CaptainU is a team of former college athletes and college coaches who got together and said, "There has to be a better way." Drawing on our own experiences with recruiting, we developed the CaptainU Process and the cutting-edge web technology to walk high school athletes through the process.

We believe recruiting should be a fun, empowering experience for athletes. All too often, recruiting is a confusing and frustrating experience that ends up in disappointment. CaptainU is about putting the power in athletes' hands and making recruiting positive and rewarding.

Meet the starting lineup

Avi — Team Captain

Avi Stopper is the founder and president of CaptainU. He was the captain of the soccer team at Wesleyan University and coached at the University of Chicago, where he also earned his MBA. Avi is the author of the recruiting guidebook “Make the Team,” which teaches athletes how to market themselves to college coaches.
Avi has been a featured recruiting columnist in SoccerAmerica magazine. He gives workshops on recruiting and is available for club and high school teams. When he's not on his laptop, Avi can be found cruising around Chicago on his longboard. Where there isn’t pavement, he tries to keep his geology skills on point.

Farb — Operations and Biz Dev

Mike Farb’s job is to keep the CaptainU train on track, as well as looking for new business expansion. Farb was a computer science and math major at the University of Pennsylvania, a tech consultant for Accenture and is now finishing up his MBA at University of Chicago. Though he used to play soccer in northern Jersey, Farb’s claim to fame is his blindingly fast cross-over dribble.

Mike P &mdash Code Czar

Mike Pilat takes all of our ideas and turns them into 1s and 0s. As our lead engineer, Mike P oversees the development team, brings the web's most cutting-edge technology onto CaptainU, and DJs every CaptainU meeting. Mike honed his skills in the vaunted University of Illinois computer science department, birthplace of the Mosaic browser and the modern web. As Mike likes to say, "I didn’t invent the internet, but a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend did." Little known fact: Mike created the annoying, talking Microsoft paper clip.

Cassio — Picasso

Cassio Lynm designed the CaptainU canvas and all elements therein. Cassio is a renowned scientific illustrator and, when he’s not working on CaptainU, is the lead illustrator for the Journal of the American Medical Association. You can see some of Cassio’s stuff here.