College Recruiting Websites: Comparing NCSA, beRecruited, CaptainU & Others
Thousands of athletic students make plans on the best way to get recruited for their favorite intercollegiate teams. But many families see the huge amount of work that it takes to get noticed by recruiting coaches as an impossibly high barrier. But you shouldn’t worry, because college recruiting websites have been set up all cross the web to make it easier.
You might be wondering something right about now.
What are College Recruiting Websites?
Websites like the ones we’ll be reviewing in this article promise to help you get in contact with college recruiting coaches. They offer a variety of services that have been reported as helping students figure out what to do to get their name out there and make recruiting coaches want to sign them for their teams.
All of these websites provide an easy way for you to show off your information and stats both in class and on the court. They also help you create rock star resumes that will look great when coaches are deciding who to contact and what players to follow and pursue. Most of these websites also give you a place to store your media like videos, photos, and blog posts so you can start creating a brand name for yourself as an athlete.
Is that all that they do?
The very best websites go above and beyond those basics by helping you reach out to fellow rising athletes or current teammates for your favorite teams. When you reach out to your fellow high school students, you can learn from their mistakes, share notes, and form bonds that helps you become a better team player. But reaching out to current players is where the magic happens.
For most student athletes, the realities of college life, especially at an individual school, is a huge mystery. What better way could there be about learning about schools than by talking with active students. These referrals help you pinpoint the schools that will not only meet your academics and athletics goals, but also help you find happiness.
Can recruiting websites really help me find happiness?
We won’t say that college recruiting websites are some secret ingredient to a happy life. But what we will say is that the very best help you figure out if you’ll like the colleges you apply to. There’s nothing worse than committing to a team or a university that doesn’t meet your unique needs.
Let’s face it, the best colleges will challenge you as a student already with courses that prepare you for life after your diploma. So we’re sure that you want to spend your time at a university that has a culture that you can enjoy. Maybe one university has a bigger music scene than another while also having a great athletics program that you want to enjoy.
But how can a recruiting website help me figure out if I’ll like the school?
The best college recruiting websites will put you in contact with coaches so that you can learn more about a team. Some of these same websites will go a step above and put you in direct communication with current players on the individual teams.
Between students and coaches, you should be able to get a great idea of what a university is like. But more importantly, if you find a college that you want to apply to, then this is a great way to start making friends and connections. No matter how challenging your courses might be, having a friend in place when you arrive will make everything a lot easier for you.
But wait a second, you might be saying, you can do this anyway if you put in the time. So you might be asking one of the most common questions that college recruiting websites get.
Why can’t I do it on my own?
Why you want to be on a Recruiting Website?
The easiest way to think about why Recruiting Websites can help is to compare them to gym equipment. Sure you can train by running around your neighborhood or lifting weights in your own room, but many people find it hard to focus on their goals.
They may not know the optimal ways to train their bodies or have the equipment to really push the most effect out of their training. That’s why many people take the time to go to their local gyms or hire athletic trainers to help them reach their goals.
Recruiting websites do the same thing. You can research to find the names and emails of your favorite coaches. You could also save yourself the time by using a Recruiting Website to find the correct email for the correct person in seconds. You could write and create your own resumes. You could also input your information and let a website create a resume that looks professional and well edited.
What about highlight videos and images?
You could store them on your computer and send them, but if you ever experience a hardware failure, hours of work can be lost. But recruiting websites often back up what you post so that you can retrieve them easily and provide direct links instead of cramped zip files.
Altogether this means that while you could do things the old way, but recruiting websites use technology to give you a better shot at getting your name out there. But let’s think about this from the college coach perspective.
How do Coaches use Recruiting Websites?
You might not believe it, but this is a two-part question. You might think that only parents and students use recruiting websites, but that’s far from the truth. High School coaches use these recruiting websites to help legitimize the information you offer by confirming your statistics and performance records.
College coaches are more likely to trust this information because any coach needs to rely on their reputation to make sure their favorite students get the scholarship awards that they deserve.
Enough about that, how do college coaches use these websites?
