One focused weekend. A list of a dozen colleges where your son or daughter can actually run, five thoughtful emails ready Monday morning, and a clear answer to what you should do next.
It’s Sunday night. Your kid has another meet this week. There’s a dishwasher to load and a permission slip to sign. And in the back of your head, the same thought you’ve had for three months:
“We still don’t know what their college options actually are.”
You’ve spent some time on Runcruit and tried to figure out TFRRS. Maybe you started a spreadsheet with a row for each school.
PRs. Tuition. Coach names. Maybe a column for “reach” or “possible fit.”
But the spreadsheet keeps getting longer without getting clearer.
It doesn’t tell you which schools your athlete should email first. It doesn’t tell you whether the coach contact is current. It doesn’t tell you whether the school fits your budget, your athlete’s major, or the level they can actually run at. And it definitely doesn’t tell you what to do when a coach replies.
Every time you sit down to make real progress on it, you hit the same wall: the information you need doesn’t exist where you can find it.
You don’t know which schools your kid actually fits at, because schools don’t list their performance standards. You don’t know which coaches to email. The head coach? The assistant? Both?
You’re not lazy. You’re not disorganized. You’re an attentive parent doing what attentive parents do, and the system is set up so that even doing everything right leaves you stuck.
A mom emailed me last week and signed it, “a very overwhelmed parent.”
That overwhelmed mom isn’t alone. Another parent asked, “Where to even start? Overwhelmed.”
A parent in upstate New York said, “I’m struggling with getting started. My son wants to run in college, but he doesn’t know what he wants to do, or where he wants to go.”
And one mom who is super organized and has a spreadsheet going wrote, “It seems daunting and more time consuming than I have the bandwidth for.”
That’s the same problem written four times by four different parents.
The information you need to make smart decisions about your athlete’s college future lives inside college programs. Not on Google. Not on Runcruit. Not in any tool you can buy off the shelf.
And until you have it, you can’t move.
Same kitchen. Same coffee. Same kid.
But the spreadsheet is closed.
In its place is a printed list of a dozen college programs you didn’t have on your radar two days ago. Every one of them is a real fit for your athlete’s PRs, GPA, geographic preferences, and what your family can actually afford.
You’ve narrowed it to the five programs you want to email first. You know exactly who to email at each school. The head coach’s email. The assistant coach’s email.
You know what to put in those emails from the video you watched on Saturday. You know what your kid’s PRs mean to those coaches, because you’ve already seen the most recent rosters at every school on the list.
Your athlete is sitting at the table next to you. They have opinions about which schools made the list and why. You’re not taking over the process. You’re helping them lead it with better information.
You have data. You’re making the decision together.
The email gets drafted Sunday night, sitting in your drafts folder. Monday before school, your child sends them.
That’s the version of you the Clarity System is built for. Informed. Organized. Armed with a plan.
You could enroll on a Thursday, spend five or six hours over the weekend, and email coaches Monday morning.
Most families think the hard part is building the list.
Then they get a list.
Now they have a new set of questions.
Who do we email? The head coach or the assistant? Should my athlete send it, or should I? What should the subject line say? How much should we include? What if a bad email makes us look like we don’t understand the process?
And if a coach replies, that creates the next set of questions.
Was that real interest or just a polite response? What does it mean if the coach says our athlete “meets the standards”? Should we ask directly about a roster spot? Should we follow up in two weeks, or wait until the next PR?
That’s where the Clarity System is different.
The Compass helps you build a better list. The school reports give you the coach contacts, cost, roster context, academic information, and links you need. The course teaches what to say, who should send it, when to follow up, and how to read the reply.
This is not just a database.
It’s the recruiting process translated into a system a parent and athlete can actually use.
“If we just look at enough websites, we’ll figure this out.”
You won’t.
The reason this process feels endless isn’t because you haven’t searched hard enough. It’s because the information that actually drives college recruiting decisions doesn’t live on school websites or third-party tools. Schools don’t publish honest performance standards and their roster pages don’t list high school PRs.
The data you need to make a real list lives one layer below the surface, and most families never get to see it.
“We just need our kid to run faster, and offers will come.”
PRs matter a lot. But the families who get the best outcomes aren’t always the ones with the fastest athletes. They’re the ones who matched their athlete to the right programs at the right time, and who knew how to ask the right questions about academic scholarships and need-based aid, as well as athletic scholarships when applicable.
Matching well is something you do, not something that magically happens.
“It’s still too early. We have time.”
This is the most expensive belief in the entire process, and it’s the one I see most often.
