BeRecruited, the LinkedIn of college athletic recruiting, has become the official recruiting provider for IMG Academy, a training center and school in Florida that has turned out athletes like Maria Sharapova and Eli Manning. After 15 months of development, the site also launched its newly revamped website yesterday.
BeRecruited CEO Vishwas Prabhakara told us that IMGA approached the company out of a desire to provide recruiting advice and networking to its campers. Between its seasonal camps and academic year program, the Florida based academy trains over 35,000 high school athletes each year. While coaches know to watch full-time IMGA students, pairing with beRecruited closes the loop for students at other schools who attend shorter term camps there.
IMGA coaches will receive training from beRecruited on how to answer questions about the recruitment process, and students will now get a badge on their beRecruited profiles indicating their participation at a camp or event. This will help coaches pick out students who are particularly serious and motivated, Prabhakara said.
The site now has over 1.5 million registered student athletes from over 20,000 high schools across the country, along with 25,000 college recruiters of an estimated 40-45,000 in the nation. While beRecruited is already the most prominent site of its kind, this endorsement by IMGA adds weight to its place in the recruiting world. According to IMGA, 60% of their graduates are recruited to Division 1 schools, with 38% going to DII and DIII, versus a national 2% of high school athletes playing D1.
Prabhakara could not provide specific numbers on how many recruitments are currently closed by way of beRecruited as it is self-reported information, but he did say that tens of thousands of students have written in to say that they were recruited through the site. And that number is vastly underreported, he added.
BeRecruited follows a freemium model, giving more proactive students the option to upgrade (IMGA students will likely receive discounts). The site is free to coaches, simply to avoid the hassle of navigating university expense accounts.
Although other recruiting sites have come and gone, Prabhakara said that beRecruited’s biggest competition is the mom and pop advisers of the world: Division 1 college athletes who have moved back home and use their firsthand expertise to help high schoolers with the process.
BeRecruited has been under the leadership of Prabhakara, Art Chang, and Joe Pestro since the site acquired Fanvibe two years ago, which Prabhakara was CEO of at the time. This offline partnership brings with it the marked presence of the nation’s top high school athletes, which should help incentivize that remaining 20,000 college coaches to join the network. Regardless, the advantages of having a universal database for potential recruits are obvious, and beRecruited is in a good position to become that source.