Building the LinkedIn for College Sports Recruiting: Insights from Scorability’s CEO Brian Cruver

College sports recruiting has long been a fragmented, inefficient process that leaves athletes, parents, and coaches frustrated. Brian Cruver, CEO of Austin-based Scorability, is on a mission to change that. Since launching in 2024, his company has grown to serve over 4,000 college programs across every level, managing more than 27,000 events annually and connecting millions of athletes through what has become the largest and most data-driven platform in college recruiting.

Cruver’s vision is straightforward: create the LinkedIn of college sports recruiting. Just as LinkedIn revolutionized professional networking by connecting job seekers with employers through verified profiles and data, Scorability aims to transform how college coaches discover talent and how athletes navigate the complex recruiting journey.

 

From Tech Entrepreneur to Sports Tech Innovator

Cruver didn’t come from a traditional sports background. As a serial tech entrepreneur, he previously founded AlertMedia, a company focused on solving emergency communications challenges through software. After selling that company, he found himself unexpectedly immersed in the college recruiting process as a parent, watching his son pursue football and his daughter soccer.

“Going through that process, realizing how inefficient it was, realizing all the pain that we were dealing with, other families we knew, my son and my daughter’s teammates going through recruiting, nobody was really clear on how the process worked because really there is no process,” Cruver explains.

That firsthand frustration became the catalyst for Scorability. Within two years, the company has grown to about 100 employees, completed an acquisition, and raised over $50 million in funding.

 

The Math Problem in College Recruiting

The scale of the recruiting challenge is staggering. Each year, approximately 4.5 million athletes identify as wanting to play their sport in college. On the other side, there are 28,000 college sports teams across every level and sport, with hundreds of thousands of coaches trying to recruit thousands of kids across the country.

“The math doesn’t work for anybody,” Cruver notes. “You’ve got football coaches running around with two phones trying to recruit thousands of kids across the country. It just doesn’t work.”

The existing landscape is cluttered with dozens of platforms where athletes can build profiles, but two fundamental problems persist:

• Athletes create their own profiles with unverified data
• College coaches aren’t actually using those websites to recruit

Scorability addresses both issues by building a true marketplace where college coaches actively discover and evaluate talent, and where athlete profiles are built exclusively with verified data from third-party sources.

 

The Verification Advantage

One of Scorability’s core differentiators is its commitment to verified data. The platform doesn’t allow athletes or parents to simply input their own measurements and statistics. Instead, profiles are built from trusted sources including youth coaches, camp assessments, and evaluations from college coaches who have already seen the athletes compete.

“If you let the parent type in the height and you let the parent type in the 40 time, you might not get exactly the right number there,” Cruver says candidly. “Coaches are driving across the state to meet up with a 6’5″ recruit only to learn that he’s 6’2″. It happens every day.”

This verification process was significantly enhanced by Scorability’s acquisition of Ryzer, a 20-year-old company based in Des Moines, Iowa, that serves as the backend operating system for 27,000 camps across the country. Through Ryzer’s network, Scorability now has access to verified data collection at thousands of events.

At these camps, the Scorability app captures both measurables and visual content in real time. When an athlete runs a 40-yard dash, for example, the system can record the time while simultaneously capturing video of the run. College coaches viewing the data can see the recorded time and watch the actual video to verify accuracy. The content is captured once and cannot be edited, eliminating concerns about AI-generated highlights or manipulated footage.

 

Bringing High School and Club Coaches Back Into the Process

An interesting aspect of Scorability’s approach is its effort to reintegrate high school and club coaches into the recruiting process. These coaches, who know their athletes better than anyone, have been increasingly sidelined as social media enabled direct communication between college coaches and recruits.

“It used to be that high school and club coaches were the gatekeeper and had the relationship with the college programs,” Cruver explains. “Social media comes along and it becomes super easy for the college coach just to DM the athlete and start a direct relationship.”

When Cruver’s son was in high school, he expected the high school coach to lead the recruiting process. Instead, the opposite happened. “We were letting the high school coach know how it was going. He would ask us, ‘How’s recruiting going?’ because we were dealing directly with the college coaches.”

Scorability reestablishes the role of high school and club coaches by making coach evaluations a fundamental piece of athlete profiles. Every athlete can invite their head coach, position coach, or private coach to write evaluations that college coaches can see. This creates an honest, credible assessment, while solving an efficiency problem for coaches who were previously having the same conversation hundreds of times with different college programs.