Once the information you give is validated by a coach, the recruiting coach has an accurate picture of who you are as a player. Recruiting websites also organize all of your information, videos, and clips into one convenient location making it easier for them to decide if you are the player they are looking for.
Many coaches report that they schedule their tournament or camp visits based on the information posted on these recruiting websites. This is especially important for smaller schools that have a limited budget and staff to go and meet students in person.
Everything we discussed gives us some very important information about recruiting websites. But let’s summarize it all into an easy list.
What are the advantages of using recruiting websites?
Exposure: With thousands of students applying for the same few scholarships and roster slots every year, it can be easy to get lost in the shuffle. Especially if you want to apply to a smaller school which may not have the time or resources to perform nationwide searches.
Making it easy for coaches to figure out who you are helps you get noticed.
Marketing & Branding: The best recruiting websites help you create a resume that will make you look better than many of your competitors. Whether you are an A+ student whose earned multiple honors in club sports or high school championships or a student with untapped potential, recruiting websites are a great way to create your image.
But more importantly than that, since most websites offer ways for your coaches to confirm your information, it creates a sales pitch that helps guarantee results.
Convenience: Anyone whose recorded videos and used editing software can tell you that it takes up a lot of space and time. This is especially true if you are using effects to highlight you and your accomplishments. After all the work is done, don’t you want a safe and secure place to post your work that you can download from or direct recruiting coaches to?
The big thing though is that having one central location for all your material means that you don’t have to scour the web to create a presence. All the work is done for you in creating a professionally stylish profile.
The Power of Communication: Never before has it been easier to reach out to your favorite schools, because coach information is usually available on school websites. Recruiting websites save you time by putting you in direct communication with coaches and players so you can learn the real truth about a school.
Knowing all this, it’s easy to see why college recruiting websites are so popular with athletics students. Using the tools provided by these sites can push your name higher on a recruiting coaches lists.
What should I expect from a College Recruiting Website?
Even the most casual search will turn up a dozen websites that all promise the same thing. Websites that swear that they will get you recruited into your favorite schools faster than all others or that will make a real difference in your athletics and academic career. With all the choices available, it might seem impossible to choose the one that’s right for you.
Therefore, we hired an independent organization to review & rate each recruiting website, including our own. Below is their direct, unedited review of each college sports recruiting site. They spent a lot of time researching some of the top recruiting websites around to see what makes each one different. Each one will be rated on a 10 point scale to make it easy to figure out which one is most worth your time and money.
Reviews & Analysis from the Independent Organization (Lead Researcher: William M.)
Many websites claim that they are a fast track to success. Through the analysis below we compared the technology and approach taken by the various recruiting sites including this one. From our research we found that there are some offerings that are more common than others because they matter most to coaches and student-athletes. For our review we’ll be looking at the following items and their existence or ease of use will help determine our score.
Static and Dynamic Resumes
By the time you’re considering getting into college, you’ve likely had to create resumes before. Maybe you were trying to land a summer job or you wanted to apply for a program that required that level of professionalism from you to be accepted. Whatever the case, resumes prove that you’re serious about being a part of a team and university’s athletics program.
But did you know that there are multiple ways to share this valuable information?
While all of the college recruiting websites we’ve reviewed help you create a static resume, we’ve found that the very best let you create a unique and graphically eye-catching dynamic resume.
To see the difference, let’s take a look at two example resumes.
You’ll notice that the static resume on the right, from a brief glance, looks like any other sheet of paper. It is traditional and professional, but the chances of it standing out at a glance are slim. The one on the right, on the other hand, tells you a lot about the student’s creativity, interests, and goals.
This makes it more likely to remain fresh in the recruiting coaches mind raising the student’s chances for success. While dynamic resumes are a great way to make you stand out, we understand that some schools and students prefer more traditional resumes. Websites that give you the choice between the two will be rated higher than those that only offer static resumes.
College Matching Services
Earlier we talked about how figuring out what college life is like can be hugely important in making a decision on where to apply and what schools to commit to. That’s because no one size fits all and what matters to one student may not matter to another.
