College coaches constantly face a steep challenge — to discover, engage and evaluate the prospective student athletes needed to build their teams for success. The coaches scour multiple databases, attend summer camps, drive around the country for visits and tap into their personal networks in the hopes of matching the best players available to their program needs.
The inefficiency of the recruiting process drains the coaches and often fails to provide them the type of insights needed to truly understand an athlete’s potential at the college level. College coaches just don’t have the time to tease out exactly who they are getting in an athlete and how the player will contribute to the team and its culture.
The recruiting process takes a toll on prospective student athletes, too. So many young athletes — and their families — dream of playing sports in college, and they often fall prey to recruiting services that promise to get them recruited by charging fees for their supposed expertise and network. However, athletes and their families eventually learn the truth: Only a coach can recruit someone using a coach-led process that helps them decide if an athlete belongs at their program.
The future of the coaches, the student athletes and their teams all hinge on how accurately coaches can predict an athlete’s likelihood of success at their program — which is why Scorability was created.
“Scorability’s software helps college coaches evaluate 10 times the prospective student athletes in less time, while also making more informed recruiting decisions based on verified data and predictive analytics,” said Scorability CEO Brian Cruver. “We’re thrilled to offer the Scorability Athlete Evaluation Software. It’s used by college coaches to discover and evaluate recruits for their sports programs.”
Built In spoke with Cruver about how the Scorability product came to life.
Why does Scorability need to exist? What impact will it have for students and coaches?
We started Scorability and built our product because we believe every student athlete has the right to play at the college level, regardless of their financial, family or school situations. Athletes should not have to pay to get recruited.
We also strongly believe college coaches, high school coaches and the prospective student athletes all benefit from a clearly defined, coach-led recruiting process. This kind of recruiting protects kids from predatory scouting services, while helping college coaches recruit the kids most likely to succeed at their athletic programs.
“We believe every student athlete has the right to play at the college level, regardless of their financial, family or school situations.”
We’re committed to giving the coaches deep player insights that truly predict a player’s likelihood of success. And we’re equally committed to helping players land at the program best matched to a great future as a college athlete.
What role did you play in this early product launch?
I help lead our product strategy and roadmap. In that role, I coordinate all the industry-leading voices and perspectives required to build the right product. College and high school coaches, players, their families and our passionate team of software engineers all contribute to our product development process.
We’ve surrounded ourselves with key advisors — people knowledgeable of the recruiting process from all angles — and they help us envision product features that address existing friction and unearth real opportunity in college sports recruiting.
What’s the biggest tech challenge for the Scorability team?
Our biggest technical challenge is also our greatest opportunity: to gather, standardize and process incredible amounts of data across millions of student athletes in order to predict success before an athlete even steps foot on the college campus. We’re using modern data science, machine learning, AI and sports science to give every college coach — for all sports and at all levels — scientifically validated athlete insights. For the first time, coaches can see who they’re getting in an athlete, how to coach them and how well the athlete fits into their culture and team.
What obstacles did your team encounter along the way?
Software development and the related product launch face plenty of challenges, but also incredible opportunities. Foundational product teams can often struggle to pare down the product roadmap to an attainable start — one reasonable enough to get version one out the door, but also packed with enough features to deliver tangible value to our customers from day one.
Having gone through this process multiple times across other success software companies, our team has tackled this obstacle with total openness. We constantly request and listen to market feedback, thus ensuring each pixel on our screens aligns to improving player evaluation and the recruiting process. That ongoing roadmap discussion — a process of true alignment between our team and our stakeholders — requires a mission-driven team operating without ego and working in total service to our customers.
“The ongoing roadmap discussion requires a mission-driven team operating without ego and working in total service to our customers.”
We’re so fortunate to have such an amazing product and engineering team, people who stay positive and look for opportunity in every task and interaction. We have been finding wins in places other teams might stumble in the product development process, and we make an intentional point to celebrate those wins collectively as a team.
What strategies did the teams at Scorability employ to ensure cross-functional collaboration went smoothly?
Our product team sees contributions from across the entire organization at Scorability. Most importantly, our shared values and goals bind our cross-functional teams in the pursuit of our mission. Our front-end and full-stack software engineers work closely with user-experience and design to bring our leadership’s visions to life.
Our data engineers partner with our data team and data scientists to standardize, store and extract value from incredible amounts of data specific to Scorability’s product. Our office administration, sales, marketing, customer success and IT teams empower the product team with unwavering support, a fun office environment and a shared commitment to help college coaches recruit better and faster.
What would you say is different about how Scorability approaches product development?
Scorability prioritizes customer feedback, and we’re maniacal about always increasing the value we deliver to college coaches with every interaction. This means a constant, never-done attitude when it comes to product development. Scorability will never finish iterating on our product, adding features and exploring additional ways to improve recruiting for our customers.
