Deal Memo: NextPick, Fixing College Athletic Recruiting
NextPick offers the college athletic recruiting process a modern three-sided marketplace that connects parents of athletes, vetted recruiting agents, and college coaches.
As of June 2025, I have no financial relationship with any company named here. If that changes, I will update this note.
If you have any questions about these memos, e-mail me.
NextPick is a company rising at the right time: between rising tuition costs and rising athlete compensation (via NIL), a seat on a college athletic roster is more valuable than ever before.
And despite the increased demand-side pressure, 98% of athletes are under-recruited.
At issue is access, an issue NextPick is already addressing nationwide.
The Heat is On in the College Athletic Recruiting World
- A seat on a college athletic roster is more valuable than ever before, given:
- College is more expensive than ever.
- The NCAA is making changes for the 2025 - 26 academic year. Among them:
- No Scholarship Cap: NCAA D1 schools will be able to offer scholarships to every athlete on their roster, eliminating previous limits.
- New Roster Limits: NCAA is introducing new, reduced roster limits.
- Scholarship Type: All sports will now be classified as equivalency sports, allowing schools to offer partial scholarships.
- Name, Image, and Likeness regulations (NIL) has opened the door for athletes who wish to capitalize on their roster spot.
- An average NCAA athlete earns $21,331 annually through NIL deals.
- Top performers like Colorado QB Shedeur Sanders secured $6M+ endorsements.
- Those economic drivers mean there is increased pressure and demand for a collegiate roster spot: more athletes have an incentive to continue playing after high school. 8.06 million high school athletes participated in sports during the 2023 - 24 academic year. And though half aspire to continue playing in college, only 7% of high school athletes go on to play in college.
- Coaches and college staff members have not been equipped to keep pace with this increase in demand. A 2022 NCAA coach survey revealed that 46% of coaches described “constant mental exhaustion” from managing NIL rules, transfer portals, and expanded recruiting responsibilities following NCAA policy changes.
- Parents and families of athletes are frustrated. While most sports operate showcases, programs, or tournaments that help improve athlete visibility and attract the attention of collegiate coaches, they are limited in scope: one estimate is that an athlete may gain visibility from 10-20 programs out of the 1,000+ in the country. They are also prohibitively expensive. (Those interested in continuing to play baseball, for example, spend between $5,000 – $20,000 to ensure they get their athlete in front of college coaches.) And worse: parents can’t be sure that these programs are actually worth the investment.
In short: there is an increased competition for a limited number of collegiate roster spots, those who are responsible for allocating roster spots are overwhelmed, and the existing solutions for athletes to gain visibility are both expensive and ineffective.
The NextPick Platform
NextPick offers a web-based marketplace designed to connect prospective collegiate athletes and their families, recruiting agents, and college coaches in a single, purpose-built platform.
In their words, NextPick is “where college athletic recruiting happens.”
The marketplace is engineered to clearly address each participant’s pain points directly:
- For Prospective Athletes and Their Families: Athlete profiles, which include stats, highlight reels, and direct messaging make it easier for athletes to stand out. NextPick enables families to find and engage vetted recruiting agents who advocate on their behalf, increasing their access to better scholarship offers and better schools. NextPick claims their athletes see a $42,000 increase in their financial aid packages, and the platform boasts a 100% placement satisfaction rate.
- For Recruiting Agents: Agents use NextPick to acquire new clients and access a suite of tools that streamline the athlete placement process. The platform further facilitates direct connection with college coaches and provides workflow features that help agents manage multiple clients (whether they originated on NextPick or not) efficiently.
- For College Coaches: Coaches benefit from a curated, actionable recruiting platform that surfaces high-quality, well-prepared athletes and simplifies the discovery process. NextPick’s coach pages are actionable, listing real-time roster needs and scholarship budgets, which makes it easier for an agent to present the right athlete. (For example, a page might say, “Yale Women’s Tennis seeks 3-star recruits with 3.8+ GPA for 2026”). The streamlined interface helps coaches save time.
The existing strategy is to exclusively service the tennis market, a focus which I believe is a strength at this stage. From here, NextPick may expand to offer additional sports or offer horizontal integration into other agent/coach/athletic administration activities, like NIL business management
Macro Trends Working in NextPick’s Favor
- The Return of School-Aged Sports: High school sports participation has rebounded to record highs post-pandemic, with over 8 million student-athletes competing annually. This expanding pool increases both the demand for college roster spots and the competition among athletes, intensifying the need for expert recruiting guidance.