The recruiting calendar has accelerated for distance running over the last decade for the fastest athletes, which has sped up the process for everyone else.
Coaches at competitive D3 programs routinely have full rosters by October of the senior year. If your athlete is a 2027, 2028, or 2029 grad, the window where you can actually shape the outcome is open. It’s not open forever.
Waiting until “we have a little more information” is how families lose the schools that would have been their best fit.
No spreadsheet. No guessing. No waiting.
When the target list is built on current roster data instead of website performance standards or what some online tool guessed, every downstream piece of the process gets easier. Emails only get sent to schools where your athlete is genuinely a fit, and where the next step is clear. Coaches respond, because the outreach matches what they’re actually recruiting. Visits feel productive instead of speculative. Decisions get made for the right reasons.
The work doesn’t go away. You’ll still have hard conversations about money, about geography, about whether your kid should be a four-hour flight or a four-hour drive from home. But you’ll be having those conversations from a place of clarity instead of from inside a fog.
That’s the shift the Clarity System is built to create. Not in six months. Not in twelve weeks. In one weekend of focused work.
I’m Jay Johnson. I spent five years as the recruiting coordinator for the cross country and track teams at the University of Colorado. I was the person inside the office making decisions about which high school athletes to recruit, who to offer money to, and which to let walk on.
I’ve coached distance runners for over 25 years, from high school kids running their first 5K to professionals chasing Olympic standards. I wrote a book on high school distance running and I’ve done podcast interviews with coaches and Olympians you’d recognize.
And right now, I’m a parent. My daughter is a 2027 grad, she wants to run in college, so just like you, I’m going through this process.
That combination is why I built Next Mile Recruiting. The information families need to do this well isn’t hidden because anyone is keeping it from you. It’s hidden because nobody’s bothered to put it in one place. I’ve spent the last eighteen months doing exactly that.
“Coach Jay was extremely helpful to our family.
We are well into the recruiting process and needed help navigating aspects like communicating with schools, the best questions to ask, timelines, tips on making hard decisions and more.
Jay’s energy, experience, and wisdom are unparalleled in the industry.
If your family needs guidance or advice regarding XC and/or track & field recruiting, Jay is your guy.”
- Next Mile Recruiting parent
The Clarity System is four things: a self-paced course, a matching tool, a set of in-depth college program reports, and a library of college coach interviews. It’s designed to be used over a single weekend.
It gives parents of high school distance runners a working answer to the question almost no one can answer for them:
“Where can my kid actually run in college, and what do we do next?”
The goal is not to give you more tabs to open. The goal is to help your family make the next decision.
You could enroll on a Thursday. You sit down with your laptop on Friday evening. By Monday morning, you’ll have a personalized list of a dozen college programs that fit your athlete. You’ll know which five coaches to email first, and you’ll have those emails drafted and ready to send.
That’s not an empty marketing promise. That’s the time budget the system is built around. About five or six hours of focused work, spread across Friday evening, Saturday, and Sunday.
Want to reach out to me? Email me at info@nextmilerecruiting.com.
About three hours of watch time, plus optional deep dives
Four core videos every parent watches:
After the core, you watch only the division deep dives that match your athlete. D1, D2, D3, NAIA, JUCO. Most parents watch two or three. About 20 to 30 minutes more. Because so much information is gender specific, some modules are split by gender, and you only watch what applies to your son or daughter.
By the time you finish the videos (Saturday morning for most parents), the fog is gone. You understand the recruiting calendar, what coaches actually want, and what changed in the sport in 2025 with the House settlement. You know what to do next, and why.
By Saturday morning, you’ll know the calendar, the first email, how visits work, how to think about money, and what your role is versus your athlete’s.
The Compass is what most online tools claim to be and almost none of them actually are. It’s accurate. It’s up to date. It lets you enter your athlete’s PRs, GPA, geographic preferences, and the financial range your family can work within.
It then gives you a list of college programs across every division that genuinely fit, surfacing information you wouldn’t otherwise be able to find online and saving you 30 to 40 hours of Googling and trying to piece things together.
The matching is built on real roster data, not published performance standards. The output uses the same vocabulary you already use for academic college planning: reach, fit, safety. And every program on the list comes with the basics already in place. Division. Conference. Head coach.
There’s a reason no other tool can do this. The data behind the Compass didn’t exist in this form before I built it. I spent eighteen months gathering and verifying it, organizing it around the parent’s question instead of the coach’s. The Compass is what that work makes possible.
You’ll see schools you didn’t know existed. You’ll see schools you’d dismissed for the wrong reasons. You’ll see your real options, in front of you, on one screen, in about forty minutes.
