How to Build a College Recruiting Target List (Without Drowning in Spreadsheets)

Start with athletic fit — and be honest

Athletic fit is the hardest dimension because it requires an honest assessment of your athlete's ability, and honest assessments are hard to come by.

Club coaches tend to overrate their players — partly out of genuine belief, partly because families who think their kid is a D1 prospect are more likely to keep paying for club. College coaches rarely give direct feedback; silence is their default response to athletes who aren't a fit, and silence is ambiguous. So families are left guessing.

Here's how to get a clearer picture:

Study rosters at your target programs.
Go to the athletics website of any school you're considering and look at the current roster. What are the stats of players at your athlete's position? Where did they come from? If every midfielder on a D1 roster ran a sub-5:00 mile and your athlete runs a 5:45, that's data. If the roster is filled with players from elite clubs and your athlete plays mid-level club, that tells you something too.

Compare competitive results, not potential.
Recruiting decisions are based on what your athlete has done, not what you believe they could do with the right coaching. Look at your athlete's stats, times, or tournament results and compare them to athletes who are currently on rosters at your target schools. Many sports have public databases — check conference stats pages, ranking sites, and recruiting services that publish committed athlete profiles. Track and field athletes have an advantage here: many programs publish specific recruiting standards by event, which makes the athletic fit comparison more direct than in most other sports.

Use the response rate as a signal.
If your athlete has sent well-crafted emails with a solid highlight reel to 15 programs at a particular division level and gotten zero responses, that's meaningful information. It doesn't necessarily mean the division is wrong — your emails might need work, or you might be contacting programs with no roster needs. But if you've been emailing D1 programs for three months with complete silence, it's time to expand your list to include D2 and D3 programs.

Ask direct questions at camps and showcases.
If your athlete attends a prospect camp where coaches are evaluating, ask afterward: "Based on what you saw today, what level of program would be a realistic fit?" Not every coach will answer honestly, but some will — and one honest answer is worth more than a year of guessing.

The goal is to identify a realistic division range — not a single division, but a band. An athlete might be competitive at strong D2 programs and some mid-tier D1 programs. That range becomes the athletic filter for your list.

How the transfer portal changes your list

The transfer portal has fundamentally altered recruiting math for high school athletes, and most target-list advice doesn't account for it.

Here's the reality: coaches at many programs — especially D1 — now fill roster spots with transfer portal players who have proven college experience. A high school junior is an unknown. A 21-year-old with three years of college stats is a known quantity. When a coach tells your athlete "we like your film but we're going to see what happens in the portal first," that's not a brush-off — it's how roster management works now.

What this means for your target list:

Cast wider across divisions.
The old advice of targeting 8–10 schools in a single division is riskier now. If you're targeting D1, include D2 programs as genuine options, not just backups you'd be embarrassed to attend. Some D2 programs offer more athletic scholarship money, more playing time, and better developmental environments than bottom-tier D1 programs.

Research programs that prioritize high school recruits.
Some programs still build primarily through high school recruiting rather than the portal. These tend to be programs with strong cultures, good player development track records, and coaches who've been in place for years. They're better bets for a high schooler's target list.

Don't wait for perfect information.
The portal means that roster spots can appear and disappear quickly. A program that was "full" in October might have three openings in January. Build your list based on fit, not on whether you think there's currently a spot available. Spots change. Fit doesn't.

Going from 100 schools to 30

Start wide and filter ruthlessly. Here's the process:

Generate the initial pool.
Use the NCAA and NAIA directories to find every program in your sport within your athlete's realistic division range. If you're looking at D2 and D3, that might be 500+ programs. Don't panic — you're about to cut most of them.

Apply the academic filter first.
Remove any school that doesn't offer your athlete's intended major. If they're undecided, remove schools that are weak across the board academically or that have graduation rates you're not comfortable with. This alone will cut 30–40% of the list.

Apply the geographic filter.
Every family has different preferences here, but be honest about them. If your athlete will be miserable eight hours from home, remove schools beyond that radius. If weather matters, remove it. If campus size matters — small liberal arts vs. large state university — filter for that now. These preferences are legitimate and non-negotiable; don't let anyone tell you to "keep an open mind" about factors that will affect your athlete's daily quality of life for four years.

Apply the financial filter.
This is where families get tripped up because financial aid varies enormously by division and school type. The key facts:

• D1 and D2 programs can offer athletic scholarships, but most sports are "equivalency" sports where the scholarship money is divided among many athletes. A "scholarship" might cover 25% of tuition.
• D3 programs offer zero athletic scholarships. The coach might advocate for you in admissions, but the financial aid package is entirely need-based and merit-based.
• A 40% scholarship at an out-of-state public university can still cost more than full price at an in-state school. Run the net price calculator on every school's website — it takes 15 minutes and gives you a ballpark of actual cost.
• NAIA programs can offer athletic scholarships and often have more flexibility than NCAA programs in how they distribute aid.

