Improving on the old college try.

• Author: Schely, Stewart
• Position: SPORTS BIZ

CONGRATULATIONS, PROUD PARENT! Your kid just scored the goal, blasted the home run, swished the three, leapt over the linebacker, won the heat, blocked the kick or chipped it in for birdie to win the tourney. Later than evening, as you burn a fresh DVD highlight reel on your MacBook Pro, you can almost feel that $30k tuition melting away.

But here comes George White, ex-college coach, business executive and all-around connected sports guy, with some advice: Stop right there!

"College coaches don't recruit from highlight videos," White says. "Everybody makes great plays. What coaches want to see is full game video."

And White should know. As the men's head basketball coach at Virginia State University and an assistant coach at Stanford, Metropolitan State University of Denver and other programs, White spent plenty of time in front of the screen, scoping out prospects. Somewhere around the time he mastered the art of the fast-forward--"I can watch a 2 1/2-hour basketball game in 45 minutes," White quips--he had an epiphany. There had to be a better way to match up high school athletes with college coaches than pawing through stacks of DVDs and scattered YouTube uploads.

White's Denver-based company, Recruiting Sports Network, hopes to be that very solution. Recruiting Sports matches promising athletes with colleges, helping families navigate a maze of schools, coaches, divisions and skill levels with a level of scale and dexterity that's new to the game.

Recruiting Sports does it through Web-based tools and mobile apps that draw from a proprietary database of more than 50,000 college coaches plus insider intelligence about everything from what sports are offered where to how well a particular team has performed relative to its division. "There's a big knowledge void and lack of exchange of key information to help athletes and coaches make the best decision," White says.

The platform lets athletes upload videos--full games--to a centralized platform. It pre-populates email messages with information for coaches to make judgments about prospects. And it doles out advice to find the right...