You get 20 in-depth School Reports for the programs you identify in the Compass that match your athlete most closely. Inside each report:
Each report opens with a concise introduction you can skim in a few minutes, so you can rank and prioritize quickly, then go deep on the four or five schools that matter most.
By Sunday morning, with a cup of coffee, most parents read through 4–5 full reports and feel ready to make a real decision about who to email first.
Conversations with college coaches across every division. D1, D2, D3, NAIA, and JUCO. Programs you’ve heard of and programs you haven’t. They tell you, in their own words, what they look for in recruits, how they read parent emails, what timeline they’re working on, what scholarship money actually looks like at their school, and what gets a kid cut from their list.
You can listen on your phone while you’re making dinner or driving to work. These are coaches telling you what they think and what you need to know.
This is where you hear the hidden rules of the process explained by the people who wrote them.
Most families think they have two options.
You can try to figure it out yourself with Runcruit, TFRRS, school websites, and a spreadsheet that keeps getting longer.
Or you can pay a recruiting service $4,000 or $5,000 and hope the person assigned to your family understands distance running, college rosters, admissions, money, and the timeline your athlete is actually on.
That person is usually a former college athlete. Almost never a distance runner. They cover every sport the service sells, which means your athlete’s events are something they look up, not something they know.
I built the Clarity System because I don’t think either option is quite right.
Runcruit can help you start a list. It’s a useful tool. But a list is not a plan.
A recruiting service may give you someone to talk to, and for some families that peace of mind may be worth paying for. But no recruiting service can make your athlete faster. They can’t get your athlete a roster spot if the coach doesn’t see the fit. They can’t create scholarship money that isn’t there.
What they can do is make the process feel less lonely.
The Clarity System is built around a different idea: you and your athlete can learn how to run this process yourselves.
You need to know where your athlete fits. You need to know which schools are realistic academically, financially, geographically, and athletically. You need the right coach contacts. You need to know what to say in the first email. And when a coach replies, you need to know what that reply probably means and what to ask next.
That’s what the Clarity System gives you.
Not a profile. Not a promise. Not someone pretending they can recruit your athlete for you.
A clear process, built from accurate, up-to-date roster, cost, and coach-contact information, school reports, coach interviews, and the recruiting experience I wish every family had access to before they started guessing.
“Coach Jay has been an incredible resource for our family. His free newsletters contained a lot of valuable information, including topics that we weren’t even aware that we needed to be thinking about.
His approach of looking at current freshmen and sophomores on collegiate rosters to gain insight into the actual times coaches are looking for was something we’d never considered. We were able to do additional research and find schools that were a match for my son both in terms of XC/track and academic fit.”
“We considered working with an NCSA recruiter, but we did not like the high-pressure sales tactics they employ. Coach Jay is genuinely in this business to help athletes, and offers a refreshing alternative to other paid recruiting services.”
- Next Mile Recruiting parent
You’ll run the process yourselves. That doesn’t mean guessing every time something new happens.
The questions families actually ask, answered and organized inside the member area. Whether a school belongs on the list. What a coach’s reply probably means. Whether an email is ready to send. What to do when one coach goes quiet and another asks for a visit. I add to it through the recruiting season, so the answers keep pace with what families are hitting that month.
Read-only. Private, family-specific questions are included with Clarity Custom and Clarity Advisory.All three start with the same distance-running-specific information and process. The difference is who does the work and how long I stay involved.
You do the work
The tools, information, and process to run recruiting well as a family.
$975
Opening late August 2026
For families who want a clear plan and are ready to do the work themselves.
I do the hardest first step
I read your intake, handpick your schools, and write the analysis. You start from finished work.
$1,775
Open today · 5 business days for 2027 grads · 10 for 2028 and 2029 grads
For families who would rather skip the research weekend and begin with a list I have already thought through.
Ongoing one-on-one guidance
Jay and his team beside your family at the decisions that matter most.
$4,975
Opening fall 2026
For families who want experienced eyes on every important step, all the way through.
If you enroll in Clarity Custom, every dollar is applied toward Clarity Advisory when it opens.
The Clarity System is built around the realistic time budget of a parent who has a job, other kids, dinner to make, and a meet on Friday. Not a course you’ll “get to someday.”
Set up your account. Skim what’s inside. Bookmark the page for tomorrow.
After dinner, watch the core course: the calendar, what coaches want, the first email, and how to use the Compass. Then save the division-specific deep dives for the parts that match your athlete.
Coffee in hand, open the Compass. Enter PRs, GPA, geography, budget. Get a dozen real fits.
