Venture Capital

Abstract

There are literally hundreds of thousands of college athletes in the United States, every one of whom was recruited in some way by the school that they decided to attend. In most cases, high athletes will consider multiple schools before eventually making a final decision. As a former college athlete myself, I took part in this exact decision making process, and can recall just how difficult and time consuming it proved to be. Today’s athletic world lacks a networking website that provides athletes and college recruiters with a convenient platform in order to connect with one another. The site will also link tournament directors with coaches of travel teams in order to address the same issues. Sportal will be the website to solve these problems.

Product/Service description

Each athlete will have his or her own personal Sportal page, stating basic information including current school, height and weight, game statistics, lifting amounts, running times, and player videos. Also included on the athlete’s personal page will be a “Commitment Status.” This will let potentially interested college recruiters know whether or not an athlete has already made a verbal or written commitment to a certain school. This will help save large amounts of time in the areas of research, phone calls, and visits to athletes who have already made a commitment to play somewhere else. Users will be able to choose whether or not their profile will be public or private to the remainder of the network. Public profiles will be able to be viewed by any other Sportal user, while private ones will only be able to be seen if the particular athlete has accepted a connection request from the other user. Also, if an athlete is logged into the network at the same time as someone they’re connected with, each user will see a notification stating that the other user is “online,” which will allow for easy communication between the two parties through the chat feature. Provided that two users...