Scouting Prospects

If every prospect's rating were fully visible the moment they appeared on your board, recruiting would be sorting a spreadsheet. Instead, an unscouted prospect sits behind a fog of war, and clearing it is part of the game.

What an Unscouted Prospect Actually Shows You

Every prospect always shows an honest star rating — that headline tier is computed from their true talent at generation, so a 3-star prospect is never secretly a disguised 5-star. What you can't trust yet is the fine detail:

• Their overall rating shows only as a range, and that range is deliberately fuzzed — it can run wide of their actual number in either direction.
• Their potential, individual attributes, and personality are all hidden entirely.

Scouting Levels

Scouting a prospect happens in three cumulative steps, each revealing more:

For a goalie prospect, that Level-1 archetype reveal is worth reading closely — it's a real style tradeoff (Butterfly, Hybrid, or Acrobatic). See Attributes, Archetypes & Ratings's "Goalie Style" section.

Personality is exactly what unlocks whether your role promise is even landing. Below Level 3, your Estimated Interest meter can't factor in a prospect's true reaction to the ice-time role you're promising — the number on screen won't budge no matter which role you toggle, since the game doesn't yet know which one this prospect actually wants. Don't mistake that flat reading for "the role promise doesn't matter here" — it means you haven't paid to find out yet.

Upgrading a partially-scouted prospect only costs the difference to the next level, not the full price again, so scouting a promising prospect further as your interest grows is never wasteful.

Some prospects arrive partially pre-scouted — a proven transfer or a well-known blue-chip junior often starts with film already on file — so your scouting budget stretches further on the murkier middle of the board instead of re-confirming what was already obvious.

The League Grapevine Already Covers the Blue-Chips

You aren't the only one scouting the class. Every AI program is running its own scouting trips against the same pool all season, and a prospect's revealed level isn't private to whoever scouted him — so the league's collective effort chips away at the fog of war on your board too, whether you spent a single point yourself or not. By the time a season ends, coverage looks roughly like this:

Every program in the country is chasing the same blue-chip names, so a 5-star or 4-star prospect is almost never a true mystery by signing day — your own scouting spend on one of them is really about racing to Level 2 and 3 for the exact overall and personality, not the initial reveal. The prospects that actually stay hidden unless you personally invest in them sit in the 2- and 3-star tier, which is exactly where a smaller program's scouting budget can uncover a player the rest of the league slept on.

Two Ways to Scout

• Offseason scouting spends a points budget against the current recruiting class. You aren't forced to spend it all up front, either — points carry across all five bidding rounds, so you can keep scouting a prospect further as your interest in them grows over the course of recruiting. Your points come from your coach's recruiting rating, your program's prestige, any scouting bonus your staff provides, and a Video Lab if you've built one. See Support Staff and Facilities & Arena.
• In-season scouting trips send a hired Regional Recruiter — or, if you've also hired the optional Assistant Recruiter, both staffers on separate trips at once — out against next year's class, a full season early, giving you a head start on the following cycle. There are three trip types: a Regional Sweep covers the recruiter's whole region and earns scouting points you spend afterward on any prospect in the pool, not just that region; a Prospect Trip, sent from a specific prospect's own profile rather than a blanket choice, jumps straight to whichever tier you pick — even all the way to Level 3 in one trip if you pay for it — priced off what that many tiers would actually cost you to earn and spend via a Regional Sweep, plus a fair premium for the guarantee and speed; a Showcase costs the most of the three and reveals up to 5 prospects at Level 1, but your scouts prioritize realistic, needed, or regionally-close fits for your program first, only falling back to the raw national top-talent list if fewer than 5 real fits turn up — a struggling program's Showcase won't burn its budget marking blue-chips who were never going to sign there. Trips cost money out of your Revenue Share, not your NIL Collective — a recruiter's travel is a staff-operations cost, so it competes with your facilities and staff budget rather than your recruiting spend. See Support Staff.

