However we did come across a feature that we like to see and believe that all recruiting websites should have. Form email letters. We love that the website provides a basic template with clear instructions on how to write great introduction emails.
This service helps students make a first impression and sets them up to making continued strong impressions over time. While this does not fully make up for the college search features we want, this is a great addition.
Every CaptainU profile features your academics and athletics achievements, positions, and ratings. This information is presented cleanly and well with no bells and whistles to distract from the facts. Ordinarily this would earn CaptainU a strong, but imperfect score until we noticed a particular button in the corner of the screen. Providing a way for a peer review of your profile is an excellent feature that stands out among its peers.
For that reason we can offer CaptainU a perfect score. We mentioned already how CaptainU starts you off by showing you the features that you could access with membership plans. We understand how marketing requires showing potential clients what they could get for a few dollars more, but this feel entirely too much and has affected our rating. But what do you unlock with your membership?
At the least expensive, you get college matching assistance, profile creation tools, and basic guidance and email support. From there you can unlock expert advice, phone consultations, all the way down to financial aid assessment and assistance. But be aware that while what you get is valuable, you pay a sizable fee for that value. NCSA is a recruiting website that we found and had to add to our list of the top six college recruiting websites.
Signing up for the website was easy and it walks you through an initial set of questions that is tailored to your chosen sport to help you build your profile and resume.
One of the things we were most excited to explore was NCSA University, which is a step by step program that guides you through the process of promoting yourself to college recruiting coaches. It also teaches you the fundamentals of the entire process to make any step you take far easier.
By now you may realize how important we find clear and concise information to be. NCSA offers some well thought out organizational tools for adding information to your profiles, which helps in the creation of your resumes. But NCSA has one other feature that we were surprised to see. NCSA joins PrepHero as being two of the only recruiting websites that we have found that provide both static and dynamic resumes.
This is a great option for students who want to add that extra level of flair and style to their resumes and help their information stand out against their competitors. The only reason why NCSA did not receive a perfect score, is that we did not find an easy option to print out resumes. At the time of writing, we found that NCSA provides many of the crucial tools that many college recruiting websites offer. You can look up college information and your profiles will be sent out to college recruiters and be accessible to them.
However, we will give credit to this website for empowering athletes with the ability to highlight finding the right programs for them to be one of their prime concerns. Whether this is simply a survey of desired services or if the software slants its services to these needs, is left for you to discover. But this is still enough to earn the website a strong score. Profiles created through NCSA are simple and easy to look through. Your information, to include highlight videos, images, contact information, and your dominant hand is all easily visible and displayed.
The fact that the website helps guide you through creating your profile and then arranges it in such a neat order makes this an easy recommend from us. We appreciate how NCSA makes it very clear what you get at each level of membership. As you can see from the list below, free access members are quite limited in what they can do. They have limited access to the amazing NCSA University, one free online class, and one group session with experts.
As you increase your rank from Champion to Elite to MVP, you gain more access to the website, with increasingly priority access to consultations as required. These features are all very excellent and interesting, but we take issue with one important factor. While signing up for one of these services will make the costs clearer, this lack of transparency is a huge problem for parents who want to know what they are expected to pay.
Even when you consider the fact that it does report to offer great quality guides, and information about NCAA eligibility, the lack of transparency is simply too great an issue to ignore.
When it comes to shopping for a service, any service, transparency is absolutely vital in building trust. SportsRecruits is unique on our list of websites to review in that it offers a demo of its services. We quickly found why you had to request a demo though, as nearly the entire website is blocked behind a membership wall.
SportsRecruits, from what we could find at the time of writing, only provides static resumes to their users. Ordinarily, this would be a problem, but SportsRecruits resumes are cleanly organized with very clear headlines to direct the eye to the information a coach is looking for. If you would like to see what a resume would look like, we encourage you to click this link to see the complete version of the resume and profile image below as demonstrated on the Sports Recruits web page.
The tool featured in the image below is a sample clipped from the SportsRecruit website to show how it will help you with your college search. As you can see, after you put in your information on your preferences of distance, division, and your grade levels, it will make recommendations on schools that meet your criteria.