 

The Camp Experience Transformed

College camps have become a critical component of the recruiting ecosystem, and Scorability has positioned itself at the center of this phenomenon. The company helps run numerous camps, including mega-events like the DFW Showcase at TCU, which attracts 3,000 athletes and 300 visiting college programs.

These shared recruiting experiences create unique opportunities. While the host school might only be interested in a small percentage of attendees at their competitive level, they invite coaches from FCS, D2, and D3 programs to evaluate the remaining athletes.

Before Scorability, these events were chaotic. Now, as each athlete completes each drill, data flows into the app in real time. Visiting coaches view leaderboards and profiles live, often making decisions on the spot.

“We saw kids last year run their 40, and while they were catching their breath, they were getting offers,” Cruver recalls. “Coaches were able to see their first 40 come through the app on the leaderboard, they’d run over to where the 40s were being run, watch the second 40, and they’re like, ‘You’re our guy.'”

Parents, who previously stood along the fence with no visibility into what was happening, can now follow along in the app, watching where their child stacks up on leaderboards and completing parent interviews to add their perspective to their child’s profile.

 

Expanding Beyond Football

While Scorability started with football, partly due to Cruver’s personal experience and connections in that sport, the platform has accelerated expansion into women’s volleyball, men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball, and softball.

The Ryzer sports also include Archery, beach volleyball, bowling, boxing, bull riding, cheerleading, cricket, cross country, cycling, dance, diving, equestrian, esports, field hockey, flag football, golf, gymnastics, ice hockey, lacrosse, martial arts, motorsports, multi-sport, netball, pickleball, rowing, rugby, sailing, snow sports, stunt, strength & conditioning, surfing, swimming, tennis, track & field, water polo, wrestling camps. Ryzer also holds camps outside of sports such as environmental, academic, adventure, and arts.

The platform is designed to serve everyone, regardless of sport or competitive level. Whether it’s a D3 lacrosse player or a Power Five football recruit, Scorability aims to be the answer to the question: How does college sports recruiting work?

“We want to be the answer for everyone,” Cruver emphasizes. “Whatever sport your athlete plays, whatever level they’re capable of playing at, whatever college experience they’re interested in, we want the answer to be Scorability.”

The tools being built for discovering, evaluating, and engaging with athletes work equally well for a coach at a small school in Idaho as they do for the head coach at Alabama. The platform currently serves 1.5 million athletes and 4,500 college programs, with a trajectory aimed at simply becoming synonymous with recruiting itself.

 

The 10-Year Recruiting Journey

Scorability thinks about recruiting as a 10-year journey. Most kids interested in playing college sports start thinking about it in middle school, setting themselves up for a high school experience that will get them recruited. If they make it to college, they might play five, six, or even more years due to redshirts and medical redshirts.

“From 13 to 23, this is a 10-year journey,” Cruver notes. “Eventually, Scorability will have verified measurables and visual content going back a decade. At some point, we’re going to have that whole history and trajectory.”

This longitudinal data opens possibilities for predictive analytics and forecasting. The company has already developed a mentality assessment, purchasing the intellectual property from a company called AuctusIQ that previously used it for NFL evaluations and Fortune 500 hiring decisions. This assessment is proving predictive of athlete success.

As the platform accumulates more historical data, it will become increasingly capable of predicting how athletes will fit into specific programs and how successful they’ll be in particular roster spots.

 

The Business Model and Market Opportunity

Scorability’s model is straightforward: college coaches pay to use Scorability, recruiting athletes in a platform that provides the athletes free listings and foundational tools to assist them in their journey. This aligns incentives properly. Athletes and parents want maximum visibility, and college coaches get access to comprehensive, verified data.

The company has raised $51 million to date, a significant sum that reflects both Cruver’s track record as a successful entrepreneur and investor recognition that sports tech represents a major opportunity. The sector is seen as recession-proof, tariff-proof, and AI-proof, making it particularly attractive in uncertain economic times.

“If we do all the things we’re planning to do over the next few years, it is a multi-billion dollar business,” Cruver states confidently.

Unlike many startups that discover their market is smaller than anticipated, Scorability has found the opposite. “As we’ve gone along, we’re realizing the opportunity is bigger and bigger and bigger than we thought,” Cruver says.