How long a trip takes depends on who you send: a weak recruiter's trip can eat the full 4 weeks, while an elite one wraps in just 1 — your head coach's Recruiting attribute nudges this too. A Prospect Trip is always at least as fast as a Regional Sweep from the same staffer, since it's a focused push on one recruit rather than a whole territory. Hiring (or upgrading) your Regional Recruiter is a direct lever on both how many points you earn per trip and how fast you get them.

Once a Prospect Trip is underway, that recruit's profile swaps its usual scouting options for an in-progress card — who's out on the trip, how many weeks remain, and which tier the trip will unlock. You can't also spend banked points on him in the meantime: the trip already underway is the spend, and it'll deliver more than points could buy piecemeal anyway. Points and a second trip both come back the moment your recruiter returns.

Recruiting Rapport — Why Scouting Trips Matter Beyond Information

Every scouting trip that lands on a realistic target for your program — the right talent tier, a position you actually need, or a home-region match — builds real Recruiting Rapport with that recruit, visible as a gauge (capped at 30) on his profile the moment you've earned any. This isn't flavor text: it's added directly to your interest score once bidding opens, on top of prestige, proximity, and your NIL offer — a genuine, standing head start over a rival who scouted him late or not at all. A Loyal personality type weighs it especially heavily, but it matters for everyone. Your head coach's own Recruiting attribute also nudges every rapport gain below up or down a bit — a strong recruiting mind at the top of your program helps regardless of which staffer you send.

A Prospect Trip is the fastest way to build it — roughly 10 points of rapport per tier for a good-fit recruit (versus only about 1 point of rapport per scouting point spent the Regional Sweep way), so sending one straight to Level 3 on a real target can build the full 30-point cap in a single trip. A "Poor Fit" prospect (flagged right on his scouting page) still reveals fine when scouted, but that spend builds little to no rapport — don't burn a Prospect Trip's premium price on a recruit who was never a realistic target to begin with. See Recruiting for how this bonus actually plays out once bidding starts.

Once a recruit is fully scouted, keep pursuing him with a Rapport Visit. There's nothing left to reveal at Level 3 — but if he's a real target you're not done building the relationship. His profile swaps in a Rapport Visit option in place of the usual scouting rows: same rapport payoff as a real Prospect Trip (+10 for a good fit, +3 for a poor one), at a discount off a real trip's price and — since there's no analysis or report to write, just a check-in — usually just 1 week, faster than the real trip it stands in for. It's repeatable all season — send your recruiter again whenever he's free and you've still got budget — so a top target you've already fully scouted doesn't stop being worth pursuing just because you know everything about him. It disappears once his rapport hits the 30 cap; there's nothing more to buy at that point.

Scouting for Line Chemistry, Not Just Talent

A prospect who grades out well can still be a poor fit if his playing style clashes with what you already have at that position. Two places surface this once a prospect's archetype is scouted (Level 1 or higher):

• Every prospect's profile — in-season and during offseason bidding — shows Your [Position]s, your current roster at that exact spot, so you can judge whether the recruit is an upgrade at all. Below it, a Line Fit callout names which of your existing forwards or defensemen this prospect's archetype would actually complement, using the same chemistry math your Lineup tab rolls in games.
• The Scouting & Recruiting page's Team Needs tab has a Line Chemistry section alongside its position headcounts, flagging which archetype your returning forwards or defense are short on for optimal chemistry — a different, and sometimes more useful, question than "do I have enough bodies at this position."

See Team Chemistry & Player Happiness for what "optimal" actually means.

Reading Your In-Season Scouting Reports

Every trip that resolves files a report, and there's no single place you're forced to go dig for it:

• It shows up as a message in your Inbox the moment it resolves — a Prospect Trip's report links straight to that recruit's profile; a Regional Sweep or Showcase report tells you the points earned or which prospects got buzz right there in the message.
• The Scouting & Recruiting page's shortcut on your Home dashboard tells you when one is waiting (and separately, when you're sitting on banked points you haven't spent yet) — tap it and, if a report is new, it opens right away.
• Every trip you've ever sent — not just the newest one — stays browsable and searchable from the Scouting Reports button near the top of the Scouting & Recruiting page, so an older trip's result is never lost once its Inbox message scrolls out of view. Reports you haven't looked at yet stand out with a dot and bolded text, the same treatment your Inbox uses for unread messages, so a fresh batch of results never gets lost in a long list of older ones — opening the page marks them read.