Altogether, SportsRecruits does a good job of giving athletes the chance to find and learn about a variety of schools that meet their needs. Earlier in this article, we posted a sample image from SportsRecruits that gives you an idea of what your profile will look like. We can only offer praise for the clear display of information, so we have no real nitpicks or complaints regarding this website.
One of the things that we absolutely love about the website though is its offers relating to your highlight reels. As shown in the image below, they offer a variety of tools to make your videos stand out and far more effective than simply posting a copy of the video or providing a link.
There may be more features hidden behind the membership wall, but we are here to judge what a potential member would see and for that we can give a solid rating. There is a demo available which places you in contact with a SportsRecruits representative to answer your questions about the sites and services.
We believe that this is a fair middle ground that lets us overlook the lack of meaningful free features. The site promises that your membership gives you access to every college coach. Messaging systems and school searches, as shown above are common and appreciated features.
But where it gets interesting is the unlimited video option. The website promises that the more common and popular video streaming sites can be used to populate your profiles video section. It is a very customer friendly way of letting your potential clients see what you have to offer so they can decide how much to invest in your services. We can respect SportsRecruits decision to block their services behind membership walls because they are very clear about what membership offers and they do have a demo that you can use to make your own decisions.
The final website on our top six list of college recruiting websites is none other than FieldLevel. FieldLevel is a website that provides similar services to many of the other websites on this list, with a few caveats that we were surprised to find.
First, the website does not cover the amount of sports that other websites offered as shown in the image below. While this is not a major problem since it does still provide servicing for a variety of sports, we quickly discovered a small issue. As you can see in the image below, certain sports options within are, at the time of writing unavailable.
We were disappointed to see this since providing options that are not really supported can be frustrating to interested players. To keep with the review, however, we went ahead and proceeded assuming that we were an American football player. When we came to the section on position for the initial profile, we came upon another problem.
As you can see below, none of these positions are American football positions. FieldLevel resumes are built by populating the fields on the profile. In addition to this, the lack of any ability to create a Dynamic resume means that what you do create remains on the website, since we did not notice a print out feature and will have trouble standing out against your competitors for college space.
So while we cannot fault the site for doing the minimum required, we do feel that for the money membership requires, they could go that extra step and do more. But then we saw the absolutely user friendly and brilliant Colleges section, pictured below. Not only can you pinpoint the schools with coaches who are connected with FieldLevel, but you can frame your search base on a lot of key factors for athletes.
These include Divisions, neighborhood settings, school size, majors, and the tuition range that matches your budget and financial aid expectations. If the page went a little bit further and provided information on school culture, then this would easily get a perfect score. But as it is, we are confident that this is FieldLevel strongest page and offering. The SportsRecruits website provides the expected amount of information that should be had on your profile.
As pictured below, your stats will be clearly visible on the left side, with much of the profile page dominated by your site level activity. From a visual level, this website is serviceable. The soft blue background is easy on the eyes and the text is clean and cleanly visible. The call out boxes featured on the profile page do help you in determining what information is needed or missing from your page, which we find to be absolutely invaluable in helping you create a profile and resume that works.
That said, we do feel that a bit more polish would make this a great feature for this website website. Before we discuss the benefits that are earned when you apply for full membership, I should note a few technical glitches that we came across. As we explored the website and found the pricing button, we clicked it to take a look and found that within seconds, the screen would bounce back to the profile page.
After attempting to refresh the browser, click to pricing from a different page, and even opening the page in an alternate tab, we were met with the same response. At this point, we were unsure if we were just encountering some odd bugs and glitches or if there were actually legitimate issues with the website.
It may be an issue of the website requiring a completed profile for analysis, but that should be conveyed to the user in some manner. So altogether, searching for pricing information along with the other problems mentioned above really affected how we felt about this website. As a workaround, we snapped a screen shot of the page when it came up right before it inevitably sent us back to the profile page. The prices listed above are for the monthly service offerings, so it should be noted that annual offerings do have savings.
Now typically membership sites will list the features that are available to free users to compare them to what you could get when you bump up to higher tiers of service. At all tiers you can view your search appearances and determine how often people see your profile and videos.
Combined with the glitch or problem we mentioned, we could not score this feature very highly. At the time of writing, we were unable to find when this company was founded. But our impression based on the problems we encountered would suggest to us that this website is either incomplete and being developed or is in development and has features that are planned, but not yet done.
