PrepsNext Hub is a recruiting platform where high school athletes build a profile, post highlight videos and get seen by coaches. I built the whole product myself, including three separate real-money flows, an editorial publishing system and the admin tools to run it.

Most high school athletes are invisible to recruiters. The platform had to give them a credible profile, a way to show their talent and a way to stand out, while protecting coaches and families from low quality or unmoderated content.

It also had to make money from day one, with payments that are safe by design.

Profiles with verified combine data across several sports

A highlight video feed: athletes post their own videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Hudl or TikTok, with likes, view counts and achievement badges

A desktop feed and a mobile vertical swipe feed

National rankings by verified combine performance

Search by sport, class year, state and recruiting status.

Promote: a live auction for the top 3 spots across the whole site

Nitro: a paid, time-limited visibility boost

Pro and Elite subscriptions with self-service billing through Stripe

Money features fail in quiet ways, so I tested the payment paths first and added a moderation check to every one.

Athletes bid for the top 3 spots. Only approved profiles can bid. The winner is charged, and anyone outbid is refunded automatically. Nobody pays for a result they did not get.

The first version of the auction had no moderation check, so a profile that had been rejected could in theory have paid to appear on the homepage. I found the gap, closed it, and then found the same class of gap on a second paid feature.

That turned into a standing rule: every new paid or public action must inherit the existing moderation block. It is now a checklist item before any release.

The magazine side of PrepsNext runs on WordPress. I built an in-house article composer so staff can write, edit and publish articles without ever opening the WordPress dashboard. Each staff member gets a real author byline, and published articles can be edited later.

An admin panel also lets staff edit athlete profiles with around sixty fields, reorder media galleries and pick related posts.

An admin dashboard shows subscriber counts, the value of the active auction and recent boost income, alongside pages for accounts, promotions, posts, schools and boosts. Moderators can approve or reject profiles, which gates every paid feature.

The Hub, the magazine and the coach CRM run as separate applications, presented to users as one site. An identity bridge links accounts between the Hub and the coach portal.