Letting a Recruiter Handle It

If you know you're going to simulate through most of the season without touching the Scouting page, that's exactly when you fall behind — AI programs' own recruiters keep working the board all season whether you engage or not, so a program that never scouts shows up to the offseason with no head start on anyone. The fix: each hired Regional Recruiter or Assistant Recruiter has their own auto-scout toggle — turn one on and that recruiter plans and sends their own trips — and spends banked scouting points — every week on their own, no different from delegating lines or training to your other staff. The toggle lives in two places that always stay in sync, so you don't have to leave whichever screen you're already on to use it: on that recruiter's Staff card, and right on their own trip card on the Scouting page itself — the same card you'd otherwise use to send them somewhere by hand.

It isn't random or generic — it targets real needs. A delegated recruiter looks at your projected roster for next season (not who's on it today), and works down a real priority list: a prospect who fills an actual coming hole comes before one who's merely close to home, the best talent available comes next, and among otherwise-similar names it spreads attention across several prospects rather than circling back to the same one or two. It reaches the same conclusions your own "Good Fit" flag on the prospect pool already reaches — a delegated recruiter never chases someone your own scouting judgment would flag as an unrealistic reach or a genuine non-need.

A need stops hogging every trip once it's genuinely covered. Once a short position has a real board built — roughly three realistically-scoutable names deep for every open spot, so needing 2 centers means room for up to 6 before this kicks in — a delegated recruiter stops chasing more names there and starts covering other ground: your other needs first, then regionally-close prospects at positions you're already fine at. That way a long stretch of the season doesn't turn into your recruiters working the same one or two positions non-stop while everything else goes completely unscouted; you still get real depth at what you actually need, just not to the exclusion of everything else.

It isn't free, but you'll know the cost before you turn it on. Every trip still comes out of Revenue Share, exactly like a trip you send yourself — the toggle shows a real estimate (roughly what one trip costs at that recruiter's current rating, and about how many trips they'd run across a full season) right there before you flip it on, not as a surprise afterward. If your Revenue Share balance actually goes negative, auto-scouting turns itself back off automatically — with an Inbox note explaining why — rather than keep spending against a budget that's already underwater. Turn it back on yourself once your finances recover.

Quality still depends on who you hired: this doesn't make a mediocre recruiter suddenly scout like an elite one, the same as every other delegated task. A stronger recruiter (and a better recruiting-minded head coach) plans faster, cheaper, more productive trips on their own exactly the way they would if you were sending them yourself.

A recruit who reaches your maximum possible rapport gets added to your Watchlist automatically. Once a recruit's relationship with your program hits its cap, that's effectively a real, near-guaranteed target once bidding opens — exactly the name you'd want flagged if you were watching closely yourself. With auto-scouting on, you don't have to notice it happening; it lands on your Watchlist on its own, so checking that list periodically is enough to see who's actually matured into a real target without combing the whole pool.

Turning auto-scouting on also quiets the pop-ups. With a recruiter delegated, you'd otherwise get a banner every time their trip wraps up — exactly the play-by-play you handed off in the first place. While either recruiter is delegated, scouting report banners stop popping up; the reports themselves still land in your Inbox and the Scouting Reports sheet unread, so nothing's actually missed, you just review it on your own schedule instead of getting interrupted per trip. A genuine Inside Track discovery still gets its own banner regardless — that one's rare and worth knowing about right away.

See Also

• Recruiting — what happens once bidding opens
• Support Staff — how a Regional Recruiter expands your scouting reach
• Rebuilding a Struggling Program — why the 2- and 3-star tier is where your scouting budget actually matters