PrepHero

Recruiting runs on relationships not everyone has.

For a high-school athlete, getting recruited has less to do with talent than with access — who your coach knows, which camps you can afford, whether a college program ever lays eyes on you. The result is a market full of mismatches: capable athletes go unseen, and coaches sift through unstructured emails, highlight links, and word-of-mouth.

EXACT Sports ran the camps where athletes and evaluators actually met in person. PrepHero was the idea of turning those fleeting in-person moments into a durable, structured connection that lived online — so a great showing at a camp didn't evaporate the moment everyone went home.

Two audiences, one platform, from nothing.

There was no existing system to extend — this was a zero-to-one build. And it had to serve two very different users at once without feeling bolted together:

Build the connective tissue, not just a directory.

The easy version of this product is a directory: list athletes, let coaches browse. That fails because it ignores the moment value is actually created — the camp, where evaluation happens. PrepHero was designed around that event: registration fed the profile, the camp produced evaluation data, and that data is what made a profile worth a coach's attention.

On a pragmatic LAMP-era stack — PHP, MySQL, jQuery — I built the full surface: athlete-facing profiles and registration, coach-facing recruiting tools, and the payment and subscription layer underneath. Boring, dependable technology chosen so the product logic could move fast.

How the pieces fit.

Two front-end experiences over a shared application core, with Stripe for money and AWS underneath.

The capabilities that made it real.

What it added up to.

For an athlete, a profile is only as valuable as who can see it. PrepHero connected them to a recruiting network that spanned college athletics at every level:

Zero-to-one is a product problem first.

The technology — PHP, MySQL, Stripe — was never the hard part. The hard part was understanding two audiences well enough to build one thing that served both, and anchoring the product to the real-world event where athletes and coaches actually connect.

PrepHero was my early lesson that engineering a marketplace is mostly about modeling trust: giving a coach a reason to believe a profile, and giving an athlete a path to be seen. Get that right and a boring stack is more than enough; get it wrong and no framework saves you.