Why we built HustlPlay

Every family that goes through college soccer recruiting says some version of the same thing at some point: "I had no idea it was going to be like this."

What do they mean by that? The volume of information is overwhelming. The timelines are confusing and the rules keep changing. The journey is an emotional roller coaster with highs and lows that can take a toll on a teenager. And there is the overwhelming feeling that everybody else has a better understanding of what to do.

There was one week we found very challenging. Our daughter was scheduled to play in a huge Texas showcase, with many coaches planning to attend. She was sick with a high fever and the flu. The virus knocked her out and depleted her of any energy. But she couldn't cancel. She still had to spend five hours that week sending individual, personalized emails to more than 100 college coaches to invite them to come watch her play. Every email had something specific about the school in it. She was doing the equivalent of a work week of administrative sales work while she should have been in bed. We struggled with how to help her, and that is when the concept of HustlPlay began.

HustlPlay exists because of the challenges we faced, along with many other parents who were helping guide their children through the unknowns of the recruiting process.

The gap we kept seeing

When we looked for tools to help our daughter navigate recruiting, we assumed a platform or service already existed to ease the burden on families managing the process while their teenager attended school, trained, competed, and traveled.

There isn't. Not the way it needs to exist.

Here's what we watched happen, and what we experienced ourselves:

• Hours of manual work just to find coach contact information. Every school. Every coach. Head coach, assistants, recruiting coordinator. Families build their own spreadsheets from scratch, and half of it is wrong by the time they need it. Coaches get hired and fired and nobody tells you until your email bounces.
• Five hours or more before every showcase, sending individual, personalized invitations to college coaches. Then more hours after: thank-you notes to the coaches who came to watch, and follow-ups to the ones who didn't.
• No clear picture of what to expect and when. Recruiting has its own calendar, its own rhythms, its own rules that change by division and by year. Nobody hands a family a map of the process. Coaches also advise you not to compare, because every journey is different.
• Endless research on schools that nobody has time to do thoroughly. Academics, athletics, conference, record, coaching stability, majors offered, and cost. Every school is a rabbit hole, and there are hundreds of them.
• The small questions with no obvious answer. What do I say in a first email? When should I email? Which ID camps are coming up? Which camps matter for us?

Every one of those things costs time. Real time. Time a teenager doesn't have, pulled out of training, out of studying, out of sleep.

There has to be a better way to help families do this than a spreadsheet and hope.

What we set out to build

We started small. Just the two of us at first, putting our thoughts on paper, sketching what a platform could look like if it actually did what families needed. We asked our club. We asked parents whose kids had already been through this. We asked friends. We asked ourselves, over and over, what would we have paid real money for?

The list got long. And the more it grew, the more it looked like something we had to build. So we brought in two people who made HustlPlay possible.

Anthony Presnell (AP) is a recruiting coordinator for an ECNL club (not our daughter's). AP lives in this world. He talks with college coaches every week and knows how they think, what they respond to, and what they ignore. When we told him what we were building, he didn't just give advice; he jumped at the chance to be a co-founder. He believes what we believe: this can make a real difference in whether a player ends up at the right college.

Dirk Wood, our fourth co-founder, knows nothing about recruiting. He'll tell you that himself. What Dirk knows is how to build software. He's our tech guy, and he's the one turning our late-night whiteboards into an actual platform.

Four of us. Two parents who lived it. One recruiting insider who sees it every day. One builder who makes our vision of helping with recruiting real.

HustlPlay is a workspace for the recruiting process. Not a marketing service. Not a ranking database. A workspace, in the same sense that Google Docs is a workspace for writing. The player owns her recruiting. HustlPlay makes it manageable.

What that means, day to day:

• A place to track the schools she's pursuing, with room to add notes, categorize by interest level, and update as her thinking evolves.
• A place to send outreach to coaches that takes minutes, not hours. Select the coaches. Write one message. HustlPlay customizes each email automatically (coach's name, school name, your player's info, even the school motto), so every email lands feeling personal, because it is. You wrote it. It just doesn't take five hours anymore.
• A place to keep every conversation with every coach organized in one thread, so nothing gets lost and nothing has to be found or researched again three weeks later.
• A place to organize highlight videos, linking to the videos on Hudl, YouTube, or wherever they already live, and drop them into outreach with a click. You'll also see when a coach opens an email or clicks a highlight link, so you're not sitting in silence wondering.
• A place to keep the recruiting calendar in front of her: unofficial visits, official visits, ID camps, showcase games, tournaments, coach calls, deadlines, and every piece of coach communication.
• A place to write down what she actually wants out of a college experience (her non-negotiables and her preferences), so she can compare schools against her values, not against a ranking or a school name.

One important note: coaches don't use HustlPlay. This is a player and parent platform. Coaches receive normal emails from your player, from her real email address. What we do is make it dramatically easier for her to send those emails, keep track of the replies, and know what's actually working.

It's not a magic bullet. Recruiting is still hard. Coaches still don't respond sometimes. Dream schools still say no. But the process itself doesn't have to be chaos.

Who we built it for

HustlPlay is built specifically for girls soccer players and their families. Not because we don't care about other sports, but because we experienced this one. Our daughter plays. We know girls soccer recruiting: the club league rhythms, the showcase calendars, the coaches, the timelines, the particular pressures on a teenage girl trying to be an athlete and a student and a full-time recruiting coordinator at the same time. We plan to grow into other sports as we learn what works, but we're starting where we can help the most.

The player is at the center of the platform, and this matters. Recruiting works best when the player owns it: when she's the one writing the emails, tracking the conversations, and making the calls with her family's support. HustlPlay is designed for her hands.

Parents are welcome and encouraged to be part of the process. There's no version of this that excludes families. But the workspace belongs to the player, and the goal is for her to walk out of the recruiting process not just with a college, but with the confidence and skills of someone who advocated for herself and got it done.

One thing we won't do

We won't tell you what school is best for your player. We can't. Nobody can, from the outside. The best college for a soccer player is the one where the coaching, the academics, the culture, the money, and the people all align with what she and her family value. The only people who can answer that are the player and her family.

We can help with organization, research, and connections so she can make a confident decision.

That's the whole product, in one sentence.

If you're at the beginning of the recruiting process, or somewhere in the middle and it doesn't feel like it's going the way you thought it would, we built HustlPlay for you. Take a look around and let us know what you think.