Home / Recruiting timeline
The recruiting timeline
Seven stages, from tenth grade to the year after the last game. Each one has a job to do, a window that closes, and a specific way it gets wasted. Click through and find yours.
Click a stage, or use the arrow keys
Why the timeline matters more than the talent
Recruiting is a calendar problem disguised as a talent problem. Programs recruit in cycles. They build a board, they work down it, and when the scholarships are allocated the cycle is closed regardless of who was still improving.
The athletes who get recruited are not always the best athletes in the county. They are the ones whose film was current when a coach opened his email, whose transcript cleared without a fight, and whose name was already familiar by the time direct contact was allowed.
The four dates that decide a recruitment
- The contact date for your sport. It differs by sport and division, and it is the day the market opens. Being ready two weeks late costs more than being two inches shorter.
- Eligibility Center registration. Late or incorrect filing here is a self-inflicted wound and we see it every year.
- The signing period. Offers move fast inside it, and the leverage you have in week one is not the leverage you have in week six.
- The transfer portal window. Short, loud, and full of promises that are not binding.
What a family should be doing right now
If the athlete is a sophomore, the work is the transcript and the film. If a junior, it is outreach timed to the contact window. If a senior with offers, it is reading what is actually guaranteed past the first year. If in college, it is the NIL agreements and the degree clock.
None of that requires an agency to figure out. It does require someone who has watched the cycle run several hundred times and knows which corners get cut. That is the part we sell.
“Nobody loses a scholarship in signing week. They lose it eighteen months earlier and find out in signing week.”
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