NCSA Coach
NCSA Coach is a specialized digital platform built for college coaches to efficiently discover, evaluate, and recruit student-athletes within the world's largest collegiate athletic network. Acting as the core activity engine of a two-sided recruiting marketplace, the platform enables coaches to filter thousands of prospects while tracking high-intent athletes who have viewed or indicated interest in their program.
Rebuilding the Coach Experience
Faced with large technical debt of our legacy product, we made the strategic decision to architect a brand-new, modern coach experience from the ground up. This required a rigorous audit of the legacy ecosystem to decouple essential core functionality from bloated features that no longer served our users. Starting fresh allowed us to establish a unified, design system that I spearheaded in close collaboration with engineering, beautifully aligning the new platform with current IMG Academy branding guidelines.
Comprehensive Legacy Audit: Conducted a deep-dive audit of the legacy platform, systematically evaluating feature usage and user workflows to determine what to migrate, optimize, or sunset.
Spearheaded the Design System: Formulated, launched, and maintained a scalable Figma design system of reusable components and design tokens that seamlessly integrated current IMG Academy branding.
Engineering Partnership: Partnered directly with development teams to ensure we were speaking the same language and we could execute on components that would match between our design library and the production code.
Intentional Onboarding Design: Designed a net-new, intuitive onboarding experience to collect core recruiting information that set coach searches up for success from the start.
Unlocking Future Product Scale: Leveraged the clean slate of the new architecture to uncover and design advanced feature opportunities that were previously impossible to implement due to legacy technical limitations.
Athlete Profile Optimization
By balancing the specific data points college coaches prioritize with the actual information student-athletes provide, I designed an optimized profile experience for the discovery phase of recruiting. Leveraging an intimate understanding of our two-sided marketplace, I structurally re-ordered athlete data to play to our platform's strengths—creating an easily scannable browsing experience that aligns user intents with actionable next steps.
Leveraging Audit Insights: Referenced my audit of the legacy coach platform to identify historical friction points and preserve high-value profile information in the new design.
Search-to-Profile Alignment: Analyzed the most common coach search and filtering criteria to ensure those critical data points (such as position, location, GPA, and video) were immediately prominent and scannable on the profile.
Context-Preserving Slide-out View: Designed a net-new profile slide-out experience directly from the search and list views, empowering coaches to comfortably evaluate an athlete's details without losing their place or navigating away from their filtered results.
High-Utility Quick Actions: Engineered a sticky, prominent top-of-profile action tier, giving coaches immediate, one-click access to essential recruiting triggers like "Follow," "Add to List," "Export," or "Email”.
Athlete Relevancy
A core driver of value for the NCSA platform is ensuring college coaches are instantly connected with the most relevant athletes for their specific program needs. To elevate this experience across our web product, email recommendations, and in-app notifications, I had to untangle complex legacy workflows and navigate significant technical debt. By focusing on incremental, high-impact design interventions, I worked to maximize value for both student-athletes and coaches without destabilizing the foundational system architecture.
Algorithmic Logic Deep-Dive: Gained a deep understanding of the match percentage and search result sort-order to optimize how relevant athlete data is surfaced to coaches in-product. This required serving college coach needs and bringing value to the business in tandem.
Email Recommendation Pipeline: Worked closely with internal support teams and active college coaches to evaluate existing pain points and start to reimagine a more intuitive experience.
Relevant Notifications: Formulated and validated net-new notification types, styles, and frequencies directly with coaches to ensure high-value updates never turned into noise.
Designing Around Technical Debt: Balanced complex legacy constraints with user desires, strategically designing UX improvements that could be shipped within existing technical limitations while still driving measurable engagement.
Private Coach Activity
Serving a wide spectrum of collegiate athletic divisions means designing for coaches with vastly differing opinions on data sharing and privacy. While visible coach activity serves as a powerful validation signal for athletes, it can inadvertently raise false expectations if the coach is merely researching. I explored and designed an experience that allows coaches to control their exposure level and interact with total privacy, while still triggering real-time signals that validate organic marketplace momentum for the athlete.
Balancing Multi-User Psychologies: Navigated the opposing needs of a two-sided marketplace—protecting coach privacy and reducing recruitment pressure while satisfying the athlete's need for real-time validation.
360-Degree Stakeholder Research: Collected feedback in the form of user interviews and feedback surveys across the entire user ecosystem—coaches, athletes, and parents—to ensure the solution balanced privacy with perceived value.
Churn & Disruption Prevention: Evaluated the psychological impact of changing "activity signals" on paying customers, carefully designing the anonymous activity to answer immediate questions and maintain high user trust to prevent business disruption.
Privacy Controls: Designed intuitive, scalable settings that empower coaches across different divisions to customize their activity visibility based on their preference.
Anonymous Value Signals: Designed a solution to visualize "exposure" to the athlete without exposing sensitive, individual coach actions prematurely.