To the other adult in the passenger seat,
Scouted started on a family vacation.
We were somewhere on a family vacation when my son
got a text from our recruiting advisor. He'd sent my son's video to a college
coach, and the coach wanted to schedule a call.
A natural recruiting moment. The first of what we both hoped would be many. My
second thought, after the high-five, was: how is he going to keep track of this?
Here's the thing. My son is, like every kid his age, completely certain he can
hold it all in his head. The names of the coaches. Who said what at which camp.
When to follow up with whom. What film he sent and when. Every parent of a
teenager knows how that sentence ends.
So my instinct was the same as everyone else's. I started thinking through a
shared Google sheet. Maybe an Apple note. Some columns: school,
coach, last contact, next step. The same thing every
recruiting family in America has built, or tried to.
And then, being a software developer by day, I knew it wouldn't scale. A
spreadsheet doesn't text him the morning of a camp deposit. A Notes doc doesn't
notice when a coach has gone quiet. Neither becomes a real assistant when the
list grows from four schools to twenty.
What if, I thought, all of this lived in one place, and the place was smart
enough to read the conversation back to him?
"Hey, the coach mentioned a camp in that text. Want to add a reminder to sign up?"
Or: "Here's a one-line read on where you stand with this program, refreshed every time something new happens."
Or: "Here's the research on this school, so you can ask better questions on the call instead of doing it at 11 p.m. the night before."
That's the app I wished my son had. So I built it.
It turns out this isn't just my son's problem, or even just baseball. Every
high school athlete trying to play at the next level, and every parent helping
them get there, is fighting the same losing battle with sticky notes and
tab-overflow. So Scouted was born.
If any of that sounds like your family, I hope you'll download it and send the
link down the hall.
— Matt Founder, Scouted · Recruiting dad, class of '27 baseball