Recruiting: Past, Present, and Future

The number that should anchor every recruiting conversation

There are more than eight million high school athletes in the United States. About 550,000 of them compete at NCAA schools. Every honest conversation a high school coach has about recruiting starts from that ratio, or it isn't honest.

None of that is an argument for discouraging anyone. It's an argument for being the person in an athlete's life who gives them accurate information, because a lot of the other voices have an incentive not to.

The analog era, and what it actually rewarded

Recruiting used to run on relationships and scarce information. A college assistant had a handful of high school coaches they trusted in a given region, and those coaches' opinions carried real weight, because there was no efficient way to evaluate a kid from four states away. You mailed tape. Someone watched it, or didn't.

That system was inefficient and unfair in obvious ways — if your coach lacked the relationship, you were invisible regardless of ability. But it made the high school coach a gatekeeper, and a lot of assumptions about this job still date from that arrangement.

What replaced it

Evaluation is no longer scarce. Film is uploaded, indexed, and searchable. Recruiting services, showcase circuits, and social media mean a genuinely good player in a small program is far more likely to be found than they were in 1995.

Two structural changes since 2021 matter more than the technology, though.

Name, Image and Likeness

College athletes can now be compensated for their name, image, and likeness. For high school athletes the effects are mostly indirect — state associations vary widely on what's permitted, and the deals that make headlines are extreme outliers. One useful calibration: the top reported high school NIL deal in 2025–26 was $25,000, in a year when the prior period's highest figure had reached seven figures. The distribution is enormously skewed, and almost nobody is in the tail.

The transfer portal, which is the one that actually affects your players

This is the change most high school coaches underrate.

Read that from a high school senior's perspective. A college coach filling a roster hole can now choose between an 18-year-old projection and a 21-year-old with two years of college film. For immediate-need positions, the experienced player frequently wins.

The second number matters just as much and gets far less attention: roughly 90% of athletes who entered the portal did not land anywhere with athletic aid. The portal is not a safety net. An athlete who signs somewhere planning to transfer up if it doesn't work out is making a bet the data does not support.

What the job actually is now

You are no longer the gatekeeper. Trying to be one is the most common way coaches waste their limited influence here. What you have instead is more specific and, in the current environment, arguably more valuable.

You are the credible evaluator. Highlight films are, by construction, the twenty best plays of a season. College coaches know this and discount accordingly. Your assessment — what an athlete does on the plays that don't make the reel, how they practice, how they take correction — is information available nowhere else. Which is exactly why a straight answer from you is worth something, and an inflated one costs you the relationship permanently.

You are the reality check. Someone has to tell a player they're a strong Division III prospect rather than a marginal Division I one. That conversation, delivered early and kindly, opens real options. Delivered in April of senior year, or not at all, it closes them. Families are usually working from a reference set of a few local success stories, which is a badly biased sample.

You are the process manager. Eligibility requirements, registration deadlines, contact rules, what an official visit actually is — knowable, unglamorous information that families frequently don't have. A coach who tracks it catches the problems while they're still fixable.

A workable approach

Sophomore year: set the frame. One meeting with athletes and families covering the real probabilities, what the divisions are and what each offers, and what academic eligibility requires. Do it early, while grades are still recoverable and before anyone has invested in a story.

Junior year: get specific. An individual conversation with each athlete who wants to play in college, including your honest division-level read. Help build a realistic school list — most of it at levels where they'd genuinely be recruited — and make sure the academic fit is real, since the great majority of these athletes' futures will be determined by the degree rather than the sport.

Senior year: manage the process. Deadlines, communication, and the harder conversations about offers that don't arrive. Stay available after signing day — that's when the athletes who didn't get what they hoped for most need to hear it wasn't a referendum on them.

Year-round: be reachable and be straight. A college coach who learns your evaluations are accurate will call you about the next player. That reputation is the most durable asset you have in this system, and it's built entirely out of telling the truth about kids you like.

The thing worth saying out loud

For the roughly 93% of high school athletes who won't compete in the NCAA, high school sport is not a failed audition. It is the whole thing — the entirety of their competitive athletic career, and by most accounts the part they'll actually remember.

A program run as a recruiting pipeline serves a small minority of its athletes well and the rest poorly. A program run well serves everyone, and still produces the recruits.

When researchers at George Washington University catalogued what makes sport worth playing for young athletes — 81 separate determinants, ranked by athletes, coaches, and parents — the highest-rated dimensions were being a good sport, trying hard, and positive coaching. Winning ranked near the bottom of the list. Recruiting exposure wasn't in the conversation at all.