How long should a lacrosse highlight video be?

The target length

• Field players: three to four minutes.
• Goalies: four to five minutes, because save variety takes longer to demonstrate.
• Absolute ceiling: five minutes. Past that, coaches stop.
• Too short: under two minutes rarely shows enough repetition to evaluate.

The reason is simple arithmetic. A coach evaluating a recruiting class may watch dozens of films a week. Nobody is giving a stranger eleven minutes.

Length also signals judgment. A four minute film says you know which of your plays are the good ones. A twelve minute film says you could not tell the difference, and coaches read that as an evaluation problem before they have watched a single clip.

The first thirty seconds decide everything

Most coaches will tell you they know within half a minute whether they are going to finish a film. That has one clear implication that most recruits get backwards: put your best play first.

Do not build to a crescendo. Do not open with your three weakest clips to save the good ones. The film is not a story, it is an audition, and the opening clip is the audition.

How to structure the film

1. A two second title card: name, grad year, position, club, jersey number and color. That is the entire intro.
2. Your best clip, immediately.
3. Six to ten more clips showing range, not repetition of the same play.
4. For field players, mix offense and defense. Coaches want to see whether you play both ends.
5. End with contact information on screen for three seconds.

Spotlight or circle yourself at the start of each clip so a coach never has to hunt for which player you are. A film where the coach cannot find you is a film that gets closed.

What to cut

• Music. Many coaches watch muted anyway, and a soundtrack adds nothing to an evaluation.
• Clips where you scored against visibly weaker competition. Coaches notice the level.
• Long runs of the same highlight type. Eight identical dodges from the same spot show one skill.
• Anything where the outcome was luck rather than a repeatable skill.
• Warmups, wall ball, and drills. Game footage only, unless you are a goalie adding a short reaction segment.

Where to host it

Hudl, YouTube, and Vimeo all work. What matters is that the link is public, plays without an account, and works on a phone. A film behind a login is the same as no film at all, and it is a surprisingly common mistake.

Test your own link from a browser where you are not signed in before you send it to a single coach. If you can watch it there, so can they.

How often to update it

Two or three times a year is a reasonable rhythm: after the summer recruiting season, after the fall, and after your high school season. New film is the strongest reason to follow up with a coach who has not replied, so treat every update as an outreach opportunity.

Keep the old link working when you can. A coach may have bookmarked it, and a dead link is worse than an outdated one.

One useful habit when you update: keep the previous film available rather than deleting it. Coaches occasionally want to see how a player looked a year earlier, because visible improvement across two reels is itself a recruiting argument. A sophomore film next to a junior film shows a trajectory that a single clip set cannot.