Every scout works with limited time and incomplete information. A recruiter covering a state or a national age group is looking at hundreds of athletes a season and can meaningfully assess a fraction of them. The first pass is almost never about technique, personality or potential. It is a filter, and the filter is physical.
That is not cynicism — it is arithmetic. The only way to move from hundreds of names to a shortlist of twenty is to start with something objective, comparable and fast to read. Understanding that filter is the difference between being seen and being skipped.
The three-pass filter
In practice, a recruiter runs the same three passes over a list of athletes, in this order. Each pass removes names. You do not get to pass two by being interesting in pass one.
- 01Baseline: does this athlete clear the physical bar for the level I recruit into? Usually a speed number, a power number, and evidence that both were measured the same way as everyone else on the list.
- 02Context: is that number good for this athlete's age, gender and sport? A raw time means nothing until it is normalised against the cohort the athlete actually competes in.
- 03Trajectory: where will this athlete be in eighteen months? Two athletes with the same score are not the same prospect if one is rising and one is flat.
Technique, game sense and character all matter enormously — but they get assessed in person, later, and only for the athletes who survive the first three passes. Most athletes are never eliminated for lack of talent. They are eliminated because nobody could verify anything about them quickly enough to justify the trip.
Why unverified numbers get discarded
A time recorded on a phone at training is not a lie. It is just unusable. There is no way for a recruiter to know the surface, the start method, the reaction to the timer, the wind, the slope, or how many attempts preceded the one that got posted.
Hand timing alone typically reads 0.20 to 0.30 seconds faster than electronic gates over short sprints, because the timer starts on movement they see and stops on movement they anticipate. Over a 20 m sprint, that error is larger than the gap between an average athlete and a very good one. A recruiter comparing hand-timed numbers to gate-timed numbers is not comparing anything at all.
Cohort normalisation, with a worked example
Normalisation is the step that turns a raw number into a decision. It answers the only question that matters: how does this athlete compare to the population they will be selected out of?
Take two athletes who both run 3.05 s over 20 m from a standing start, both measured under the same protocol.
| Athlete | Raw 20 m | Cohort | What the recruiter reads |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 3.05 s | U15 male, field sport | Well above cohort — a genuine speed asset with years of development ahead |
| B | 3.05 s | U19 male, field sport | Around cohort average — competent, not a differentiator |
Same number, two entirely different signals. This is why the AQ protocol scores every vector against your age, gender and sport cohort before combining them into a single AQ Score on the 0–1000 scale. The raw data is still there and still visible — but the score is the part that survives a comparison across a list.
Trajectory beats a single score
The most underrated line on any athlete record is the second one. A single test tells a recruiter where you are. Two tests tell them which direction you are moving and how fast, which is the actual thing they are buying.
An athlete who moves from 610 to 690 across two verified tests is a more attractive prospect than one who sat at 700 for both, because the first athlete is demonstrating responsiveness to training. Recruiters are making an eighteen-month bet, not a purchase of today's performance.
What to send a recruiter
When you do get the chance to put something in front of someone, keep it short and lead with what they filter on. A recruiter who has to hunt for your numbers will not hunt for long.
- Your AQ Score and tier, plus the date it was tested.
- Your two or three strongest vectors, named — not a list of all eight.
- A link to your passport so they can see the full vector profile and raw data themselves.
- Current age, playing position or event, and current team or program.
- Two to three minutes of unedited footage, if you send footage at all. Full-speed, wide angle, with you identifiable.
- One line on availability: where you are based and what you are looking for.
What actively hurts you
- Self-reported numbers with no protocol attached. At best ignored; at worst they cost you credibility on everything else you claim.
- Six-minute highlight reels set to music. Every clip is your best moment, which tells a recruiter nothing about your worst.
- Results from a testing day that nobody else in the network used. Non-comparable data is not evidence.
- Rounding in your own favour. Recruiters retest. Being 0.15 s slower in person than on paper ends conversations.
- Silence between tests. A record that has not been updated in two years reads as an athlete who stopped.
The honest summary
You do not control whether a recruiter likes your highlight reel. You do control whether you have a verified, cohort-normalised, repeatable physical record that survives the first three passes. That is the whole game at this stage, and it is the part of the process most athletes leave to chance.