With college matching services, you have a stronger chance of finding the schools that won’t just let you play your favorite sports but will provide an atmosphere that is right for you.
Everyone knows that students grow and develop better when in a culture that suits them. So our reviews will favor those websites that provide college matching services.
Access to Coaches and Teammates
To go along with college matching, it’s important for parents and students to be able to get the scoop about a school directly from someone whose involved. Because it’s always easy to simply say that you match up with a specific university, but it’s another entirely to hear that from a player or coach’s own words.
That’s why some of the better websites
The Information Displayed on your Profile
You might have read about how college recruiting websites give you a convenient place to store and display your information. As you can guess, athletics websites often share your statistics as an athlete to make it easy for coaches to figure out what positions you may be best suited for and where your strengths and weaknesses are.
But did you know that coaches also want to see how you stack up and compare to your peers in your school work and grades as well?
The reason for this is obvious when you consider that all athletics scholarships require that you are not a career athlete. That means that your first ‘job’ is to be a great student with being a great athlete coming second.
Since many of these websites can also have statistics and information confirmed by coaches, this gives college recruiting coaches an easy and convenient way to get a total picture of who you are.
Any website that makes your profile information easy to see and read, will receive higher marks than those that don’t.
How much does full access cost?
Every recruiting website is funded by the memberships of its members. We’ll be reviewing the cost for full services along with what full access can give its members. But one thing you should know is that we are not here to judge whether or not the cost is higher or lower than its competitors.
We instead focus on whether or not the cost is justified by what you get as a free member vs a paid member. We do this because we believe that investing in your future is never a bad idea, but we want you to be sure that what you invest in will be worth every cent you pay.
So even if a website may cost more than its competitors, as long as the website provides great bang for the buck, it will receive higher marks than others.
Year Company Was Founded
Our reviews will not place founding year as a criterion for judgment, but when possible, we’ll be sure to list this information in our reviews. This is important to many parents and students because older websites tend to have a better track record of success and are less likely to fold or disappear as time passes.
The reason we don’t include this in our review metrics is simple. There’s no fair way to determine the difference in a website based on founding year. A new website that provides great value for the buck should not be graded harsher than an older website that doesn’t provide as much.
So consider any mention of founding year as being interesting, but not necessary.
So now that we know what we’re looking for, let’s begin the reviews!
Review of PrepHero
Like all of our top websites on this list, PrepHero offers support for a variety of sports options for the athlete.
When you first reach PrepHero, you are greeted with a 'race' image. Which is appropriate as this is your starting line on the race for recruiting success. The website offers its services for free and we’ll learn as we go whether or not the website can keep up with this bold claim.
What we found interesting about this website is the attitude that it presents as it’s less geared towards sports achievements and more about player development. What this means is that it doesn’t just offer a bland statistical analysis, it also provides tools that help coaches see how you grow as an athlete and a student. This was one of the missions that PrepHero Founders have been shooting for according to this interview.
It offers players the chance to find recommendations from teammates and coaches. It also emphasizes that as recommendations help players and coaches identify strengths and weaknesses that there is no bad endorsements. This surprised us as it highlights the team part of team sports and emphasizes how your strengths should cover another players weaknesses and vice versa.
We found that the registration process for this website was relatively simple and within moments we were greeted by guidance that prompted us to think about our recruiting future. We were impressed by this quick call to action and by what we found as we explored the site.
Dynamic and Static Resumes
PrepHero makes resume creation a snap as every piece of data you put in will be plugged into a customized resume that you can print. The resumes will also have a link that leads recruiting coaches back to your PrepHero profile so that they always have access to your updated information.
The resume that is created organizes your information cleanly and neatly while offering you easy to find options on creating a Dynamic Resume, in case you want your resume to stand out.
But one thing we noticed about the resume creation tool is that you are prompted early on about how to maximize the effectiveness of your resume and the attached interest email that you can send through the service.
This is phenomenal as it pushes you to make the best use of your emailing time while preventing you from making any key errors.
