IMG Academy+ Recruiting Experience
IMG Academy+ is an online platform that brings the elite developmental coaching and training methodologies of Florida's IMG Academy to athletes worldwide. A new pursuit from the online business is creating a college recruiting experience for athletes, placing them directly in front of the existing, vast network of over 40,000 active college coaches. Having previously architected the college coach’s search and discovery platform, I possessed first-hand insight into exactly how coaches filter talent and prioritize what athletes should complete. I optimized the athlete-profile UX to intentionally drive completion of these high-value fields. This data-informed approach transforms a standard profile into an experience that was deeply beneficial for both coaches and athletes.
Profile Building and Completion
The primary challenge of the legacy athlete experience was a lack of clarity around profile completion. Athletes were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of fields, resulting in sparse profiles that left college coaches frustrated. Recognizing that a profile’s value hinges on data hierarchy and completeness, I architected intuitive, bite-sized workflows that isolated high-priority fields first. By transforming a daunting data-entry process into a clean, step-by-step experience, the interface removed the intimidation factor for teenagers while ensuring coaches immediately surface the metrics they care about most.
Leveraging Coach Evaluation Insights: Designing with a first-hand understanding of the specific information college coaches prioritize.
High-Visibility Completion Triggers: Implementing targeted UI prompts to drive the completion of high-priority, coach-facing data fields.
Actionable Empty States: Transforming empty states into educational touch points that clearly guide athletes toward their next immediate task.
Progressive Workflows: Structuring step-by-step micro-tasks designed to organically increase profile completeness without cognitive overload.
Profile Activity and Exposure
The recruiting experience thrives on a naturally compounding, two-sided marketplace loop. Complete athlete profiles organically scale college coach interactions, creating a valuable feedback cycle of views, follows, and searches. Building upon the proven success of our legacy experience, I explored enhancements designed to further optimize this loop—focusing on reducing marketplace friction, deepening coach engagement, and delivering even higher visibility for athletes. By modernizing these core mechanics, we simultaneously elevate customer success and unlock greater returns for the business.
Defining the Experience: Profile activity and exposure acts as one of the key pillars that can drive the entire recruiting experience.
The Two-Sided Ecosystem: The marketplace naturally feeds off of itself; as athletes complete their profiles, coaches interact more frequently.
Real-Time Feedback Loops: Increased coach interactions surface directly within the athlete's experience as live college coach activity.
Driving Key Metrics: Tracking and climbing performance metrics like profile views, follows, and searches serves as a main driver for user retention.
ROI Alignment: Maximizing profile visibility directly leads to higher overall customer satisfaction and increased returns for the business.
Messaging Optimization
To elevate the user experience beyond our legacy platform, we took this as an opportunity to enhance our message center—the critical touchpoint where student-athletes, parents, and college coaches build meaningful connections. By introducing and testing strategic communication enhancements across all three user groups, we aimed to lower communication barriers and streamline interactions. I led the validation process for these proprietary technology shifts, establishing a clear, data-backed foundation to guide our next-generation product roadmap.
High-Impact Communication Strategy: I worked with product to Identify and target key friction points within the legacy message center to propose a new additional workflow for student athletes and patients
Three-Sided User Testing: Facilitated feedback loops and usability testing sessions with athletes, parents, and college coaches to ensure the enhancements solved real-world communication pain points.
Strategic Validation: Structured the qualitative and quantitative validation to ensure easy communication of our results. This was required to justify major technological shifts, ensuring user alignment before graduating the results to engineering.
Cross-Functional Alignment: Documented and communicated the testing insights to be able to be shared to product stakeholders and development teams with a validated blueprint for the future messaging experience.