Scoped a verified-first athlete performance and recruitment platform for a 50-to-60 athlete pilot

The problem

Youth and college sports recruitment runs on trust that the data is weak. Incumbent platforms rely on athlete-self-reported metrics, their automated AI tagging carries explicit warnings that results may be inaccurate, and team fundraising partners take up to 20% of every donation — $2,000 of a $10,000 raise. Coaches have no simple way to certify a metric, athletes have no way to prove one, and recruiters cannot tell a claimed 40-yard dash from a verified one.

A sports technology startup wanted a platform built around verification: coaches, not athletes, lock performance records, and only verified data flows into recruiter-facing profiles, highlight reels and outreach emails. The pilot had to deploy at one host institution with 50 to 60 student-athletes and produce the unit economics — burn multiple under 1.5x, LTV to CAC of at least 3 to 1 — that an institutional or Series A audience would examine.

What it cost

Without a scoped, cited plan, the startup had a compelling idea and three uploaded research documents but nothing a board, an institution or an investor could evaluate. Feature ambition across three user types risked a build with no pilot-sized first release.

What we built

A statement of work in cited edition, with every quantitative and competitive claim keyed to a references section. The platform is structured as three hubs, each feature tagged to a build phase. Athlete Hub: sport-specific dynamic profiles, a metric dashboard that separates athlete-claimed from coach-verified records, an AI highlight reel builder with automatic sequencing, trimming, scoring and stat overlays, a college outreach engine that sends pitch emails containing only verified stats, nightly leaderboards by age, region and sport, and a donation gateway at a 0–5% effective fee.

Coach Hub: the platform's trust anchor, centralising verification authority with credentialed coaches and a pose-estimation verification loop. Recruiter Hub: a verified-only data feed for college programmes across NCAA divisions and NAIA. The SOW fixes a 12-month, three-phase build, a fixed-phase engagement model, the pilot cohort, and the market and competitive context underpinning each design decision.

What changed

The startup has a board-ready scope tying every feature to a documented incumbent gap and a build phase, ready to take to a host institution and to capital conversations. Pilot metrics will exist once the first cohort is live.