Our Rating: 9.8/10
College Matching Services
Like many of the websites on this list, PrepHero offers you basic college info access. It organizes the teams into their respective divisions and offers you the options to manually search for the schools you know you are interested in without needing to wade through information you might not care about.
But then you come across two of the best features that we’ve ever seen and realize that PrepHero is a step above the rest.
The first feature is what PrepHero calls a Recruiting Session. When you take a Recruiting Session, the program will tell you about schools one at a time, presenting information that you need to know about the school. If you are introduced to a school that interests you, you can send them a personalized email expressing your interest.
The best part of the personalized emails, is that PrepHero has a variety of templates saved which it rotates through. That way you are less likely to send out two of the same looking emails and to limit the sameness that can ruin applications that don’t take this very smart step.
The cool part about this feature is that your completed profile will be automatically attached to your email, which includes the resume you created. The software keeps the email general enough that you’ll only need to make minor changes to personalize the email for the respective coaches. Athletes find that they get fast results thanks to this service.
The second feature that PrepHero can proudly boast is a college matching survey/quiz. With this feature accessible at this link, you’ll be able to tell them what you find most important about a school, the activities that you love, and the extras that matter to you.
Do you want good off-campus food in close proximity? Do you want a campus that enjoys playing video games when you aren’t on the field? Do you want to be near enough to your family that they don’t need to fly to visit?
All of those are options that will give you several matching colleges which makes the first feature even easier to recommend.
Our Rating: 10/10
Profile Information on Display
We mentioned earlier about how easy PrepHero makes it to figure out what can go onto your resume. It even neatly organizes the sections into academics, mental, and physical stats.
A lot of this information is supported by the EXACT camps that PrepHero participates in, which gives players a valid and valuable resource to make claims on their skills and have official support for those claims.
As you can see from the image below, some of these statistics are even found by taking tests or participating in games that the software has created. This makes it easy to discover things such as learning styles or your prime motivation factor as a player.
You’ll also be able to request endorsements from your current teammates as well as coaches, which helps demonstrate how much of a team player you are.
As you complete tasks, your online profile becomes filled with valuable information that paints a total picture of you as an athlete, making PrepHero our top choice for strong profiles.
Our Rating: 9.7/10
Full Access Costs
We spent a lot of time talking about the services that PrepHero offered. At first, we were tempted on skipping this session since it seemed like PrepHero was the total package of services and all for free. We did notice that the college matching only offers three ‘matches’ unlocking more for sharing results on social media outlets.
But then we found the subscription management button and this is what we saw.
In a word, this package is amazing. $10 a month or a small flat fee for a life-time membership nets you full access to your results on college matching, priority access to recruiting coaches, notifications so you don’t have to manually check your profile, and more.
We love that you are given enough of each service to justify membership and that it feels good to support the website with this tiny fee.
In short, PrepHero proves that you don’t need to pay a lot to get a lot.
Our Rating: 10/10
So what’s our rating?
PrepHero floored us with the features that it offers to student athletes. From the amazing recruiting tools and college matching surveys and the fact that the entire website is accessible for free makes it an amazing value.
We believe that any student would easily benefit from using the website and will only find greater value by paying their small fee. Our only wish was that the website made information about their affiliate camps and parent programs more accessible in the dashboard.
PrepHero earns it’s 9.8 rating.
Review of BeRecruited
BeRecruited is a college recruiting website that has been around for nearly two decades now. It provides services for a variety of sports from Baseball to Wrestling and includes a surprising eSports section.
When you first visit the website, you’ll find that it has portals available for Athletes, Parents, and Coaches. For our purposes though, we only looked at the services available to Athletes.
You’ll find that signing up is free and you get access to some of the more interesting services available, but we’ll talk more about that once we reach the Full Access Costs.
So let’s start by looking at the resumes that are offered.
Dynamic and Static Resumes
Like many of the websites that you’ll find on this list, BeRecruited helps you by transferring your information into an easy to read and follow resume. Your resume, like the sample pictured below, starts with a picture that you choose, your school and position information, your personals, and an at the glance review of what you are as a player.
