Working title · Production beta · Next.js · Postgres · MapLibre
RecruitRoam
Find the right college. Plan every visit.
RecruitRoam turns a scattered recruiting process into one family workspace. Athletes and parents can search a source-backed catalog, capture an invitation, build the actual campus trip, carry a day-of plan, and compare the decision afterward — without turning the family conversation into another public social feed.
Origin
How it started
The college visit is usually treated as a travel problem or a spreadsheet problem. For a family, it is both — plus recruiting, academics, cost, timing, and a young person's future. I built one private system that follows that whole arc instead of handing the family six disconnected tools. The current name is intentionally temporary while the product runs in a controlled production beta.
Features
What it does
A real college and athletics catalog
Search across 204 schools in six states, 1,692 athletic programs, 677 staff profiles, 1,619 academic programs, and 24 mapped arrival points. Records carry source and freshness information instead of pretending every web result is equally current.
Private family workspaces
Separate household workspaces, role-based memberships, and single-use, expiring, revocable email invitations. Family planning data stays inside the family account rather than becoming a public athlete profile.
Invitation to structured opportunity
Paste a coach invitation or recruiting note and turn it into a reviewable opportunity with school, sport, dates, contacts, confidence, and follow-up fields before it enters the family plan.
The trip is part of the decision
Real road routing, campus stops, buffers, meals, lodging assumptions, mileage, estimated costs, and calendar export live beside the recruiting record. The athlete gets a focused day-of view while parents keep the full operating picture.
One decision file
Athlete and family priorities can be recorded separately, compared, and revisited after the visit. The system preserves the difference between the student's experience and the household's practical constraints.
Under the hood
Engineering
Trust starts with the record
The catalog is not an anonymous pile of scraped text. School, program, staff, academic, and arrival records retain source and freshness fields so a family can see what the system knows and when it knew it. That evidence boundary matters more here than a bigger-looking result count.
Privacy is a tenancy boundary
Family accounts own their own workspaces. Membership roles, invitation lifecycle, and application-owned sessions enforce that boundary server-side. A private-by-default promise is only credible if one household cannot accidentally inherit another household's data through a convenient query or shared cache.
Routing is live; traffic and hotel inventory are not
Trip geometry and drive estimates use live OpenStreetMap/OSRM routing. Traffic forecasts and bookable hotel inventory are not connected in the current beta, so the interface labels lodging and schedule inputs as planning assumptions instead of presenting them as live availability.
What is possible
The name can change. The product thesis should not.
RecruitRoam is a controlled-release working title. The permanent brand is still being decided, but the product is already real: a private, evidence-aware family workspace that connects discovery, recruiting, travel, and the decision without claiming to predict admissions or recruiting outcomes.
Stack
- Next.js App Router
- React · TypeScript
- Neon Postgres · PostGIS
- MapLibre · OpenStreetMap · OSRM
- Resend
- Vercel