Where prep players meet college coaches

In grassroots basketball the hard part isn’t playing — it’s being seen. Prep Hoops is the platform that fixes that: high-school players build a profile, college coaches search a database of prospects, and the right ones find each other. Toobler engineered the platform behind it — profiles, recruiting tools, verified coach access and subscription payments — and evolved it for more than two years.

Customer and context

Prep Hoops is a basketball recruiting platform and media outlet — “where players become prospects” — and the product Toobler built for Prep Network, the company behind it. It serves two sides at once: high-school and grassroots players (and their parents), who build profiles and want exposure to college programs, and college coaches, who subscribe to search a database of prospects and recruit them. Around that sits editorial coverage, rankings and events. Toobler was Prep Network’s engineering partner for the platform and its subscription model, and developed it from 2016 through 2018.

The challenge

A recruiting platform is a two-sided marketplace with a media business attached, and each side needs something different:

• Players need a profile that gets found. Searchable by the things coaches actually recruit on — state, graduation year, position, height — with stats, galleries and the details a coach can act on.
• Coaches need to be verified, and to pay. Not everyone claiming to be a college coach is one; access to players is gated, so coaches register, get approved, and subscribe.
• The business runs on subscriptions. Tiered plans, payments and upgrades — the revenue model had to be built into the product, not bolted on.
• It had to be run by a media team, and keep evolving. Non-technical staff manage content, pricing and settings; and the platform had to grow, release after release, as the business did.

The solution

A searchable prospect database. Toobler built player profiles as the core: create and edit a profile with a gallery and details, and — the part that matters — find a player, filtered by state, graduation year, position and height, so a coach can recruit on the criteria that count. Player detail pages, side-by-side comparison, and a directory of profiles.

Verified coaches, gated access. College coaches register, an admin approves them, and approved coaches get the recruiting tools — searching profiles, messaging and recruiting players. Access to the prospect side is controlled, not open to anyone.

Subscriptions and payments, built in. Tiered subscription plans (Starter through All-American), Stripe payments, profile-creation fees and plan management — the revenue model engineered into the platform and run from an admin.

A platform a media team can run. Built on a customized CMS with a bespoke theme and a membership layer, so a non-technical editorial team manages content, pricing and settings themselves — and the platform was maintained and enhanced continuously across the engagement.

Built and evolved as a partnership. From the initial build and responsive HTML conversion through a live launch and a long tail of enhancements, feedback and an All-Access Pass revamp, Toobler developed Prep Hoops over more than two years.

Engineering worth naming

• A two-sided marketplace, not a website. Players and coaches are different products on one platform — profiles and exposure on one side; search, verification and subscriptions on the other.
• Recruiting search that matches how coaches recruit. Filter by state, graduation year, position and height — the platform models recruiting, not just listings.
• A subscription business, engineered in. Verified-coach approval, tiered plans and Stripe payments as first-class parts of the product.
• A media team in control. A bespoke CMS and membership layer, so editors run content, pricing and settings without engineering.

Results

• Players become findable — a searchable prospect database where a college coach can filter to exactly the players they recruit.
• Coaches are verified and subscribed — gated, approved access with tiered plans and payments built in.
• A platform the media team runs and grows — editorial, pricing and settings in their hands, maintained and enhanced over two-plus years.
• A long-term engineering partnership — build, launch and continuously evolve the platform behind a national basketball-recruiting brand.

What this means for sports software

Sports software is rarely just one product — a recruiting platform is a two-sided marketplace, a subscription business and a media operation at once, and it only works if the search, the verification and the payments are engineered around how the sport’s ecosystem actually behaves. Prep Hoops is that in practice: a platform where high-school players become college prospects, built on a model that verifies coaches, gates access and runs on subscriptions, and evolved by a long-term engineering partner. If you run a sports media, recruiting or membership business and need the platform behind it built and grown with you, talk to Toobler’s engineering team.