We are always in favor of clean resume information, but we would have liked it if the resumes felt a little more bold, because resumes like the one above just don’t feel very different to contrast them from their competitors.
Some users do use the site to create their own resumes, but the black on white format makes it easy for the eyes to wander with information being lost upon the reader.
At the time of writing, we didn’t see any options for creating or finding help in creating a more dynamic resume, which we feel is a shame. Still, BeRecruited provides a clean and clear space for adding your information, so we can’t fault the website for providing the basics.
Our Rating: 8/10
College Matching Services
From what we could discover as we explored the website, there didn’t seem to be any way to compare colleges based on what you want out of a school. At least not as a free user, as you’ll see when we get to the pricing section.
Instead what it provides are two tools that can help you form a game plan on getting into the schools that you’re looking for.
First, when you sign up, you’ll be offered a free recruiting tool, where you’ll be able to speak with a recruiting process expert to see if a personalized game plan would help increase your odds of success.
This service, while certainly valuable to some, does feel like a way to get you to pay for a Deluxe Upgrade or for some expanded services, but that is something that you should explore or ask if you sign up.
Second, the website provides you a way to list the schools that you’re interested in for your sport. The website promises that your information will be sent to the universities in question to begin the process of networking.
This is a great service, but it seems to benefit you most later in the process after you complete your profile and have your coach verify your information.
We won’t deny that these two tools are very useful in giving you power and agency in selecting the schools that can reach out to you. But the BeRecruited offering, at least at the free membership level, doesn’t do enough to help find the schools that would be best suited to you.
However, if you know what schools you’re interested in, then these two tools are excellent and appropriate. So we can easily give credit where due for providing help for these students.
Our Rating: 7.4/10
Profile Information on Display
The Profile Information that is given to BeRecruited users is an excellent resource of information for coaches, athletes, and parents. When you sign up for BeRecruited, you’ll be able to provide information about your athletics and your sports play, as shown in the images below.
You’ll also be able to see how you compare to other users on the site. Which is a huge help in finding what your strengths and weaknesses are on a national scale. Take Volleyball for example.
If you notice that you’re in the top 10% of Digs per game, but only in the top 50% for kills, then you know that you can emphasize Digs as opposed to Kills when you’re contacting recruiting coaches.
We also love how the website guides you through the process of completing your profile with an easy to understand percentile rating. This makes it easy to see where your profile may be lacking contact.
It also guides you to making full use of the websites features, to include the blogging tool which some athletes even use as their resume space.
But none of these features would be as valuable to the athlete if they couldn’t see what effect it’s having on their recruiting prospects. As you can see in the image below, the website provides you with a space for clear data on how many coaches have checked you out, how often you show up in searches, and even how many coaches follow you.
As you can see in the previous image, the page also helps you make yourself more appealing to coaches by telling you information that you can use to increase your online footprint.
As you can guess, we think that BeRecruited knocks this one out of the park and earns itself a perfect rating.
Our Rating: 10/10
Full Access Costs
We mentioned above that there were some services that were simply not available to free users. That comes pretty standard for most recruiting websites so there should be no surprise there. The true test for BeRecruited comes when we look at what you are given when you spend some cash.
Looking at the services listed below, we see that free users get to set up a profile and blog, which we love. You also get to follow school programs and follow up on information about these schools. This, along with the app download and the free scout evaluation is pretty excellent for the price that you pay.
But let’s look at the two tiers above free membership.
First we have Deluxe Membership which for $19.99 a month or $99.99 for life time membership, you gain more exposure to coaches, the ability to send emails directly to coaches and invite them to see your profile, while also seeing which coaches are interested in you.
If you recall the coach views information above, you’ll notice that this suggests that free members get statistics whereas paid members get names. While this is fair, it’s clear that the nameless statistics are free advertising for this service.
However, if you pay $299 for a lifetime Deluxe All-Star membership, you gain all the above plus Game Film Evaluation, a Personalized Scouting Report, Consultation with a recruiting Coach, and the customized school list.