- Skyrocketing Cost of College: The cost of attending college has risen dramatically over the past two decades, making scholarships and financial aid more critical than ever for families. As tuition outpaces wage growth, families are increasingly motivated to invest in recruiting services that can help secure athletic scholarships and reduce the financial burden of higher education.
- Professionalization and Complexity of College Recruiting: The recruiting landscape has become more complex, with the rise of the NCAA transfer portal, increased regulatory scrutiny, and the need for compliance with evolving NIL rules. Families and athletes are seeking expert help to navigate these new challenges, while coaches are overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of recruiting tasks. There’s a huge increase in the number of agencies.
- Expert Marketplace Growth: Consumers are gravitating toward managed marketplaces and expert-driven platforms for specialized decisions, as evidenced by the rise of companies like Leland and The Expert in adjacent verticals.
Competition
Traditional recruiting agencies offer guidance, connections, and media services, but are prohibitively expensive.
Along similar lines, recruiting coordinators are sometimes employed by athlete clubs but they’re limited in terms of scope: they often only work with certain colleges or universities, do not offer services tailored to the individual athlete, and may only operate within a set geographic region.
Technology-based competitors offer high school athletes profile pages that may be shared with college coaches, akin to LinkedIn. These platforms, like IMG Academy’s NCSA and the newly-acquired SportsRecruits (terms undisclosed), offer self-service tools which do not carefully monitor for quality.
Contrast that to NextPick, which is more like a specialized executive search firm. NextPick orients around placement outcomes: rather than opening the firehose and allowing athletes to bombard coaches, they encourage connection with specialist agents who can manage the pitch to a coach. This is a premium, specialized service through a carefully-managed marketplace - they’re competing with a quality, high-touch operation.
Simple Business Model & Revenue Options
NextPick operates with a straightforward business model, accepting a flat percentage of the fee paid by athletes and their families to recruiting agents. This simplicity is a strength.
By offering free access to college coaches and agents, NextPick encourages healthy growth and engagement on the supply side - and by offering a useful set of software tools to this audience that help them run their process (whether involving a NextPick athlete or not), NextPick is able to improve stickiness.
The company has the opportunity to sell premium features such as paid profile promotion for agents, LinkedIn-style “Who Viewed Your Profile” analytics, data insights, or a comprehensive toolkit for agents to manage their recruiting businesses (including managing payments).
Traction & Key Metrics
NextPick has shared early signs of product-market fit with (a self-reported) 600+ college coaches (including coaches from Duke, Notre Dame, Boston University, Dartmouth, Alabama, Penn State, Oregon, Clemson, and others) and 150+ agents already active on the platform. The company boasts a 98 Net Promoter Score (NPS) from their collection of agents and coaches.
They have noteworthy monthly revenue.
The Hustle Fund Deal Assessment Framework
- Team: What is the founder’s earned secret? Steven Say, a former Division I and Division II college tennis athlete, and Romain Costamagna, a Division II national champion tennis player, have an intimate understanding of the challenges facing college athletes. Both have firsthand experience navigating the recruiting process as athletes and understand the other side of the marketplace through their network of teammates and opponents who are now coaches. Few understand the pain points of their marketplace participants as acutely as these guys.
- Product: Is this a vitamin, or a pain killer? This is a painkiller sorely needed in an athletic recruiting process fraught with anxiety for families, athletes, and coaches - and due to the macro factors, it’s pain that is becoming more serious each year.
- Market: How big is this market, and why now? NextPick offers a “better way” to secure roster placement for ~600,000 NCAA athletes, and the opportunity to help is even greater given the sharp increase in transfer portal activity. The timing is exactly right as there is more demand than ever before - and the process has not improved in any way.
- Execution: Are the customer acquisition channels unique? The NextPick customer acquisition channels they’re building - especially the SEO content moat and their planned network of ambassadors - will be proprietary and clearly differentiated from the ads-heavy approach taken by competition.
- Fundraisability: Is the founder a strong sales person? Absolutely. The duo onboarded 600+ college coaches and 150+ agents pre-launch and made an impressive pitch at the Philadelphia This Week in Startups event.
NextPick is building a quality-first marketplace at a pivotal moment in college athletics. As tuition rises and monetization accelerates, roster spots have never been more valuable. By connecting overwhelmed coaches, agents, and athlete families in a streamlined three-sided marketplace, NextPick is bringing order to a chaotic, fragmented recruiting process.
With strong founder-market fit and major structural tailwinds, NextPick is a company to watch.