Max learned this the expensive way.

Where this came from.

Three years ago Max was the parent this site is written for: a decent athlete in the house, a club calendar full of events with entry fees, and no way to tell which of them a college coach would ever hear about. The advice available came almost entirely from people who were paid when the advice was followed — the club selling its own showcase, the recruiting platform selling a subscription, the camp selling a spot. None of them were lying. All of them had a stake.

So he did what an under-informed parent does: bought most of it. Then spent three years working out which parts had actually mattered, mostly by watching what the coaches who eventually responded had responded to.

What he found was that recruiting is not a talent market. It is a hiring process run by busy people with a fixed number of openings, a budget, and a deadline. Once you see it that way, most of the recruiting economy stops making sense as a service and starts making sense as a business model.

What he got wrong.

These are the mistakes the whole service is built to stop you repeating. Every one of them cost real money.

• Paying for exposure before there was anything to expose. A national event in the freshman year bought a weekend of hotels and precisely nothing else. There was no film worth watching and no list of coaches to send it to, so nobody was ever going to be looking.
• Building the target list from name recognition. The first list was schools he had heard of. It took a year to replace it with programs that were a genuine fit on both the athletic and the academic side — which is the only kind of list that produces replies.
• Treating divisions as a ranking. He spent an embarrassing amount of the first year assuming D1 was the goal and everything else was a consolation. Running the actual four-year net cost on a few D3 programs later was genuinely disorienting.
• A highlight video built to impress relatives. Music, graphics, slow motion, chronological order, best clip at the end. Coaches watch on mute at double speed and give it about thirty seconds. That video was a waste of money twice — once to make, once in the replies it did not get.
• Waiting to be found. The single most expensive assumption in recruiting is that good athletes get discovered. They get contacted. By themselves, individually, with film attached.

What he would do differently.

Roughly: spend a tenth as much in the first two years, and spend it on finding out the truth rather than on being seen.

• Get an outside evaluation early, from someone with nothing to sell — in 10th grade, while there is still time to act on the answer.
• Build a wide, tiered, unsentimental list before booking a single event, and let the list decide the calendar rather than the other way round.
• Have the athlete email coaches directly, one at a time, with film attached and the program's name in the message.
• Run the money math on every level, early, so an eventual outcome at any division is the plan working rather than a disappointment.
• Take the academics as seriously as the sport from ninth grade, because grades are the cheapest recruiting asset a family will ever buy.

How he works now.

The service is deliberately narrow. Max advises the parent and the athlete; the athlete does the emailing, the film and the work. He does not contact coaches on anyone's behalf, does not represent athletes, and does not sell a place anywhere. What is being sold is the order of operations — and the willingness to tell a family that the level they are aiming at is not the level they are at.

The expertise is process, not sport. Evaluation, targeting, visibility and decision-making work the same way across sports; the details of any one sport's circuit are something your club coach knows better than we ever will, and we will say so.