Scout accounts, athlete search, favorites and messaging

What it is

A free account for college coaches ("scouts") to find athletes, keep a list of players they like, follow tournaments, and ask a family to connect. Athletes and parents stay in control: only public pages are searchable, and a scout cannot message a player until the family accepts a request.

How to use it

1. Sign up at the scout signup page with a college (.edu) email, your school, title and sport. Confirm the email within 48 hours with the link we send. Until you confirm, you can sign in but see no athletes.
2. Find athletes (web): search by name, school or team, then filter by sport, position, grad year, throws and bats, GPA, 60-yard time, exit, throw and pitch velocity, and game stats such as batting average, OPS, home runs, ERA and strikeouts for a chosen season. Pages are 24 athletes each.
3. Open a player to see their public page. Star them to add to Favorites, and keep a private note that only you see.
4. Follow tournaments to see which of your starred players are playing and when. The mobile app has a scout home with upcoming tournaments, starred players and messages, plus the player pages.
5. To reach a player, send a request to meet (a short note, and optionally where and when). The family answers; if they accept, a conversation opens with every linked parent on it.

Rules and limits

• Only athletes who made their page public are searchable. Private pages cannot be found, starred or messaged.
• Messaging is switched off for now. Until it is turned on, scouts can search, star, take notes and view tournaments, but request-to-meet and messages are unavailable, and families see no scout inbox.
• When messaging is on: a scout cannot start a chat. They get 10 requests a day, one open request per athlete at a time, and a declined request means a 30 day wait before asking that athlete again. A request nobody answers lapses after 14 days. Links, emails, phone numbers and social handles are not allowed in requests or messages. After 3 scout messages in a row with no reply, the scout has to wait for the family. Messages are limited to 2000 characters.
• A player under 18 can only be reached if a parent is linked, and the parent is on every message. Under-13 accounts are answered by the parent only. Families can block or report a scout.
• A suspended scout loses all access at once.
• Search is limited to 200 searches an hour and the first 20 pages of any search; narrow the filters to go deeper.

Edge cases

• If the .edu domain matches a school we know, your account is linked to that college automatically.
• If you did not get the confirmation email, use the resend option on your scout home page.
• Game stats are entered by the athlete or imported, and are not verified.
• An athlete who turns their page private disappears from search and can no longer be messaged.
• The athlete search with filters is on the web; the mobile scout app does not have it.