NCSA College Recruiting
NCSA College Recruiting is the world’s largest collegiate athletic recruiting network, functioning as a powerful, multi-sided marketplace that connects high school student-athletes with collegiate sports programs. By enabling families to build comprehensive athletic and academic profiles, NCSA places prospects directly in front of a network of over 40,000 active college coaches while providing human-led, expert guidance to navigate the complexities of the recruitment lifecycle. NCSA has assisted over 750,000 student-athletes since the year 2000, with more than 330,000 officially making college commitments.
Design Refresh & Modernization
While simultaneously architecting a next-generation platform, we maintained a vital obligation to continuously deliver value and optimize usability for the thousands of active athletes and families currently relying on our live product. To drive customer retention and boost "curb appeal" for prospective users, I led a strategic visual and structural refresh of our legacy application. This required and update with the IMG Academy branding guidelines and evaluating what short-term improvements could be considered within scope.
Balancing Parallel Roadmaps: Strategically delivered high-impact visual improvements to the active legacy platform, ensuring current paying users received a premium experience while long-term parallel reconstruction was underway.
Cross-Functional Triad Research: Conducted targeted alignment interviews across internal Product, Sales, and Service teams, leveraging their unique frontline insights on customer pain points and business goals to shape high-value feature opportunities.
Curb Appeal & Retention Focus: Modernized visual hierarchies, typography, and layout styling to elevate perceived product value, incentivize user engagement, and attract net-new acquisitions.
Retrofitting Brand Guidelines: Successfully adapted and applied current IMG Academy brand standards, establishing visual cohesion across our digital touch-points.
Systematic UX Polish: Targeted and improved historical usability issues of core product pages to make the highest impact.