Making a video serves a purpose in the right circumstances, but anyone who relies on video really far behind the eight ball. What simisoccerfan said is the best advice anyone has given yet in this thread. Recruiting can be very easy and straightforward if kid plays at a solid ECNL club for a respected coach. College coaches show up in droves for good teams at showcases and will almost always pay close attention to a kid who has shown interest, at least if the club coach has recommended the player in advance and is respected enough for the college to know they don't oversell players.
Every dollar I paid for soccer was earned back 10x over when her coach sat us down to talk about her future, specifically college. We talked about her interests, grades and test scores, and the colleges we were interested in for and their educational programs. We discussed how he anticipated she would fit in with different college coaches given their respective personalities and styles of play. He knew everything, including the educational programs at every school we were interested in, and each of the college coaches personally including their personalities and style of play. We discussed the schools he thought she might have a hard time getting playing time and the extent to which that even mattered to her if, for example, soccer was just her way to leverage getting admitted to Stanford. He made calls to coaches at the schools we agreed were the best fits, every single one of them watched her team at a showcase a few weeks later and, in fact, 100 college coaches came to her team's games that weekend. Within a month she had unofficial visits to two Ivies, two Pac-12s, and the one WCC that interested us. There were no videos. There were no mass emails to college coaches. This is not how things were done at her club because it was not necessary. All it took was my daughter's hard work, excellent daily training and development, and a phone call.
It is painful seeing dads complain in the other thread that a club deserves to be in ECNL because it has a U14 team that beat a pre-ECNL team at Mustang. They have no idea what ECNL is about. It isn't about 14 year old girls winning as many soccer games as possible. Many of their daughters are 11, 12 or 13 and have the potential to leverage soccer into college opportunity that it beyond their parents' wildest dreams and the path is right there in front of them, but they will squander it. When they claim a club in Modesto should be in ECNL over one like Santa Rosa United that has not won much for a long time, they have no clue. They don't understand that any 13 year old girl with potential who plays at Santa Rosa who is committed will develop into a solid college recruit even if they lose all their games. They don't understand that this club has respected staff with a long history of developing kids who have ability, and who are respected by college coaches who will answer the phone and listen when they call based on mutual respect that has been earned over decades. They fail to understand that there has been a single family connected with that club for so long, and who have contributed to developing and putting so many girls into high level programs that it is ridiculous, so much so that a kid is 75% of the way to an offer just because one of them made a phone call. Whereas college coaches have dealt with unknown yahoo coaches trying to oversell players and waste their time their entire careers, and it is unlikely they will even listen to the voicemail when some unknown phone number pops up.
