Designing a Multi-Audience Recruiting Platform

Timeline

Overview

Level Up College Recruiting set out to solve a real problem in the athletic recruiting world: high school athletes and college coaches were relying on outdated, fragmented tools to find each other — spreadsheets, third-party recruiting services, and cold emails. NCAR Sports Company brought me on to help take their platform from an early concept to a fully launched product, owning the UX from the ground up.

Objective: Design an intuitive, trustworthy recruiting platform that serves three distinct audiences, athletes, coaches, and parents. Each with different goals, technical comfort levels, and reasons for being on the platform, while supporting features like AI-powered matching, video highlight reels, direct messaging, and performance analytics.

Challenges

Three users, one platform. The core challenge of this project was designing for three fundamentally different audiences inside a single product. Athletes needed a space that felt motivating and easy to build a profile in. Coaches needed powerful search, filtering, and evaluation tools that could move fast at scale. Parents needed visibility and reassurance without feeling like a third wheel in their kid's recruiting journey. Every flow had to be evaluated against all three lenses — a decision that made sense for coaches could easily confuse an athlete, and vice versa.

Zero to one, with a moving product. Because this was a 0-to-1 build, there wasn't an existing design system, user base, or set of assumptions to lean on. Early decisions about information architecture and navigation had to be made with incomplete information, then revisited as real feedback came in.

NCAA compliance constraints. Recruiting communication between athletes and coaches is governed by NCAA rules, which meant the messaging and contact-logging features had to be both compliant and unobtrusive — guardrails that couldn't feel like friction.

Role & Approach

As the sole product designer on this engagement, I worked closely with NCAR's development team to move from early concept to a shippable MVP, and then iterated with them continuously as new features and feedback came in.

I started by mapping out the three core user journeys — athlete, coach, and parent — to understand where their needs overlapped and where they diverged. This shaped the platform's information architecture and made the case for distinct, role-based experiences within a single product (rather than one generic experience trying to serve everyone).

From there, I designed the core flows: profile creation, AI-powered matching, video highlight uploads, coach search and filtering, messaging, and performance analytics. I worked in close partnership with the dev team throughout — reviewing feasibility, refining flows based on technical constraints, and making sure design intent survived the handoff into build.

Once the MVP was live, I planned and ran the beta testing period, combining an open beta (with structured feedback forms) alongside 1:1 interviews with a smaller group of beta users across all three roles — athletes, coaches, and parents. This gave us both breadth (patterns across many users) and depth (the why behind the friction points).

What We Learned in Beta

Interviews and feedback surfaced real, actionable patterns.

Each of these findings fed directly back into design changes ahead of launch — refining onboarding, simplifying navigation, and clarifying where each user type could (and couldn't) take action.

Designing one platform for three different users meant designing three different experiences that never got in each other's way.

Results

The product is set to fully launch in August 2026, with the MVP and beta period giving the team real, validated confidence heading into launch — rather than guessing at what athletes, coaches, and parents would actually need. The beta process surfaced usability issues early enough to fix them before they reached a wider audience, and shaped a platform that treats three very different users as three intentional experiences rather than one-size-fits-all.

Growth & What's Next

With full launch happening in August 2026, this is just the beginning. Post-launch, the focus will shift to monitoring real usage data, continuing to refine the AI matching and film analysis tools, and expanding features based on how athletes, coaches, and parents actually use the platform at scale.