Junior to College
The most consequential decision window in junior tennis. Recruiting, admissions, fit, the transfer portal — and the families who've already done it. The conversations on this page are the ones every parent told us they wish they'd heard a year earlier.
Listen in this order.
Five episodes, in sequence. They're chosen to give you honest footing.
"What I wish I'd known about college recruiting" — six families.
Cross-section reel auto-assembled from family-journey episodes.
The recruiting reality
Coaches receive 100–150 emails a day. Parents writing on behalf of their child are immediately filtered out. The first lesson isn't tactical — it's that the person sending the message is the message.
Beyond D1 — the wider field
Tunnel vision on D1 is the single most common — and most expensive — mistake families make at this stage. D2, D3, NAIA, and JUCO offer paths to play, develop, and graduate that often fit a family better than any D1 program would have.
The transfer portal era
343 boys in the portal before the spring window. House settlement uncertainty. Roster caps. A landscape that has changed faster in the last three years than it did in the previous twenty.
Academics & admissions
The recruiting form gets the coach interested. The transcript gets your child admitted. After the House settlement, the second one matters more than ever.
The lines from the archive that families come back to.
"We spent two years writing emails for our son. The day he started writing them himself, three coaches wrote back inside a week."
"We thought D3 was a step down. By the time our daughter graduated, we realized it was the only place she would have been allowed to actually develop."
"The transfer portal opened the day our son committed. We spent his entire freshman year wondering if his coach was still going to be there in the fall."