These services are extremely beneficial to student athletes and are easily worth the money, especially as it provides benefits for a members entire life. But we should point out that the value decreases the longer you wait to sign up.
So this service works best for students who are in their first two years of High School Athletics.
Still, the bang for the buck is there. So we can give this website a respectably high score.
Our Rating: 9/10
Year the company was founded
We couldn’t find the information on when this company was founded on a casual web search. But when we emailed customer support we got a response within a day, which is excellent customer service. BeRecruited was in existence since the year 2000.
So what’s our rating?
You can’t argue with the free pricing to sign up which gives you access to a lot of useful features. Also, the staff was very good about answering the question we sent in within a day. So we have no doubts that if you sign up for BeRecruited then you’ll fin a great experience for your college recruitment.
That said, we can’t ignore that there are some features, such as Dynamic Resumes, that we would have loved to see and the value of the website diminishes the later in your High School career you sign up.
After considering everything we mentioned above, we are giving BeRecruited a very respectable 8.6 rating score.
Review of CaptainU
CaptainU is another recruiting website that we’ve had our eye on as it boasts some exciting features that would be useful to athletes. When you visit the site and sign up, you are greeted with a tool that encourages you to request that a parent assist you with the recruiting process.
This can be valuable as it helps your parent understand what you are looking for or doing on the website and parents will be sent tips on what they can do to help.
Afterwards, you are given the opportunity to select schools that you are interested in, with recommendations on additional schools offered depending on your choice.
Let’s dive right in and see what we like about this website.
Dynamic and Static Resumes
CaptainU offers a standout resume that highlights your achievements and skills. We love the look and design of the resume since the gray background on your resume page helps focus the eye on the text and any images that are attached to your resume.
At the time of writing we were unable to find any options for Dynamic resumes though, so that may be an issue for some athletes and parents. Unlikes some of our other options, we also did not see any options to create a printable or savable copy of your resume.
This option may exist, but we find that many students may not notice options that aren’t clearly visible.
One important thing that you should note, is that your profile does appear to be your resume. This limits the sites appeal if you are speaking with a coach who prefers paper resumes as opposed to website links.
Our Rating: 7.6/10
College Matching Services
One thing we noticed as we explored CaptainU, was how much of the sites features seem to be strongly enhanced by a pay wall. As shown in the image below, even something like assistance with finding the right colleges for you require membership.
While students who know what schools they want to play for may not need the help, we would have preferred if there was some middle ground assistance provided to free students. Ultimately, the site offers great college search tools, but only if you pay, which we can understand.
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.
Our Rating: 8.5/10
Profile Information on Display
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. This helps ensure that your profile, which as discussed also creates your resume, does the job it’s intended to do. For that reason we can offer CaptainU a perfect score.
Our Rating: 10/10
Full Access Costs
We mentioned already how CaptainU starts you off by showing you the features that you could access with membership plans. From the moment you first login, you encounter services that are openly walled off to you unless you’re willing to pay into CaptainU. We do appreciate transparency, but we wonder if this couldn’t have been done in a more customer-friendly way.
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.
In either case, we clicked on those plans and this is what we found.
But you should note that these are the annual options, as monthly pay rates are anywhere from $5 to $125 more depending on the package you purchase. 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.
We believe that Silver memberships are simply not worth your time, we won’t deny that consultations with recruiting coaches and financial aid assessments make the gold and platinum memberships more worth your time. But be aware that while what you get is valuable, you pay a sizable fee for that value.
Because as mentioned, the above pricing is based on an annual pay scale, so the platinum scale offer is nearly $900.
Our Rating: 7.5/10
Year the company was founded
At the time of writing, we were unable to discover when CaptainU was founded.
So what’s our rating?
We have some trepidation with how strongly CaptainU pushes it’s membership rates and services, especially considering the comparatively high pricing schedule compared to some of the other websites on this list.
We won’t deny that it is an attractive website that gives you lots of information for your membership fee.
So CaptainU earns a still respectable 8.4 rating.
