1st Look Sports - No.1 platform for young American Football players

1st Look Sports is the leading sports news source covering international youth/prep athletes around the World. They grant young athletes the exposure they need and deserve. Powered by numerous reporters, content creators, scouts, and coaches, 1st Look has become a respected name in international college football recruiting. Once the players register, they can upload their highlight tapes, link their social media profiles, and showcase their skills and achievements to a global audience. With this case study, I want to outline the unique challenges and solutions that made 1stlooksports.com a unique platform for young athletes who want to continue their football journey in the USA. 

1st Look Sports, built for young athletes, aims to connect them with coaches from all around the world. How it works: the platform allows players to create profiles, upload their football highlight tape, and leave their basic information (weight, height, current team, country, etc.). 1st Look Sports team then reviews the profile and highlight tapes, giving rank and rating to the player and publishing their profiles to be visible for coaches and recruiters from colleges in the USA or teams worldwide.

A key challenge was the need to provide a seamless experience for players to create or update their profiles and for coaches and recruiters to easily navigate through different groups, and use filters while ensuring that top-rated players were available. Since the part of the project included rebranding and migration from WordPress to Webflow, the goal was not only to create a new platform for players and coaches, the first part was migrating the old database that will be later populated with new registrations.

Built with Webflow, the platform is designed to be easy to use for athletes and coaches alike. The following tools and integrations are used for functionality, ensuring perfect profile management and effective talent discovery:

• Memberstack – This tool manages player registrations, stores athlete profiles, and manages account information. Each player can create and access their profile easily, ensuring a smooth onboarding process and secure data management.

• Make – make.com plays a crucial role in the automation of data flow across the platform. When an athlete completes their profile, Make.com automatically sends the data from Memberstack to Webflow’s CMS, simplifying the process and ensuring profiles are ready for review. Additionally, Make.com enables athletes to update their profiles when needed, ensuring that their latest information and achievements are always visible.

• Webflow CMS Management  – Platform owners can access and manage athlete profiles directly within the Webflow CMS, where they assign rankings and ratings before publishing profiles. This rating and ranking system gives coaches and recruiters valuable insights into each athlete’s skill level and potential.

• Advanced Filtering Options – With Finsweet and JavaScript, we have filtering, allowing coaches and recruiters to find athletes based on specific criteria, such as class year, position, country, name, or ranking. This makes it easy for recruiters to identify athletes who meet their team’s exact needs.

By combining Webflow, Memberstack, and Make.com, this platform offers an efficient system for managing, updating, and showcasing young athlete's profiles. It not only simplifies the process for athletes looking to gain visibility but also offers coaches and recruiters a simple way to filter and find talented players who match their team requirements. 

1st Look Sports platform has successfully addressed the challenges faced by both athletes and recruiters, transforming the way young talent connects with college coaches and teams.

I want to point out the key results:

• Over 2,000 athlete profiles migrated from the previous WordPress database to Webflow CMS, preserving data integrity and ensuring consistency. Here we used Make automatization again, to send every user a personalized email about platform migration.

• A 40% increase in new athlete registrations within the first two months after launch.

• Advanced filtering tools allowed recruiters to identify potential talent more quickly and effectively, saving hours of manual searching.

• Improved profile accuracy due to real-time updates via Make.com automation.

From the user's perspective:

• Player profile updates increased by 60%, as athletes found the new system easier and faster to use.

• Coaches and recruiters reported to the founders a reduction in the time spent navigating the platform to find players.

And one of the most important things is that the combination of Webflow, Memberstack, and Make.com created a scalable infrastructure, capable of handling future growth in both user registrations and profile management without requiring additional backend development. From here we can easily integrate subscriptions, and paid and free features for both, coaches/recruiters and players who want their profiles to get more visibility. 

Using Webflow, enhancing performance with Memberstack, and making perfect processes with Make, we created a system that benefits all stakeholders—athletes, coaches, and recruiters alike, and especially for founders of the 1st Look Sports.

My goal with this case study was to highlight not only the technical expertise required to design and optimize a platform with user registration and profile management but also the value of putting user experience at the forefront.

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