Your Athlete Needs a Sports Account, Not a Personal One

A college coach hears a name. The first thing they do is search it. What loads in the next ten seconds decides whether they keep looking or move on.

If that search lands on a private account, they leave. If it lands on a birthday party, a meme reposted last spring, and one blurry clip from a game two seasons ago, they leave. Not because your kid is not good. Because there is nothing there to evaluate.

Why the two accounts stay separate

This is the argument for a separate sports account, and it is not about hiding anything. Your athlete should still have a personal account. Friends, jokes, whatever teenagers do. That account is theirs. It should be private and it should stay private.

The sports account is different. It is public, it is under their real name, and every single thing on it exists to answer one question: what kind of athlete is this. Film. Stats. Camp results. Team photos. A clip of them working out in January when nobody is watching. Coaches and brands are not scrolling for entertainment. They are scrolling for evidence.

Keeping the two apart protects your kid in both directions. The sports account never has to carry a bad day. The personal account never has to be sanitised for a stranger with a clipboard. One is a profile. One is a life.

Start earlier than feels reasonable

Start it earlier than feels reasonable. Middle school is not too early. The account does not need followers on day one, it needs history. When a coach finds a profile with four years of consistent film, they are not looking at a highlight reel. They are looking at a trajectory. Trajectory is what gets recruited.

A few things that make the difference between an account and a portfolio. Use their full name and their graduating class in the handle, because that is what people search. Pin the best current film to the top and change it when better film exists. Put the position, the school, the height and the weight in the bio and keep them current. Every post should be findable by someone who has never met them.

What turns an account into a portfolio

The mistake we see most often is waiting. Parents wait for the athlete to be good enough to be worth documenting. But the athletes who get seen early are not the ones who got good first. They are the ones who started building first, and then got good in public where it counted.

The mistake we see most

Talent gets you noticed. Content gets you seen. The account is where the seeing happens.