What Is NCSA Volleyball?

You may have heard the term NCSA, or NCSA volleyball, in the sports world and not know what it actually refers to.

NCSA is a business called Next College Student Athlete. It is a platform for athletic recruiting to the college level. If you hear it referred to as NCSA Volleyball, that’s simply the division of the platform that serves the volleyball players and coaches.

Next College Student Athlete is equipped to help you through the recruiting process in any sport that is played at the college level and has a well-developed foundation for the sport of volleyball. If you are a volleyball athlete or parent of an athlete, NCSA is designed to guide you through the recruiting process to maximize your potential of playing at the next level.

As you can see there is actually plenty of opportunities to play at the next level, you just have to know where to look and consider your expectations. Using the NCSA platform opens the door to all of these programs because you instantly gain information and access that you would have to try to do on your own without them.

Does NCSA Have Men’s Volleyball?

NCSA does support men’s volleyball and yes there are men’s volleyball programs in some colleges across the United States. Unfortunately, there are currently only 220 men’s college volleyball programs, while there are many more women’s programs.

Next College Student Athlete is equipped to help you have the best chance as you compete for the attention of that smaller pool of coaches. Currently, less than 5% of male high school volleyball players end up playing at the college level, so if you’re serious about playing in college, you should certainly consider NCSA.

Where Is the NCSA Volleyball Login?

If you’re looking to sign up for Next College Student Athlete for the first time, you can access the login screen here.

You will begin by creating a free athlete profile. Have a look around and then before there’s any commitment, you’ll be able to speak to a representative and they will give you a tour of the site and answer any questions you have.

If you would like to get a picture of the entire flow and process of recruiting, take a few minutes to review our FREE Recruiting Guide.

Is NCSA Worth It?

This is the most common question for recruiting websites, “Is it worth the cost?”

Speaking as a parent, I must answer with a resounding “YES, it’s worth it.” The recruiting process for your athlete is only going to happen once and you can’t afford to get it wrong.

Can you go through the recruiting process on your own, without a service like NCSA? Yes, you absolutely can. If you’ve been through it with another child recently, in the same sport, then MAYBE I would consider not signing up for a program like NCSA. But even then, I would consider it. Let me go over a few of the major benefits that make it worth the cost:

NCSA Will Save You Time

A lot of the different steps can be done manually, but you would be investing HUGE quantities of your time. A good example of this would be gathering information about each college. Can you picture trying to gather information about each college in your geographic region that you’d like to attend school? With NCSA, you can view any and all of that information in one place, and filter it down faster than you can brew a cup of coffee.

NCSA Helps You Organize Information

When you get to have different conversations, phone calls, and emails with different coaches and programs, you are going to lose track very quickly of who you’ve told what and when. It becomes difficult to track the timeline of these communications and the details they’ve shared. NCSA gives you one place to track and log all of this information and will even give you prompts to follow up at an appropriate time based on the information that you’ve entered.

NCSA Gives You a Match Score For Each College Program You Research

When you’re just going off of feelings and impressions, sometimes it’s hard to really get a true idea of how good a fit a particular college would be for you. As humans, we give in to bias and we either think too highly or dismiss opportunities without giving them a realistic ranking. You fill out your priorities and then NCSA will give a match score to each of the schools that you consider based on the information that YOU entered.

If you would like to see the NCSA platform in a brief overview, this video may help:

Is NCSA the Same as NCAA?

No, the NCSA and NCAA are not the same. The NCSA is a business that’s called Next College Student Athlete, that’s designed to help high school athletes navigate the recruiting process to the college level. The NCAA is an organization called the National College Athletic Association.

The NCAA governs all games, tournaments, and playoffs for all of the athletic programs in their member colleges. They manage the athletic programs, upholding guidelines that are designed to regulate programs for the well-being of their athletes and to promote strong competition and fair play.

Resources

https://www.ncsasports.org/womens-volleyball/colleges

https://www.ncsasports.org/mens-volleyball

https://www.ncaa.org/overview

Photo Credits

Feature image by Black Rimmed Creations on flickr.com: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Men’s volleyball image by Elmira College on flickr.com: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/