Privacy and safety standards for minors
Recruiting asks a teenager to do the one thing every other piece of online-safety advice tells her not to: become findable by adults she's never met. Here's how that's done carefully.
Recruiting requires her to be findable
Every other safety conversation with a teenager is about being less visible. Recruiting is about being visible to two hundred adults she doesn't know.
Those two things can't both be maximised, and pretending otherwise leaves families either paralysed or careless. So the job isn't to be invisible. It's to be findable by the right people, in the right ways, on terms you set.
That's a design problem rather than a rule — which is good news, because design problems have solutions.
The overwhelming majority of college coaches are exactly who they say they are. Recruiting is a normal process conducted by professionals with institutional employers, and thousands of families go through it every year without incident.
The standards below aren't a response to something likely. They're ordinary precautions for an unusual situation — the same way you'd think about a schedule that puts a teenager in a different city most weekends.
Why general online-safety advice doesn't fit here
Four things make recruiting different, and each one disables a standard piece of advice.
Contact from unknown adults is expected and legitimate here. A coach she's never met emailing her is the process working. That removes the simplest filter families normally rely on.
The entire point is that a coach can identify her, verify her, and evaluate her. Name, school, grad year and video are the product.
Tournament schedules are published. Anyone can know where she'll be on a Saturday in June — which is exactly what makes a profile schedule a different decision from a published event bracket.
This is the one that matters. A person claiming to be a coach holds real power over a fifteen-year-old who badly wants to play in college — and that power is what makes impersonation worth someone's effort.
She can't avoid contact from adults she doesn't know — that's the process. What she can do is confirm who they are before the relationship goes anywhere, and that turns out to be straightforward. See below.
What goes out, and what stays in
These apply everywhere her name appears — profile, video, social accounts, emails, event registrations.
- Name, graduation year, position
- High school and travel organisation
- City and state — not a neighbourhood, not an address
- GPA, test scores, academic interests
- Height, bats/throws, measurables
- Statistics and competition levels
- Video of her competing
- Coach references, with their permission
- Home address, or photos that identify it
- Her personal phone number
- Her school day schedule or class times
- Where she trains, and when, as a routine
- Younger siblings' names or schools
- Anything with a visible house number, street sign or bus route
- Live location — posting from a place while she's there
- Full birthdate
Contact details. Use a parent's email and phone anywhere a contact field is published. Coaches don't mind — many prefer it for a minor. The AG2C profile handles this for you: her email is never displayed, and coaches reach her through a form that forwards to her inbox.
Her schedule. Coaches genuinely need to know where to watch her, and a schedule is one of the most valuable things on a profile. Publish events and dates — the tournament name and the weekend. Don't publish field assignments, hotel information, or a family itinerary. The event is public; her movements around it aren't.
Confirming a coach is who they say they are
Five minutes, and it's the single most useful habit in this whole area. Do it for every new contact, every time — not because someone seems suspicious, but because you do it for everyone.
A college coach emails from the institution's domain. A message from a personal address claiming to be a college coach is the single clearest signal there is — not proof of anything wrong, but a reason to verify before replying with anything.
Every program lists its coaching staff, with titles and usually a photo and contact details. Go to the school's site directly rather than following a link in the email.
Titles matter. Someone describing themselves as a "recruiting coordinator" for a program whose staff page doesn't list one is worth a question.
If anything feels off, this resolves it entirely. A real coach receives your reply at their real address; an impersonator doesn't.
They frequently know the staff, the program, or someone who does. One question costs nothing and answers most of these instantly.
Behaviour that doesn't belong in recruiting
A real coach behaves professionally because their employer requires it and their career depends on it. These patterns are outside how legitimate recruiting works, whoever the person claims to be — including someone who genuinely does hold a coaching job.
- Wanting to communicate privately, off email, away from where a parent can see it — or suggesting she not mention the conversation at home.
- Asking for photos beyond softball video, or commenting on her appearance rather than her play.
- Pressure to decide quickly, or an offer framed as expiring if she talks to anyone about it.
- Asking for money in any form. Legitimate recruiting never involves an athlete paying a coach.
- Wanting to meet without her program or family involved.
- Personal questions unrelated to recruiting — her relationships, her body, what she does outside softball in ways that go past the ordinary.
- Discouraging her from telling her travel coach about the contact.
Anything a coach can't say in front of her parents doesn't belong in her recruiting. That single sentence handles cases nobody thought to list — and it's simple enough for a fifteen-year-old to apply in the moment.
Worth saying to her out loud, once, plainly: she will never be in trouble for showing you a message. The thing that makes this dangerous is a teenager deciding to handle something alone.
Oversight without taking over
This site's whole position is that the athlete runs her own recruiting. Safety is the one place a parent is genuinely in the loop — and it's possible to do that without taking the process off her.
Parent email on contact fields, access to the accounts, visibility of what arrives. She still writes the emails and she still answers them.
The first message from an unfamiliar program is worth a look. The tenth exchange with a coach you've already verified isn't.
Do the five-minute check once per program. After that the relationship is hers, which is the point of all of this.
If bringing you a strange message risks losing a chance she's worked years for, she'll weigh that — and teenagers weigh it wrong. Say explicitly that it never costs her anything.
Report it. You don't need to be certain, and it isn't your job to work out whether it's serious enough.
NCMEC CyberTipline — for online exploitation or inappropriate contact with a minor. Report at CyberTipline.org or call 1-800-843-5678, available 24 hours.
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988 if she's in distress or you're worried about her safety. Also 24 hours.
911 in an emergency, or if anyone is in immediate danger.
Also tell her travel organisation. If someone is approaching one athlete this way, they are usually approaching others — and a program that doesn't know can't act.
Next steps
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Recruiting rules change and vary by division. Always confirm current rules with the governing body: NCAA.org · NAIA.org · NJCAA.org