Sunday morning, 4–5 full school profiles. Decide who to email first. Draft those emails.
Before school. Five thoughtful, informed messages to the right coaches at the right schools.
Total: five to six focused hours. Spread across a weekend.
One weekend, and you’re moving.
The Clarity System works because it’s built on accurate, up-to-date roster, cost, and coach-contact information, not estimates. The roster information in the Compass is current and checked against this season’s actual rosters.
The school reports are up to date with the 2026–2027 tuition and fee numbers, the current coach contact information, and this year’s roster, so you can see for yourself how fast a team’s freshman class was last year.
The course teaches:
The coach interview library is what tells you whether the framework I’m teaching you is real. Because you’ll hear the coaches confirm it themselves.
“When does the Clarity System open, and what does it cost?”
It opens late August 2026 at $975. That includes the course, the Compass, 20 in-depth School Reports, the coach interview library, and the Ask Jay Library, with access through June 30 of your athlete’s senior year.
Join the waitlist and I’ll email you the day it opens. Nothing is charged until you decide to enroll.
“Should we do this ourselves, or have you do it?”
You don’t need to be a recruiting expert to use the Clarity System. I give you the information, tools, and process. Your family does the research and builds the initial list, so you understand why each school belongs.
Clarity Custom is for families who would rather not spend that weekend. I read your intake, handpick 20 to 25 schools, write the custom analysis, build your family a private Clarity Dashboard, and draft the first two coach emails. You get 40 School Reports instead of 20, plus 30 days of direct email access to me. It’s $1,775 and it’s open today. After the completed intake is submitted, delivery is within five business days for a 2027 graduate and 10 business days for a 2028 or 2029 graduate.
The same information and process sit underneath both. The difference is whether your family does the hardest first step or I do it. If that’s the trade you want, Clarity Custom is open now.
“How is this different from Runcruit or a national recruiting service?”
Runcruit is a tool, and it’s a reasonable place to start. You enter times and it gives you a general sense of where those times might fit. The Compass is the closest comparison, and the difference is what’s underneath it. The Compass is built on current roster data I gathered and verified myself, matched to what your family can afford and where your athlete can get in. And the Compass is one of four pieces. A list is not a plan. Runcruit can’t tell you who to email, what to say, what a coach’s reply means, or how to compare two offers.
A national recruiting service is a different thing entirely. The person assigned to your family is usually a former college athlete. Almost never a distance runner. They cover every sport the service sells, which means your athlete’s event group is something they look up, not something they know. They can’t get your athlete a roster spot. They can’t create scholarship money that isn’t there. And they don’t have access to the data that drives the Compass, because that data didn’t exist in this form before I built it.
One more thing, because it matters. Anyone in this space who promises your athlete a roster spot or a specific school is promising something they don’t control. Coaches decide rosters. The Clarity System is built on the opposite premise: you and your athlete can learn to run this process yourselves, with better information than any service has.
“My athlete is a 2028 grad. Is this too early?”
It’s not too early. For 2028 parents, the Clarity System does two things. It gives you a clear-eyed read on where your athlete sits at every division based on current PRs. And it gives you a roadmap for what to do over the next 18 months. Most families won’t be emailing most coaches yet, but you’ll know which schools to track and what PRs would change which doors open.
“My athlete is a 2027 grad and hasn’t emailed coaches. Is it too late?”
No. Not at all. That said, you need to get going and contact coaches in June. Whether your child has humble PRs or ran some huge PRs in May, you don’t want to wait. All the D3 coaches at the elite schools want to do a pre-read in June. Many D1 schools want to schedule the visit in September.
I don’t want to scare you. The first week of June isn’t too late to be emailing coaches if your child is a 2027 grad. The flip side is that you don’t want to send that first email in July or August.
“My athlete is a 2029 grad. Is this too early?”
It’s early, but it’s not unreasonable.
If your son or daughter is a 2029 grad, you probably won’t use every part of the system right away. You don’t need to be emailing coaches this fall. But there’s no downside to learning how the process works now, understanding how roster fit changes over time, and knowing what schools to watch as your athlete develops.
If you enroll when the Clarity System opens, your family will have access through June 30, 2029.
“How long do I have access to the Clarity System?”
Your family has access through June 30 of your athlete’s senior year. The Clarity System is built to be used in the kitchen this weekend and again every time something changes: a new PR, a coach goes quiet, a financial aid letter doesn’t match what the coach said. You don’t lose access in 12 months.
“What kind of support is included?”
