About Trackbeast
Built by the families
living the recruiting grind.
College track & field recruiting is noisy, expensive, and stacked against families who don’t already know how the system works. Most high school athletes apply blind — no real sense of where their marks make them competitive, what a program actually needs, or how NIL works in their state.
Trackbeast replaces that guesswork with data. We pair one of the most complete databases of programs, coaches, rosters, and performance marks anywhere with the tools a family needs to run their own recruiting: find the programs where an athlete’s marks fit, reach the right coaches, and track every step.
The founders
Adam Dailey
Founder & CEO · Head Coach, La Jolla High School
13:54
5000m
28:34
10,000m
9
NCAA team titles
5×
D1 All-American
5
Kids
Adam was a blue-chip high school recruit who earned a scholarship to the University of Arkansas, the winningest program in NCAA history. He was part of nine NCAA team championships there and left a five-time D1 All-American. His wife is a 12-time All-American from the same program.
After running he built businesses around the sport. He founded Ludus Tours, which ran Olympic tours from 2004 to 2016 and brought thousands of fans to the Games, then sold it. Today he is head track and cross country coach at La Jolla High School and builds the distance plans with Eric.
Where Trackbeast comes from
When his daughter Chiara went through recruiting, Adam found the process hadn't changed in 30 years. Families were still guessing what times coaches wanted and emailing into the dark. He pieced it together the hard way: Chiara signed with Stanford, won a USATF U20 title, ran for Team USA and signed a NIL deal with HOKA. Then he built the tool he wished they'd had.
Adam comes from a strong team background and tries to instill that in every group he coaches. He has spent 30+ years in the running industry, and in 2019, at 43, he got back into competing to chase an Olympic Trials qualifier in the marathon. He went through halfway in under 1:09 but crawled home in 2:27, and came up short. His coaching works backward from the race that matters. He's a father of five, and he wants athletes still loving the sport when they're his age.
Eric Avila
Co-Founder & Head of Coaching · Founder, San Diego Elite
3:55
Mile
3:35
1500m
13:18
5K
33
Sub-4 miles
10
Years as a pro
Eric was a high school star in San Diego who earned a scholarship to Northern Arizona University before transferring to Southern Oregon, where he became a four-time NAIA national champion. He then raced ten years as a professional for adidas and HOKA and was ranked as high as 37th in the world at 1500m. He made two U.S. Olympic Trials 1500m finals, ran for Team USA, and won the 2021 USATF Road Mile title.
He broke four minutes in the mile 33 times. His first, 3:56.89 at Balboa Stadium in 2014, was the first sub-4 in San Diego since 1988. His training said he was in 3:49 mile and 13:00 5K shape. He never ran those times, because he left them on the practice track by going too hard, too often. That lesson is the heart of how he coaches.
Where the method comes from
In 2023, coming back from injury, Eric and his training partner Hobbs Kessler moved their training to the Norwegian method, while training in Flagstaff alongside Andreas Almgren and learning the system firsthand.
Today he coaches with lactate-tested zones, easy days run by heart rate, and threshold work built up when the athlete is ready. As founder of San Diego Elite he coaches professionals alongside high schoolers, and two of his 2025–26 high school athletes now run at Stanford. Every Trackbeast coaching program runs through his system.
Meet the team
Billy Wegeng
Sports Science
Austin / LA
Ciarán Lane
Physical Therapy
Ireland
Natalie Varella
Coach
Miami
Christian Harrison
Coach
Texas
Rebecca Thomson
Marketing
Orange County
Athletes we've coached and advised have landed at
Why you can trust the data
A recruiting platform is only as good as what’s under the hood. Here’s what’s under ours.
985
College programs
4,000+
Coaches with contact info
170,000+
Verified performance marks
23,000+
Recruits tracked
Counts verified against our database · Data updated October 8, 2026
Real marks, not estimates
Every program’s standard comes from actual results its athletes have run, jumped, and thrown — compiled from official rosters, meet results, and public performance records. We show where your marks fit against real rosters, not a generic “recruiting standard.”
Built event by event
Sprints, distance, hurdles, jumps, throws, and multis are each handled on their own terms. A program that’s deep in the 800 may have a wide-open throws roster — we surface that instead of treating a school as one number.
Kept current
Rosters turn over and coaches move. We refresh programs, coaches, and marks on an ongoing basis so a family isn’t emailing a coach who left two seasons ago.
Honest about the limits
We don’t guarantee scholarships, admission, or that a coach will write back. What we do is remove the guesswork so your outreach goes to the programs where your athlete actually fits.
How we validate BeastMatch
Anyone can claim their matching works. We test ours against what actually happened — and publish the results.
15,755
Real signings the engine is tested against, leave-one-out, across every division — 6,400 of them Division I.
88%
Of the time, the athlete’s real destination lands in the range BeastMatch rated a fit for their marks.
0
Cherry-picked success stories. Every miss counts — the backtest runs across every division and event group.
Real signings, called before we checked the answer
Five of the 6,400 Division I signings in the backtest — the engine saw only the high-school marks, with the athlete's own mark removed from the pool, and rated the school a fit before we looked at where they actually signed. Anonymized; every signing is in the same public data you can browse on this site.
Boys · 1600m
4:05.79
Washington
rated a fit → signed at Stanford
Girls · 400m
53.30
Texas
rated a fit → signed at Georgia
Boys · 110m hurdles
13.65
Texas
rated a fit → signed at Texas A&M
Girls · long jump
21′ 0.25″
California
rated a fit → signed at Oregon
Girls · shot put
45′ 2″
Massachusetts
rated a fit → signed at Penn State
Accuracy by event group
Division I backtest, verified July 10, 2026. We publish the weak spots too — throws data is the thinnest and it shows. Counting the misses is the point.
What counts as “a fit”
For each event we take the actual high-school marks of every athlete a program has signed and build that program's signed range. A program is a fit for your athlete if their mark lands at or above that program's slowest signee in the event (within a small cushion). If your mark is behind a program's entire signed range, it's a reach — reaches are not counted as fits.
88% is a leave-one-out test. We remove each real 2025-26 signee from the data, run the engine on only their high-school marks, and check whether the program that actually signed them was one the engine rated a fit. Division I: 88% of the time, it was.
A fit is a shortlist, not a single guess — so we also publish rank. Across Division I the school an athlete actually signed with had a median rank of 99 out of ~340 programs and landed in the engine's top 25 about 17% of the time. BeastMatch narrows ~340 programs down to the ones where your marks are competitive; it does not claim to name your one destination.
Versus a simpler model. Ordering programs without the signing-history signal — closer to how the free roster-fit tool ranks — put the actual school in the top 25 about 9% of the time. Weighting by proximity to what each program has actually signed nearly doubled that to 17%.
How the test works. We take athletes who already went through recruiting, feed BeastMatch only what it would have known — their high school marks — and check whether the program that actually signed them shows up where the engine said they fit. Then we do it again every time the model or the data changes. When a change makes the number worse, it doesn't ship.
What we don't claim. BeastMatch predicts fit, not offers. It can't know a coach's remaining budget, a roster spot that opened yesterday, or how your athlete interviews. What it removes is the guesswork about where your marks put you — so every email goes to a program where the numbers say you belong on the list.
See where your athlete fits.
Enter one PR — free, no account needed — and find the programs that match.