What is recruit-hq.com?

Recruit-HQ.com is a student-athlete community where anyone can find and anonymously share real-time ratings and reviews about specific experiences with specific NCAA athletic programs—all for free. What sets us apart is that we know how difficult it can be to really find out the quality of an athletic program combined with the academic quality of the college itself, all of our information comes from the people who know these colleges and athletic programs best—student-athletes. In the spirit of community, we ask former and current student-athletes to share their experiences with young high school athletes who aspire to be where they are.

Combined with our roster openings search tool, and more free tools to come, we empower young athletes and their parents with all of the information that they need to take charge of their recruitment journey. By working together to offer an inside look at athletic programs, we can make more programs accessible and bring transparency to one of the most important decisions in a young athlete’s life.

How did we get here?

In 2016, as a former DI student-athlete herself, Recruit-HQ.com founder Tessa Thomas began offering free webinars, speaking to teams and consulting with families 1-on-1 to help them navigate the college athletic recruiting process. Over the course of a three year period, Tessa found that one of the most common points of frustration and overwhelming feelings for young athletes and their parents came from not knowing if a school was “good”—the question always came up, “But, there’s so many, how do you know if a school is good?”.

Tessa contemplated why there wasn’t a collective place for current and former NCAA student-athletes to share their experiences, unless you knew someone who knew’s someone who competed for a specific college or coach you really didn’t have a chance of knowing what that experience was like. You could also miss out on great opportunities at smaller and less widely known schools. Tessa decided to expand the ratings and reviews concept to include roster openings, a method of finding scholarship opportunities that she herself had used in her consultancy. And thus, Recruit-HQ was born to deliver new transparency to an incredibly important decision for young athletes and their families—where to play and continue their education.

What makes us different?

Recruit-HQ.com is the only site that provides a complete real-time look at what it’s really like to be a student-athlete at a particular university—ratings reviews and confidence in the coaching staff—for free. Although we’re just getting started, Recruit-HQ is already providing what we think is very compelling information, including:

Detailed athletic program reviews. See what student-athletes on the inside really think with reviews that cover the good, the bad and much more in between. We encourage constructive feedback in our athletic program reviews and ask that respondents provide “pros” and “cons” alongside “advice to the coaching staff.”

Student-athlete ratings on athletic and academic factors and leadership. We know that student-athletes will find different aspects of the college experience more challenging than others, so we ask users to rate a range of factors (athletics-academic balance, extracurricular opportunities, scholarship and financial aid availability, team morale, athletic skill improvement, coaching staff, fairness and respect).

Roster opportunities by position and year of graduation. We don’t believe that you should get lost in a crowd of thousands of online profiles, instead you can see what the roster landscape looks like for each school in your sport so that you can immediately see where your best scholarship opportunities may be. See exactly who is graduating in your position of play when you’ll be entering into college, these are positions that coaches will be actively recruiting for, you’re more likely to be successful in your recruitment journey if you can fill a specific need of a program instead of hoping you can fit in anywhere—we give you the power to standout.

It’s all FREE. The only cost to access all this information on Recruit-HQ is the two minutes that it takes to create an account. Since it will only take a few minutes to get access to what’s inside Recruit-HQ we hope you’ll give it a try.

Why Recruit-HQ?

Just in case it needs some explanation—Recruit-HQ was selected because we’re equipping young athletes and their families with all of the information, tools and transparency that they need to be successful in their recruiting journey, we are your recruiting headquarters, we’re on your side and we’re here to help you get better insight into athletic programs and colleges.