Contact College Coaches began when its founder and CEO, Eric Van Dril, encountered a problem.

Eric Van Dril, Founder/CEO

It was the spring of 2017. Eric was working as a sports reporter in Chicago, and had compiled a list of the city’s unknown/underrated boys basketball players during his five months of covering the sport at over 100 of the city’s public high schools.

Eric wanted to send out the list to college coaches all over the country to help the student-athletes with their recruitment, but ran into a significant roadblock: the information was scattered all over the internet. It wasn’t consolidated into an easy-to-use spreadsheet that could be purchased and/or downloaded, making it impossible to quickly reach out to college coaches en masse.

So he built one.

The list of men’s college basketball coaches’ contact information he built that spring was the first version of the one available for purchase here. It allowed him to send emails to college coaches all over the country about the database of college-level basketball players from Chicago. In the end, more than 25 kids from the city landed at programs that likely wouldn’t have known about them otherwise.

After that experience, Eric had an epiphany: I think this is a business. If I had this problem, I bet other people are having it, too. Let’s see if I can solve it.

Since then, ContactCollegeCoaches.com has grown significantly and the products have improved. One list of college coaches’ contact information has turned into 20 — with more on the way. Eric built a sophisticated, automated system in 2018 that allows for much more accuracy by tracking which people have been added/removed from schools’ directories and whose information has changed. If one digit in an assistant coach’s phone number changes, for example, the system catches that.

Plus, a ton of school-specific information has been added to each list. It helps student-athletes and their families take the often-overwhelming process of figuring out which schools will be a good fit and makes it manageable.

Moreover, individuals’ and teams’ social-media information was added for every list in April 2021. It’s a collection of data that doesn’t exist anywhere else on the internet. It will allow for ContactCollegeCoaches.com’s customers to have a more effective and more intimate level of communication that doesn’t exist anywhere else online.

Even though so much has changed since Eric built that first list in 2017, the company’s goals remain the same: continue to solve the problem he faced in 2017 by providing complete, accurate lists of college coaches’ contact information at a reasonable price.

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