scout

It hasn't been a good month for online recruiting services.  On National Signing Day earlier this month the number one subscription-based recruiting website, Rivals.com, suffered an embarrassing breakdown.  The website crashed under the immense weight of signing day traffic in the ultimate case of bad timing.  Amazingly, Rivals head Eric Winter foreshadowed his website's crash before Signing Day when he spoke about the site's outdated backend, "We're living on an older technology. Once you put a Rolls Royce inside the engine, nothing will stop us."

Although it hasn't come with the publicity and panic of crashing on National Signing Day, now the second largest recruiting website in the land has been suffering from its own breakdown.

For multiple days beginning this weekend, Scout.com has undergone major technological issues and crashes.  On February 25th, Scout released the following statement to its subscribers promising a free week to make up for the outages and placing the blame on their "prior owner."

"The forums experienced a major hardware and database failure on Sunday. They're up and running again, but recovery required using a backup from February 13, and therefore all posts between then and Sunday morning have been lost, except for private messages. We are very sorry for this and will compensate our subscribers by adding a week to all subscriptions proactively. This will be done automatically, you need not call or take action to receive it.

As most of you know, Scout was recently purchased from a prior owner who eliminated all internal engineering and made no significant hardware investments since 2005. We have been upgrading this aging infrastructure to reduce and eventually eliminate the chances of failures like Sunday's. To minimize potential disruption, we had planned to wait until after the current NCAA basketball season to perform major upgrades, but will obviously accelerate those plans now. We have also been working hard on a major site redesign, including mobile-friendly sites, improved video, new categories and other features, and look forward to delivering those in the next few months.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience, will strive to do better and appreciate your patience and support."

Who was that prior owner?  Fox Sports.  Founder Jim Heckman sold Scout to Fox in 2005 for $60 million before buying it back in 2013.  In 2012, Fox had tried to rebrand Scout as "Fox Sports Next" and it was a miserable failure with several breakdowns in technology and branding.  The Fox Sports Next rebrand was supposed to be the first major upgrade since Fox bought Scout in 2005 and it flopped.  A year later, Scout left Fox completely.  Apparently those same issues that occurred under Fox's umbrella were still lingering as Scout.com was still experiencing issues well into this week and members lost several days of posting because of corrupted backups.  Members were not happy…

Even today, at least one Scout site was still experiencing issues.  The interest in college athletics, and especially recruiting, has never been higher.  Sites like Rivals, Scout, 24/7, and others are still growing and reaching new users.  In many ways, the recruiting world and these subscription-based sites are exploring new territories.  It'll be interesting to see how the industry reacts to the what has happened the last month and how the space continues to evolve.