Review of NCSA (Next College Student Athlete)
NCSA is a recruiting website that we found and had to add to our list of the top six college recruiting websites. This website does a lot to help students get noticed and we were excited to explore it’s software and features to see what it had to offer.
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. .
So let’s dive right in!
Dynamic and Static Resumes
By now you may realize how important we find clear and concise information to be. That’s because recruiting coaches have to read hundreds to thousands of resumes every day during the recruiting season and it’s very easy for your information to get lost in a sea of other resumes.
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.
Our Rating: 9.2/10
College Matching Services
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.
The website, in short, offers the basic level services you need to help you determine the programs that are right for you, but it’s not clear how much support you can be given beyond the above mentioned search tool. But this is still enough to earn the website a strong score.
Our Rating: 8/10
Profile Information on Display
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.
Our Rating: 10/10
Full Access Costs
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.
What do these services cost?
It’s easy to understand that one dollar sign means Champion costs less than MVP, but does that mean that you pay a single digit amount? 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.
For that reason, despite how great the NCSA University program is, we can’t give cost the high mark that the site may deserve.
Our Rating: 6/10
Year the company was founded
At the time of writing, we were unable to discover when this website was founded.
So what’s our rating?
When it comes to shopping for a service, any service, transparency is absolutely vital in building trust. While we came in looking forward to NCSA great services and renowned NCSA University, the pricing page does not provide enough information.
So we have to give NCSA a rating of 8.3.
Review of SportsRecruits
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.
You might be wondering if this walled off content will affect our score.
Let’s find out together.
Dynamic and Static Resumes
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.
For our review purposes though, we can easily give this feature a solid score.
Our Rating: 8/10
College Matching Services
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.
We would have wanted this feature to also include details outside of school and sports life, such as the community culture of these schools, but we won’t fault SportsRecruits for focusing on the bigger picture.
Altogether, SportsRecruits does a good job of giving athletes the chance to find and learn about a variety of schools that meet their needs.
Our Rating: 8/10
Profile Information on Display
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.
Our Rating: 8/10
Full Access Costs
This was an interesting category to consider since, as we mentioned early on, the website requires membership to access it’s features. 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. What we also love is how the website makes it very clear what you’ll pay and what payment awards you.
The site promises that your membership gives you access to every college coach. While this is a bold claim to make, we want to believe that this website would not make that claim if it couldn’t back it up. 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. When you combine this with the post-production services that the site offers, it’s easy to see why any athlete would be willing to work with SportsRecruits as their website of choice.
With that in mind, the price does mean that you’ll pay almost $600 for a full year of service. With that in mind, here’s our rating.
Our Rating: 7.2/10
Year the company was founded
At the time of writing, we were not able to discover when this company was founded.
So what’s our rating?
In today’s day and age, it’s easy to see why college recruiting websites often offer free services. 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.
With that in mind, our final rating for SportsRecruits is 7.8
Review of FieldLevel
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. It’s unclear if this list was created from our initial choice of men’s soccer, but it is still a problem that we cannot ignore.
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But let’s look further and see if FieldLevel can make up for these initial impressions.
Dynamic and Static Resumes
FieldLevel resumes are built by populating the fields on the profile. This is expected and standard for many of these websites so there’s no real surprise there. But what we did notice is that there wasn’t an obvious way to create a distinctive resume using the standard template.
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.
Our Rating: 7.5/10
College Matching Services
After our initial problems that we had with the site, we can admit that we didn’t expect to be floored by anything FieldLevel would provide. 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.
Our Rating: 9/10
Profile Information on Display
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. We do appreciate the activity timeline to show how you’re using the website, though we do question it’s potential use to recruiters and students.
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.
Our Rating: 8.5/10
Full Access Costs
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.
There is simply no reason for this as it makes the decision on whether or not to spend money on FieldLevel’s services needlessly complex. 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.
But for now, let’s look at what membership to FieldLevel offers you.
The prices listed above are for the monthly service offerings, so it should be noted that annual offerings do have savings. The screen shot does say that annual plans save you 20% per month, but due to the above glitch we could not do a side by side price comparison.
