Turning the Page: ACES Nation's Visionary Journey from College Recruiting to Revolutionizing Youth Sports and Athlete Development

Beyond the Scoreboard: Transforming College Recruiting to Empower Every Athlete's Journey and Unveiling a New Vision for Sports Success

For most of the past 16 years, I have worked in college recruiting.  Whether it was working with individual athletes to get them placed in college programs or developing recruiting software for organizations to use to manage the recruiting process to maximize the opportunities for their players, the goal has always been the same...to help athletes to achieve their goal of becoming a college athlete.  It is an awesome feeling knowing that you played a role in positively impacting someone's life and possibly giving them an opportunity that they may have never had without your involvement.  Once you experience the feeling of knowing that you can make a difference, it's like a shot of dopamine and you want to repeat that feeling over and over again by helping everybody you can!

However, when it comes to recruiting, the reality is that no matter how many athletes you try to help, it is impossible to help them all.  Since only a very small number of athletes can play in college, you cannot help far more than you can. Having been involved in some capacity with hundreds of thousands of athletes throughout my career, I have experienced first-hand the heartbreak and disappointment that athletes, and their parents, feel when they realize that they have no place to play or if they do, having to face the fact that the cost of college is beyond what they can afford.

Unfortunately, most parents don't understand how the system works, and they don't realize that over 90% of all high school athletes will NEVER play at a 4-year college. For those that can, there is the daunting fact that the average college athletic scholarship is under $4,000 per roster spot per year for NCAA DI, DII, DIII & NAIA. Some sports are worse than others.  Take baseball, men's lacrosse and men's soccer for example, where the average athletic scholarship is about $2,395 per rostered player per year.

I believe we are looking at things through an old broken lens and there is a better way for us to move forward with less stress, pressure and insanity.

Don't get me wrong, I want every athlete that is wanting, willing and able to play in college to have a chance to experience what that is like!  For those of us that were blessed with that opportunity, we know what it feels like and how it positively impacted our lives.

That said, what I want even more is...

1. for every athlete to play their sport as long as possible because playing sports prepares you for life, and

2. for every athlete to have the opportunity to go to college because an education can change lives and it cannot be taken away.

Embracing Change: A Leap of Faith from Recruiting to Tackling Bigger Challenges in Youth and High School Sports

With this weighing heavy on my mind, about 4 months ago I made the difficult, no, gut-wrenching, decision to make a major pivot and step away from focusing on college recruiting to take on the bigger issues that sports organizations are facing. These are the ones that deal with balancing the complex demands and many times, unrealistic expectations of parents, athletes and coaches with the challenges of affordability, efficiency and scalability.

I was blessed to be part of the incredible College Fit Finder legacy started by Greg Allen and Stacy Allen. Fortunately, that legacy will not only continue, but will flourish in our new partnership with the talented team at SportsRecruits. With that transition coming to its completion, we will still be able to assist in providing any organization with the best recruiting software in the country, but now it is time for ACES Nation to focus on forging a new path forward.

Believe me, this was not an easy decision and, it was time for me to once again put my personal belief of “FAITH OVER FEAR” to the test. Not only did I have doubters and non-believers all around me, but I also had to acknowledge the fact that I had allowed my own personal identity to become entangled with my profession. Neither of these promoted much confidence, but as my good friend Jeremy Boone says, "courage comes before confidence.” I had to remind myself that just because something hasn’t been done before, it doesn’t mean it cannot be done. If that were true, we would have never put a man on the moon and Roger Bannister would have never run the mile in under 4 minutes.

When you have faith and truly believe that God will lead you in the right direction, amazing things can happen.

-Tim Livingston

Founder & CEO at ACES Nation