PrepChamps Raises Over $800,000 in Seed Funding; Launches New Social Recruiting Community for High School Sports
Raleigh/Durham, NC (PRWEB) March 5, 2008 -- With over $800,000 in seed funding led by several angel investment groups, PrepChamps, an online social recruiting community for high school sports, proudly launched its groundbreaking new website today at www.prepchamps.com.
The new website allows high school athletes and coaches, college coaches, recruiters, scouts, parents, friends and fans to connect and follow their favorite student athletes. Athletes can create free profiles with their personal, academic and sports accomplishments, in addition to uploading photos, videos, and other sports highlights. Also, an NCAA-Guided Clearinghouse Checklist is available within each athlete's profile to help athletes with NCAA eligibility guidelines, timeframes and deadlines. This clearinghouse tool also allows athletes, college coaches and recruiters to verify and track eligibility compliance as well as see where an athlete is in the official NCAA Clearinghouse process - a new best practice for online college sports recruiting.
PrepChamps recognized the connection gap between 7.5 million high school student athletes and the nearly 2000 collegiate athletic programs across the country. Thus, PrepChamps was inspired to help student athletes with the ambition and desire for an athletic scholarship. "Over 75 percent of high school athletes want to play college-level sports, yet only 20 percent ever get recruited. Our simple goal is to level the playing field for high school student athletes to get recognized and get recruited. We aim for PrepChamps.com to be the preeminent all-encompassing meeting place and recruiting environment for high school athletes, coaches and scouts looking to find the best talent available. In addition, we offer family, friends, and fans a community to follow their favorite athletes," said PrepChamps Founder and Chief Executive Officer Dean Bundschu.
The site comprises a synergistic combination of sports media, technology and community-building features and services for the high school sports community. Through building a network of high school student-athletes and coaches alongside NCAA college coaches and recruiters, www.prepchamps.com will showcase athletes from all sports, as well as post verified results of high school football combines it hosts through its Director of Athletics Kevin Fitzgerald, a former strength and conditioning coach for collegiate powerhouses Florida State and Notre Dame. "PrepChamps was created to help dreams become a reality for high school athletes everywhere. It's nothing less than an individual marketing campaign for athletes to promote themselves on a national level to college coaches and recruiters," said Bundschu.
Athletes on PrepChamps.com are also able to write blogs, create forums and groups online, and create an entire athletic profile in a virtual format that will hopefully yield athletic scholarship opportunities. Equally, thousands of high school athletes will connect with each other as well as the millions of high school sports fans and thousands of coaches who want to keep track of their favorite athletes. These athletes will gain from networking and exposure, building from their collective experiences in sports, school and life in general, and perhaps most importantly, the website will provide opportunities that might otherwise not be available.
"The founders of PrepChamps - as a group, we're really just a bunch of entrepreneurial sports fanatics - recognized that most websites out there for high school athletic recruiting focused solely on the elite athletes, or conversely, served as only a social networking site," explained Hal Fischer, one of the Founders and Chief Marketing Officer of PrepChamps.
PrepChamps' social sports recruiting approach embraces the recent shift from many to one, from one person merely finding information on the Internet, to that same one person distributing their own information, receiving others' information and comprehensively affecting the content on websites. "We wanted to change the online recruiting landscape to empower the student athlete, so we created a platform for high school athletes to self-promote themselves to the collegiate athletic community," noted Jay Kerr, a Founder and Chief Operations Officer at PrepChamps. Kerr continued, "Through the use of forums, blogs, networking and messaging, PrepChamps creates a compelling community of high school athletes, coaches, college scouts, passionate hometown fans, teammates and parents."
To produce PrepChamps.com, the founders complimented their unique vision of sports social networking and recruiting with an equally unique web application platform. "PrepChamps.com is built on a Ruby on Rails application framework. The product team consists of agile Ruby developers and interaction designers who follow test-driven-development and user centered design methodologies," explained Chief Technology Officer Bryan Minihan. The site design follows a modular portal-based approach, where common components are built once and placed where users look for them.
"Given the technological capabilities of the new PrepChamps.com, and the influx of capital from savvy angel investors, we believe this to be a major - but only initial - stepping stone for our site and indeed the entire high school sports market across the country and eventually the world," said Bundschu.
PrepChamps wants athletes to take recruiting into their own hands by providing them with the platform and tools to Get Recognized and Get Recruited. Registration at www.prepchamps.com is quick and easy, and membership is free and open to high school athletes, coaches, and fans.
ABOUT PREPCHAMPS: Helping high school athletes improve their chances of getting recognized and recruited, PrepChamps.com is an online social recruiting community for high school sports. Allowing athletes to showcase their talent by creating a free online profile, posting statistics, photos and upload highlight videos, PrepChamps.com is an online destination for athletes, coaches, and fans to interact.
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