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. FieldLevel doesn’t bother with that, instead starting you off with the base level fees and what you get.
We feel that this is a mistake that sets a less than customer-friendly image.
But what does membership get you?
At all tiers you can view your search appearances and determine how often people see your profile and videos. If colleges are following you you’ll know which ones, and you gain access to workshop classes.
Beyond the basics you get access to matching and recommendations as well as profile activity rankings and points for Premium+ users.
It was hard to determine what value these services offer since it’s unclear what advantages they provide. Combined with the glitch or problem we mentioned, we could not score this feature very highly.
Our Rating: 5/10
Year the company was founded
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.
So what’s our rating?
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. We feel that the mention of services that may one day be provided, but aren’t at the time of writing, seems like it does more harm than good to this websites services.
In fact, if it wasn’t for the phenomenal college search system in place, we would not be able to recommend this website. 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 7.5 rating score.
Other Recruiting Websites: Honorable Mentions
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. But we don’t think that any guide on recruiting websites would be complete without a mention of what these websites offer.
For many of these websites, they have very clear niches which they serve well, but they don’t provide the width and breadth of services that their bigger cousins provide.
To make this section easy, we’ll only be looking at three factors as described below.
What Is It About: We’ll summarize what you can expect from this website and who might be interested in using it.
What Does It Offer: We’ll tell you some of the promises and guarantees that the website makes.
Why Did We Disqualify It: We’ll explain why it didn’t make our top six list above.
ConnectLax
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. It is focused on Lacrosse only, so we couldn’t justify including it in our top six list.
UniversityAthlete
What Is It About?
UniversityAthlete is a website that assists with recruitment for Volleyball players. It makes use of your USA Volleyball registration and provides portals for coaches, club directors, and event coordinators.
What Does It Offer?
The website twitter shows that they are very active in the Volleyball scene by taking part in and supporting plenty of events every year.
Why Did We Disqualify It?
This website does a lot for the sport of Volleyball alone, which forced us to disqualify it from our list.
ZCruit
What Is It About?
ZCruit is a website that promotes the recruiting scene for American Football. The website is geared towards recruiting coaches.
What Does It Offer?
Unlike many of the other websites on this list, this one is primarily a resource for recruiting coaches. The website even boasts that it’s intent is to bring recruiting into the 21st century.
Why Did We Disqualify It?
While students will benefit from being discovered by ZCruit, since the features are both only for American Football and primarily of use to coaches, it doesn’t have a place in our top six list.
GotSoccer
What Is It About?
GotSoccer, as the name implies, is a website designed around the soccer scene. It provides a lot of great features for soccer-interested players.
What Does It Offer?
Besides helping students with a college search engine, it also has statistical data and a frequently updated blog.
Why Did We Disqualify It?
It’s all in the name. This website is of use to soccer athletes only.
ScoutingZone
What Is It About?
ScoutingZone boasts an app that allows scouts to keep track on players and helps players keep their information up to date faster.
What Does It Offer?
Besides the App, ScoutingZone has information on ID Camps that an interested soccer player may want to explore.
Why Did We Disqualify It?
While we love the integration of technology, we have to disqualify websites that cater to only one sport.
RecruitingBoard
What Is It About?
RecruitingBoard is a lot like ZCruit in it’s focus on American football, except that this one does a better job of inviting players to sign up and upload their data.
What Does It Offer?
Besides player information and data, it also has a film school library, as well as college information and contact emails. Many of the features though require signing up.
Why Did We Disqualify It?
American football players may enjoy what RecruitingBoard has to offer, but it’s focus is too narrow to make our list.
CollegeFitFinder
What Is It About?
CollegeFitFinder provides tools that emphasize club play. It makes it easier for club directors to organize and assist in the recruiting process.
What Does It Offer?
For players, they set up profiles that are branded with their club info and colors, which saves the directors time in promotion.
Why Did We Disqualify It?
We do find that the club focus is relatively unique, but that uniqueness limits it’s universal appeal for our list.
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