 

The AI Advantage

Scorability leverages approximately two dozen AI tools across all functional areas. The product and engineering team of about 20 operates with the productivity of 60 people, according to Cruver.

This technological leverage allows the company to move quickly and consider expanding into adjacent areas within the youth-to-college sports journey, including roster management and athlete management more broadly.

 

Navigating Data Privacy

Operating in the youth sports space requires careful attention to data privacy. Scorability has drawn clear lines to manage these concerns:

• The platform serves athletes 13 and older, avoiding younger age groups with more stringent protections
• No health, medical, or HIPAA-related injury data is collected
• Data is not publicly accessible; it’s shared only with college coaches who are customers
• Athletes and parents can opt out at any time

The model benefits from the fact that athletes and parents actively want their data shared with college coaches to maximize recruiting visibility. This creates a natural opt-in environment rather than the privacy concerns that plague other data-driven platforms.

 

Competition and Partnerships

Scorability operates in a space with adjacent competitors but believes its approach is unique. Companies like NCSA offer personalized advisory services, which Scorability views as complementary rather than competitive. In fact, NCSA is a partner, having worked with Ryzer for years.

Other companies focus on specific aspects of the recruiting ecosystem. Hudl specializes in video, Teamworks provides athlete scheduling and college compliance systems, and various platforms offer profile-building tools. But none approach the market quite like Scorability, which aims to become the comprehensive marketplace where recruiting actually happens.

“I like having a lot of competitors,” Cruver says. “It’s been easier to get into a market and disrupt it when you don’t have to convince people of something completely new. You’re trying to convince them that this thing they already have a budget for, that they’re already using, is outdated and we can do it better.”

 

The Vision for Interoperability

Looking forward, Scorability sees enormous potential in connecting with other platforms across the youth sports ecosystem. Companies like TeamSnap, GameChanger, LeagueApps, and Hudl all possess valuable data about athletes, from participation history to stats, schedules, and video.

“There’s so much potential there that we could probably start a whole new podcast series about just that,” Cruver acknowledges.

However, the company is taking a focused approach. “It’s focus or fail,” Cruver says, emphasizing the need to first establish Scorability as the recruiting marketplace before expanding into broader data integration.

 

Making Coaches’ Lives Easier

At its core, Scorability aims to solve a fundamental problem: college coaches spend too much time recruiting and not enough time coaching. They juggle multiple phones, piece together information from 14 different sources, and struggle to get a complete picture of any individual athlete.

“Coaches want to get to know their kids. They actually want to coach,” Cruver observes. “Coaches do less and less coaching today than they ever have because of how painful the recruiting process is.”

By consolidating verified data, visual content, coach evaluations, and communication tools in one platform, Scorability gives coaches back time to focus on what they do best.

 

A More Equitable Process

Beyond efficiency, Scorability is working toward a more equitable and transparent recruiting process. The current system favors athletes with connections, resources, and knowledge of how to navigate the complexity. Athletes without those leg-ups often get overlooked, regardless of talent.

By creating a centralized platform with verified data accessible to coaches at every level, Scorability helps level the playing field. A talented athlete at a small high school in a rural area has the same opportunity to be discovered as an athlete at a nationally recognized program.

“99% of recruiting has no NIL, there is no Power Five, there are no big-name programs,” Cruver points out. “There are thousands and thousands of D3 lacrosse players for whom none of that’s relevant to their recruiting experience.”

Scorability is building for that 99%, creating tools that work for everyone regardless of sport, level, or resources.

 

The Road Ahead

As Scorability continues to grow, the company remains focused on its core mission: becoming the definitive platform for college sports recruiting. With strong funding, a talented team, strategic acquisitions like Ryzer, and partnerships across the ecosystem, the company is well-positioned to achieve that goal.

The platform’s success ultimately depends on maintaining the delicate balance between serving multiple constituencies: college coaches who need efficient tools, athletes and parents who need transparency and opportunity, and high school and club coaches who need to stay connected to the process.

When Scorability succeeds, the college recruiting experience will look dramatically different in five years. Instead of chaos, confusion, and inefficiency, there will be a clear pathway. Instead of unverified claims and missed connections, there will be trusted data and genuine opportunities. Instead of coaches spending endless hours piecing together information, they’ll focus on coaching.

For the millions of young athletes dreaming of playing college sports, that transformation can’t come soon enough. And for Brian Cruver and his team at Scorability, building that future is just getting started.