We have never before been this concerned over what to do with our ratings before. From signing up to searching for pricing information, this website has proven to be difficult. But as it stands, this tool is so valuable that it could be used on its own as an assistant to your own offline searching and recruiting efforts or as an addition to what you do with other recruiting websites.
At the time of writing, the college search feature seems usable to free users, which further cements this website to companion status in our books. After considering everything we mentioned above, we are forced to give FieldLevel a 7. We mentioned earlier in this guide that there are dozens of College Recruiting Websites.
The ones mentioned above were the top six that we feel are most worth your time. What Is It About? ConnectLax is a website that focuses on helping Lacrosse Athletics students get paired up with interested College Athletics programs. What Does It Offer? ConnectLax has a Youtube video that goes into more detail, but it provides a comprehensive profile, College Matching, and Connectivity to Coaches. Why Did We Disqualify It?
While this website provides excellent tools for interested athletes. UniversityAthlete is a website that assists with recruitment for Volleyball players. It sounds good, but it won't help you get recruited. And, of course, their program is designed this way because it is cheaper to perform and more profitable for them. NSR, on the other hand, will stay with you for the duration of your high school athletic career. Your personal scout lives and works in your area. He or she goes to the games, matches or meets and personally scouts other prospects from your area.
With NSR, you will have a hands-on person to go to when you need help or advice. If you need a one-on-one meeting, your scout can oblige. And, perhaps more significantly, college coaches have someone to talk to who really knows you and has personally scouted you. It's not hard to find out which companies are good, which ones are not, and which one is the best. Do your own comparing. Check out each company with the Better Business Bureau. Compare the promotional and exposure services of each and compare the backgrounds of all the companies.
Then, ask yourself this key question: If you were a college coach looking at two equally talented prospects with similar grades, size and other attributes, one was enrolled with NSR program and the other was enrolled with another scouting service, which one would the coach be more likely to recruit and make an offer to?
You are able to add posts, highlight videos, links, contact info, measurables, transcripts, and more through AIR. NCSA makes it very clear what you get at each level of membership. As you can see from the list below, free access members are quite limited in what they can do. They have limited access to the amazing NCSA University, one free online class, and one group session with experts.
As you increase your rank from Champion to Elite to MVP, you gain more access to the website, with increasingly priority access to consultations as required. These features are all very excellent and interesting, but we take issue with one important factor.
While signing up for one of these services will make the costs clearer, this lack of transparency is a huge problem for parents who want to know what they are expected to pay. Even when you consider the fact that it does report to offer great quality guides, and information about NCAA eligibility, the lack of transparency can be confusing. Their pricing is set up very similar to those models. They offer a free version and an upgraded premium version.
Upgrading your account gives you access to more features including analytics, unlimited swipes on college coaches, and the ability to add more liaisons. You also gain access to their educational platform to help you optimize your accounts. It is all laid out in a clear and easy to understand way. In , NCSA became the first company to challenge the status quo and bring digital technology to the paper-based recruiting world. New technology and data also helped create a recruit match system that helps athletes determine their best college options.
Today, there are more than 35, college coaches in our network. But what really drives success for NCSA and its clients is the passionate team of former college coaches and athletes who use their firsthand knowledge and expertise to help athletes at every step in the recruiting process. Since , more than , NCSA clients have reported their commitment to a college team.
AIR was founded in by former student-athletes and college coaches who saw the emergence of virtual recruiting. As former D1 athletes and college coaches, our founding team saw a gap and opportunity for growth in the recruiting process. We saw the pressure coaches faced to win, the immense life-changing value that a scholarship has on student athletes, and that recruiting and dating are fundamentally the same social science.
Both parties want what the other has and neither can be their best without the other. With this in mind, the solution became clear:. AIR is fairly new, but claims to have thousands of users on the platform. They currently only serve American football, but their website says they plan to expand into every NCAA sport in the near future.
Pricing wise AIR is the clear winner. AIR puts the powers in your hands as a student-athlete or parent, whereas NCSA kind of guides you to the level they feel is best suited. AIR is yet to release their web version, but the phone app is right up there with any of the top social media platforms.
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