There are three core aspects that govern your ability to play at the next level and maximize your high school football career.

First and foremost is development: training and performing at a tier required to compete at the college level.
In this series, you will learn why this is the most fundamental aspect of a successful career. All other steps are irrelevant if this is not the main focus. This fundamental aspect of the process is often lost; As a parent, know that you can never go wrong by investing in your child's development.

The second critical component is understand how the recruiting process works.
Understanding exactly how this complex and often convoluted process works does two core things for you:
1) It ensures you are doing what you need to in order to maximize your son's chances of playing at the next level, or having a bevy of options when his high school career is over. As we will teach you, proper exposure comes from understanding where your son's information needs to be and how to best "sell" himself as a football player.
2) It allows you to navigate this market. A parent who is well educated on how things work and the 'why' behind them is a parent who will invest their money properly, avoid scams, and ultimately do what is best for their son.
As mentioned previously, we see a lot of companies taking advantage of parents who simply want what is best for their child. 

3) Finally comes the actions required for you to take as a family in order to continue your son's career for as long as possible.
These actions range from running a meticulous Hudl profile to having a well organized highlight tape, to becoming NCAA eligible and much more...
We will cover each step in great detail. For now, we wanted to give a high-level overview. This is important to lay out in order to provide a framework which keeps the process manageable and concise.

This is also the foundation upon which we built our program at AthleticOutlook. Our goal is to address these three areas, each catered to your personal situation from a Coach who has handed out hundreds of scholarships.
Now that we have a good framework for maximizing your son's career with a timeline, let's jump into the fundamentals of understanding recruiting and the different "divisions" an athlete can continue his career at.

You are not in the recruiting process until you have Varsity film! 
This series will still be valuable if your son is not on Varsity yet. It will teach you how the process works and allow you to take action when his time comes!

A large misconception we see in the recruiting process is Sophomores, Freshman, and even pre-HS youth athletes looking for exposure or to get their name out there...
Their focus should remain on development and understanding rather than action at this age.

The key things to understand here:
D1 & D2 offer scholarships, D3 schools do not. You can obtain financial aid at D3 though.
D1 - FBS offers full rides and are made up of schools you probably are most aware of; Alabama, Oregon, Clemson, etc...
D1 - FCS is the D1 subdivision. They offer full rides and partial scholarships. They have 63 scholarships compared to the 85 scholarships D1 - FBS schools hold. This is why it is considered a huge deal when an FBS team loses to an FCS team. Teams that are FBS you may know are Eastern Washington or North Dakota State.
D2 is quality football, a lot of times great academics and has schools that offer scholarships. They tend to offer more partial scholarships because they have less to go around.
D3 does not offer scholarships, but can grant financial aid. Generally speaking, the better your grades are the more money they can offer you.NAIA isn't included above but is fairly similar to D3 competition wise. They also differ from D3 by offering 12 scholarships per team. I believe there are over 300 NAIA football teams.  

Understanding when schools recruit will help you see where you stand and should also clarify that your recruiting window may still be open in other divisions.

 We hope this timeline can convey that there is still a lot of opportunity for your athlete.
Also, not shown here is the Junior College route. JC is a phenomenal path to continue to improve and re-open recruitment.

Now, with a fundamental framework in place, an understanding of when the recruiting process is for your son and the different divisions there are we can dive into the fun stuff!
In the next lesson we will start to cover how a college coach identifies potential prospects and the steps you should take to best sell yourself.