Remove any school where the likely out-of-pocket cost is beyond what your family can sustain for four years. Not what you could stretch for in year one — what you can sustain. Student-athlete transfers due to financial strain are more common than anyone talks about.

After these four filters, you should be somewhere around 30–50 schools. That's your working pool.

Going from 30 to a working list of 15–20

Now the research gets specific. For each remaining school, dig into three things:

Roster needs.
Check the current roster and look at the class breakdown. If a program has six juniors at your athlete's position, they're probably not recruiting that position heavily this cycle. If they have two seniors graduating, that's a potential opening. Look at the recruiting class they just signed — did they already fill the position? This information is public on most athletics websites.

Coaching staff stability.
Search for how long the head coach has been at the program. A coach who has been there eight years with a consistent recruiting approach is more predictable than a first-year coach who might overhaul the roster. Coaching changes are one of the biggest risks in recruiting — the coach who recruits you is not always the coach who coaches you. Programs with high coaching turnover deserve extra scrutiny.

Program trajectory.
Is the team getting better or worse? Look at win-loss records over the past three to four seasons. A program on the rise is usually a better bet than one that peaked three years ago — improving programs tend to have better culture, more institutional support, and more invested coaching staffs.

After this round of research, cut schools where the roster needs don't align, where coaching instability is a red flag, or where the program trajectory doesn't inspire confidence. Your list should land around 15–20 programs.

That's your target list. These are the schools your athlete will email, whose camps they'll attend, and whose coaches they'll build relationships with.

Categorize your list: reach, fit, and safety

Within your 15–20 schools, every school should fall into one of three categories:

• Reach (3–5 schools): Programs where your athlete is at the lower end of what they typically recruit. Admission might be tougher, the roster might be competitive, or the financial picture is uncertain. Worth pursuing but not counting on.
• Fit (7–10 schools): Programs where your athlete's ability, academics, and finances all align. These should be the core of your outreach. If a fit school offers, it should feel like a genuine win — not a consolation.
• Safety (3–5 schools): Programs where your athlete is clearly competitive and admission is likely. These aren't throwaway options — they're schools where your athlete would thrive and potentially get more playing time and scholarship money than at higher-division programs.

If your list is all reaches, you're setting up for disappointment. If it's all safeties, you might be selling your athlete short. The balance matters.

When to update your list

A target list is not a one-time exercise. It should evolve based on new information:

Add schools when coaches reach out.
If a coach emails your athlete after seeing their reel or watching them at a showcase, that program goes on the list immediately — regardless of whether it was on your radar before. Genuine coach interest is the strongest signal in recruiting.

Cut schools after sustained silence.
If your athlete has emailed a program three times over two months with a solid highlight reel and gotten no response, move that school to the bottom of the list or remove it. Silence from a coach who has seen your materials is, unfortunately, an answer.

Adjust divisions based on response patterns.
If D1 programs are consistently silent but D2 coaches are responding, your list should shift accordingly. This isn't failure — it's the market telling you where your athlete fits. Plenty of D2 and D3 athletes have better college experiences than D1 athletes who ride the bench for four years.

Revisit after every showcase or camp.
New performances create new data. A strong showing at a camp might open doors at programs you'd written off. A disappointing season might mean cutting some reaches.

The bottom line

Building a college recruiting target list is the most time-consuming and least glamorous part of the process. There's no shortcut — it takes hours of research, honest conversations about athletic level, and a willingness to cut schools that don't fit all four dimensions.

But the families who do this work well save themselves months of wasted outreach, thousands of dollars in camp fees at programs that were never realistic, and the emotional toll of chasing schools that were never going to respond. A focused list of 15–20 schools where your athlete genuinely fits is worth more than a spreadsheet of 80 where half are fantasies.

Soccer families building a D1 target list can find sport-specific guidance — including regional program breakdowns, roster analysis tips, and how to calibrate reach vs. fit vs. safety for soccer — in our D1 soccer programs guide. For soccer families considering D2, our D2 soccer colleges guide covers the conference landscape and how to evaluate programs. Baseball families: see our D1 baseball programs guide for conference tier breakdowns, state-specific landscapes, and how to assess whether your athlete's metrics match the programs on your list. Volleyball families can use our volleyball recruiting standards guide to assess whether their athlete's measurables and skills match what coaches expect at each division level — the physical benchmarks by position help calibrate which programs are realistic targets. And soccer families trying to gauge their athlete's fit can use our soccer recruiting standards guide for the same purpose.

If you're earlier in the process and still getting oriented, our overview of how college recruiting works covers the full timeline and key milestones. When your list is ready and it's time to start contacting coaches, read our guide on how to email a college coach — the first impression matters more than most families realize. And if you're not sure whether your athlete's level matches the schools on your list, understanding the real differences between D1, D2, and D3 programs can help you calibrate.