Residential camps can serve a number of purposes for a DI Men’s soccer program, but Georgetown head coach Brian Wiese makes no bones about what his camp is for.

“We use these camps as recruiting tools for us.  It’s a teaching camp and everyone will come in at one level and hopefully leave at another, but the real benefit for us is that we can use it heavily as a recruiting tool,” Wiese said. “We’ve always taken players out of this camp and added them to our team. Getting players we might be interested in to come to our camp is an important chance for us to see them play. We can evaluate, teach and see how fast they pick up concepts and what they are capable of.”

In keeping with that goal, the camps are capped at 100 players each and targeted for players entering 10th, 11th and 12 grades. This year’s sessions are July 14-17 and July 19-22 on Georgetown’s Washington D.C. campus.

“It’s an opportunity for them to live in the dorm, eat the food and see what it’s like here on campus, plus they get to play for us,” he said. “A lot of times you’ll have a kid commit to us right after they camp because they see everything they want to know and decide this is a good spot. If you have your camp offsite they don’t get that perspective and see what they would be getting if they came here.”

Wiese added that the summer dates for the camp mark a timely return to the training ground for the coach himself.

“I finish with the boys here at the end of April so that’s 2 ½ months of not being on the field,” he said. “When you get into coaching it’s so you can work with kids. Since I don’t take a club team it’s kind of coaching preseason for me, plus it’s an opportunity for some of our guys to get back and work and that also gives the campers a sense of what goes on with our team.”

Wiese said he picked up on successful camp formulas during his previous involvement with programs at Notre Dame and Stanford. While all 100 campers obviously won’t end up attending Georgetown, he involves staff from similarly-minded schools in order to optimize the experience and opportunity for camp goers.

“You can go sit on the sidelines and get a sense of what a kid does in a game, but not as much what he is like as a kid. For me this is a great way to cement in my own head who are the kids I really like, as well as for them to cement where they want to be” he said. “We try to pull in a staff that has an interest in similar types of kids. We tend to attract good soccer players who are good students and so we have people from places like Harvard, Princeton, University of Chicago, Richmond, American, Villanova, Rhode Island and schools looking at that same caliber of student coming in.”

Campers will have their evening games watched by evaluators, and the schedule ensures there is no overlap with the games. Post-camp evaluations include recommendations about levels of programs the camper should be targeting.

For more information on the Georgetown University Residential Soccer Camp, go to:

http://guhoyas.cstv.com/camps/gu-m-socc-camp.html