purposes, but I can see how that may be a feature many people want. While NCSA does have their own apps – both for the athlete and a separate one for coaches, they don’t have the best reviews and I would say that counts as a possible con.

If you are looking for specifically NCSA Volleyball, this is the article for you.

Does NCSA Give Scholarships?

It can be confusing sometimes when you’re learning about different colleges, different sports programs, and different services. Some people wonder if Next College Student Athletes gives out scholarships?

NCSA does not award college scholarships. They are a recruiting services platform that helps student-athletes to maximize their chances of being recruited and earning a college scholarship from the schools they would like to play for.

How Do I Commit On NCSA?

Great question, congratulations on getting to the point where you are committing to play for a particular school! Hopefully, that means you got into the program of your dreams.

To update your NCSA account and communicate that you’ve committed, go to the top right corner and click on your account (your profile image) and you should see a dropdown pop-out that shows “Recruiting Update” under the Contact menu.

Once you click on the Recruiting Update link, you will proceed to a page that offers you a drop-down with several different choices. You can indicate that you have made your college decision and proceed from there.

Is NCSA a Waste of Money?

One of the most common questions is if the cost is worth it when you pay to use any recruiting service. You can try to go through the recruiting process by yourself, or you can join a service that guides you.

If you pay for NCSA, but then don’t do the work, it will be a waste of money. Recruiting, even with NCSA on your side, will require a lot of work. Doing it by yourself takes a LOT more time and manual work. I believe investing in NCSA was well worth the cost for me and my family.

I think the most common complaint from folks who join any recruiting platform or recruiting service is that “it didn’t work.” They feel like their athlete should have just gotten recruited since they paid some money. If you learn about the recruiting process, that’s not how it happens.

You will need to do the work of getting yourself recruited unless you are in the very, very top of the top 1% in your sport. Coaches today have hundreds, sometimes thousands of athletes trying to get their attention. You will have to engage in making connections to coaches, sending them emails, calling them, and sending them highlight videos.

So when someone says, “It didn’t work,” I have to ask them, did you? Did you do the work of putting yourself out there to the coaches? Did you use the tools that NCSA provides in its platform?

If you haven’t read our Complete Volleyball Recruiting Guide, you really should take a few minutes to look it over, it’s free!

What Does NCSA Cost?

NCSA has several different levels of service that you can choose from. They don’t publish their prices so you have to have a conversation with one of their representatives.

Of course, they would like for you to pick one of the larger tiers, but they also want to have a chance to explain the options, answer questions, and make sure you understand what you are buying.

Can I Get My Money Back From NCSA?

One of the things they explain during a call with a Next College Student Athlete representative is that you’re basically making a purchase. Whether you choose to use that purchase or not, you’ve made the choice to buy.

There is a contingency for athletes that have medical concerns or extraordinary family issues, and so you can investigate those terms and see if you qualify here.

How Do I Cancel NCSA?

A common misconception is that NCSA is a subscription service, it isn’t. When you speak to the representative during the interview, they explain that it’s more like you are choosing to purchase an investment – a membership for the athletic career of the player. The great benefit to this is that you pay a fee and the athlete has access throughout their entire athletic journey, so you might as well begin when they are young.

If you would like to pay all at once you certainly can, but for many of us, it’s much more manageable to break the cost up into monthly payments. In my case, when we signed up during my daughter’s senior year of high school, I understood that the monthly payments would go for 12 months. After she got a scholarship and didn’t need the service anymore, I understood that I still needed to complete the payments, even though our use of the platform was essentially done.

So people often decide they would like to just stop paying, but it’s important to understand what you’ve agreed to and realize that this isn’t a subscription service even though you may have an agreement that allows you to pay monthly.

Photo Credits:

Kent State v. Northern Illinois image by David Wilson on flickr.com: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/