The Clarity System is self-guided. You get the course, the Compass, your School Reports, the coach interviews, and the read-only Ask Jay Library. I add to that library through the recruiting season when rules change or I see the same question coming up for several families.
What isn’t included is me answering your family’s specific questions one to one. Private, family-specific answers come with Clarity Custom, which includes 30 days of direct email access, and with Clarity Advisory, which is the ongoing relationship.
Whatever you choose, your access to the complete Clarity System and its updates runs through June 30 of your athlete’s senior year.
“College coaches are already contacting my athlete. Do we still need this?”
Maybe not, and I’ll be straight about that. If your athlete is one of the fastest in your state, coaches will find them.
But interest is the easy part. What comes next is where families with the most leverage often have the least clarity. Official visits, and what to ask on them. The questions you should be asking the coach, the questions your athlete should be asking, and how to read the answers you get. And if scholarship money is in play, how to have that conversation, because it’s a delicate one and there’s a right way to do it. Coaches have these conversations every year. Your family does this once.
That’s the job the Clarity System does for families in your spot. It helps you prepare for every visit, compare programs and offers, and think through how academic money and athletic money stack at each school. It also helps you pressure test the list. The schools recruiting your athlete found them. The best fit might be a program that hasn’t seen them yet.
“I’m not very techy. Is the Compass complicated?”
No. You enter your athlete’s PRs, their GPA, the states you’re open to, and a financial range. The Compass returns the list. The course includes a video walking through exactly how it works. If you can use a computer, you can use the Compass.
“What about athletes who run events outside 800m to 3200m?”
The Clarity System currently focuses on athletes whose events fall in the 800m through 3200m range, plus cross country. If your athlete’s primary events are 400m or shorter, this isn’t built for you yet. But I’m tracking interest for adding the sprints, hurdles, and field events version for a fall 2026 release.
“Can a high school coach buy this for the team?”
No. A Clarity System purchase is for one family, not a team license. A coach cannot buy one copy and share the login, course, Compass, school reports, or coach interviews with multiple families.
If you’re a high school coach and want to help several families get access, email us at info@nextmilerecruiting.com. We can talk about a group discount or a clean way for families to buy their own access, but each family needs its own account.
“What if we have more than one child?”
Reach out to us. You’re not buying a license to Next Mile as a family, but we also want to be reasonable. If you have more than one child who may use the system, email info@nextmilerecruiting.com and we’ll figure out what’s fair.
“What if it doesn’t work for our situation?”
Email us. We’re a small team, and if the Clarity System genuinely isn’t a fit for your family’s situation, we’ll make it right.
The thing we can’t do is run faster for your athlete. But the schools that fit, the emails coaches will respond to, and the timeline that gives you real options are what this is built to deliver. If you’re not getting that, tell us. We want to know.
If any of these apply, you’re the parent I built this for.
$975 · Opening late August 2026. I’ll email you the day it opens.
Would rather not spend the weekend on it? Clarity Custom is open today, and I do the hardest first step for you.
The course is built. The Compass is built. The school reports are built from accurate, up-to-date roster, cost, and coach-contact information. The coach interviews are recorded conversations with college coaches across every division.
What I don’t have yet is what I’ll have in a few months: more parent testimonials, more case studies, and more stories from families who used the system to make better decisions.
What I can tell you now is exactly what is built and what it does, which is what the rest of this page has been for.
The Clarity System opens late August. Join the waitlist and I’ll tell you when it is ready.
The Clarity System answers that question. Not in a vague, motivational way. A dozen schools. Five emails. By Monday morning.
If your weekend is open and your athlete is a 2027, 2028, or 2029 grad, this is built for you.
If you’ve already started a spreadsheet you can’t seem to finish, this is built for you. If your athlete has sent emails and heard nothing back, this is built for you.
I built this because I watched too many good families make the wrong decisions for the right reasons.
The families who come through this well aren’t always the ones with the fastest athlete or the biggest budget. They’re the ones who found the right handful of programs early enough to still have a real choice.
That’s the work here: turn a guess into a thoughtful choice.
You do the work
Run the process with better information and a clear plan.
$975
Opening late August 2026
I’ll email you the day it opens.
I do the hardest first step
I handpick the schools and write the analysis. You start from finished work.
$1,775
Open today · 5 business days for 2027 grads · 10 for 2028 and 2029 grads
Ongoing one-on-one guidance
Jay and his team beside your family through the process.
$4,975
Opening fall 2026
If you enroll in Clarity Custom, every dollar is applied toward Clarity Advisory when it opens.
Have questions? Email us at info@nextmilerecruiting.com and we’ll get back to you promptly.