About & sources

The school numbers

Cost, academics, conference, enrollment and the rest come from federal databases, checked 2026-08-16.

How much of it we have, of 2,558 programs: cost of attendance 2,522, academic estimate 2,531, conference 1,975. Earnings and debt are blank for 34, where too few students reported to publish a figure. Earnings and debt cover students who got federal aid, across the whole school - not your team and not your major.

A blank means we do not have it. We would rather leave it empty than guess. A few schools could not be matched to a federal ID at all, so no federal data joins to them.

Track and field conferences are taken from the other sports at that school, so they can be out of date for track specifically.

The coach contacts

Names, addresses, phone numbers and team links are collected by us off each team's own coaching-staff page. Instagram handles were found while researching the team online.

This is the thinnest data on the site. We have a coach name for 638 of 2,558 programs. On NCAA Division I men's soccer, 112 of the 214 addresses were checked by hand (52.3%). On NCAA Division II men, raw email coverage is higher at 91.0%, with none hand-checked. Measured 2026-08-16.

Trust varies row by row, not by division, so every address on a card carries its own label:

• Checked by a person - somebody hand-checked this address.
• From a bought list - came from a purchased contact list, nobody checked it. Confirm it before you rely on it.
• Scraped from a team site - pulled automatically off a team website, nobody checked it. Confirm it before you rely on it.
• You entered this one - you typed it in yourself.

Cards also show when the contact was last checked, as a date or a month.

Where a school publishes no address for the head coach, the card shows the program's recruiting contact instead - that is the person who reads recruit mail at the revenue sports.

The camp dates

From each program's own registration pages and camp directories, read 2026-08-16.

• Confirmed - the date and price were read live off the registration system.
• Listed - from a directory and not confirmed. Directory dates disagreed with the registration system 41 times out of 46, so treat a Listed date as a starting point and verify before you book.
• A blank deadline means the school did not publish one.

Each card says how we matched it to a school: confirmed two ways, from the web address, checked by hand, from the directory only, matched to our school list, name exactly as the directory listed it, or not identified. Where a camp did not state a gender, the card says how we worked it out: from the camp title, the web address, the description, the program that runs it, or inferred because the school fields only one program.

The grades and the score

Grades are ours. We turn each federal figure into a percentile - where a program sits against its own group - and the score adds up the percentiles on the things you set a minimum for. No grade yet counts as zero, which is nothing added, not a penalty.

• Not graded yet on a card means we did not have enough on file to grade that one thing for that school. It is not a verdict on the program.
• stand-in means we cannot measure that thing directly, so we grade the closest thing we do have. The school card says exactly what.
• few graded means only a few programs have a grade on that measure so far.
• A program never drops off your list for missing data - only for a real grade below a minimum you set, or a filter you turned on yourself.
• Programs nobody has graded on your measures are listed alphabetically, not ranked.

Campus-and-lifestyle fit depends partly on where you live, which this page does not collect.

The NCAA rules and the links

Every rule line is cited to the NCAA's own guide; every "our advice" line is our recommendation, not a rule. Rules come from the NCAA Guide for the College-Bound Student-Athlete, 2025-26, checked 2026-08-15. The links, test dates and aid dates in the Resources shelf were checked 2026-08-16, and a few were re-checked 2026-08-26.

Primary sources used: ncaa.org and web3.ncaa.org (Eligibility Center), naia.org, College Board (SAT Suite, Bluebook, CSS Profile, school code search), act.org, studentaid.gov, the US Department of Education Financial Aid Toolkit and NCES, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, Common App, and ivyleague.com.

Two rules changed recently and the page reflects the change, not the old version:

• Scholarship caps. The cap shown on a card is the pre-2025-07-01 ceiling. It no longer binds Division I schools that opted into the House settlement. Division II still runs per-sport equivalency limits, confirmed directly on ncaa.org.
• The sliding scale is gone. The current D1 and D2 pages show a flat GPA floor and no test-score chart. We confirmed the absence on the primary pages. Division III sets its own academic standards and the NCAA does not require core courses or a core GPA there.
• The old aid-stacking bylaw is gone. We read the current 2025-26 Division I Manual directly: Article 15 runs from Bylaw 15.3.6.2 straight into Article 16, and the old bylaw's LSDBi record returns "Record not found" at every reference date we tried.

The core-GPA calculator on the checklist is not your report-card GPA. It counts only the courses you marked NCAA-approved, drops plus and minus, and averages the grading periods you type in. We do not add an honors or AP bonus, because that only applies if your high school registered the course as weighted with the Eligibility Center.

What we could not verify

Each of these is on the site with a smaller claim than we wanted to make. Checked 2026-08-16 unless noted.

• The NCAA fee-waiver category list is from a search snippet only - the NCAA's own help-desk article returned empty to every attempt.
• The NCAA certification fee rising from $100 to $110 effective 2025-09-01 is search-sourced, not confirmed on an NCAA page.
• No dated ncaa.org press release confirming when the sliding scale was removed. The absence of the chart is confirmed directly; the date is secondary.
• eligibilitycenter.org would not load (certificate error), and no 2026-27 D1 compliance PDF was located.
• studentaid.gov timed out on eight or more attempts. The FSA ID address is confirmed by two federal pages that did load, and by two university financial-aid pages (University of Houston, University of North Texas), but we could not read studentaid.gov ourselves.
• No primary source for how many days ahead to create an FSA ID, so no lead time is given.
• The 2027-28 Texas state priority aid date is not published anywhere we could find. The 2026-27 date, January 15 2026, has passed.
• No per-sport signing date - the NCAA-hosted PDF describing it was located but could not be read.
• Whether every D1 school opted into the House settlement, and what applies in D2, is not stated on any ncaa.org page we found. Ask that program's compliance office.
• The SAT's 400-1600 scale is corroborated elsewhere but was not restated on the page we linked.
• Common App's Application Dictionary moved; we relinked it and verified the content word-for-word on 2026-08-26. A second Common App document is described rather than linked, because no URL for it was captured.
• NAIA eligibility links point at play.mynaia.org directly - the older playnaia.org address is unreliable.
• ACT fee pages returned different numbers on two reads the same day. Check the price on the page before you pay.

What we do not have

• How long your shortlist should be at each stage. Nobody publishes a number we trust.
• When offers typically start. It varies too much by sport and division for one answer.
• The first date a coach in your division and sport may contact you off campus. The NCAA guide points at it but never gives the date.
• Early-application deadlines per school. No source publishes them in a form this page can hold offline, so the checklist gives you a search link instead of a guess.
• ID camps for football, basketball, baseball, softball, volleyball and gymnastics. Soccer only so far.
• NAIA programs. We hold 402 and they are still in the data, just not shown - their sport list came off a recruiting-list site rather than from the NAIA.
• Where you live, which is why campus-and-lifestyle fit is partly unmeasured.

What we can tell you about timing: the binding signing happens in senior year, and recruiting usually gets going in 11th grade. The checklist assumes a school year starting July 1, the common "rising senior" cutoff.