Getting Started With Inbox Athletics

Last reviewed: July 2026

Setting up Inbox Athletics is a handful of steps — sign up with Google, see a quick welcome screen, confirm your age, build your profile, start your trial, and connect your email. Here’s exactly what happens at each one, and what to do once you’re in.

Signing Up

You’ll sign up with your Google account. There’s no separate username or password to create — once you’re signed in, account setup begins automatically with a brief welcome screen introducing Inbox Athletics before setup gets into the actual questions.

Confirming Your Age and Agreeing to Our Terms

After the welcome screen, the first thing you’ll do is enter your date of birth. This isn’t busywork — it’s how we know whether federal privacy rules for minors (COPPA) apply to your account.

If you’re under 18, you’ll be asked for a guardian’s email address next. That email goes out automatically to notify your guardian that your account exists. There’s currently no additional step your guardian has to click through or confirm — your setup keeps moving right away, without waiting on them to do anything.

After that, you’ll review and accept our Terms of Service and a COPPA/FERPA privacy notice. This is standard, and it’s the same for every new user regardless of age.

Building Your Profile

Next, you’ll fill in your athlete profile: your sport and graduation year are required, along with your high school’s name. Position, and your high school’s city and state, are optional — you can add them now or come back later.

The more accurate this is, the better Inbox Athletics can help you draft messages to coaches down the line.

Starting Your Free Trial

Before you connect your email, you’ll set up your subscription. Inbox Athletics runs on a 14-day free trial through Stripe Checkout, and a credit card is required upfront to start it — there’s currently no way to skip this step and continue without one.

Connecting Your Email

Last, you’ll be asked to connect the email account you actually use for recruiting — Gmail, Outlook, or iCloud. (Later, if you ever reconnect an account from Settings → Connected Accounts, you’ll see a button labeled Connect Gmail for Google specifically.)

Once your email is connected, your account setup is finished — you’re in. You don’t have to wait for your inbox to finish importing first — that keeps working in the background while you get started.

Finding Schools Already in Your Inbox

If you’ve already been emailing with coaches, Inbox Athletics starts working through your inbox in the background right after you connect your email — syncing messages, classifying them, and looking for colleges and coaches it recognizes. This happens automatically — you don’t need to do anything. It can take longer if you have a large inbox, so don’t expect results the moment you finish setup.

When it finds something, it shows up in one of a few places:

Attribution Queue — colleges it thinks it found in your inbox, one at a time, for you to Add, Skip, or Dismiss.
Contact Suggestions — individual coaches it thinks it found, for you to Accept or Dismiss.
A Discovered Schools widget on your Dashboard, and a Discovered Schools banner on your Organizations page (dismissible, and it resets after 24 hours) — both letting you know new items are waiting for review.

Nothing gets added to your list automatically. You decide what’s real and what isn’t.

Adding a Coach Who Wasn’t Discovered Automatically

You don’t have to wait for automatic discovery to add a coach. There are two ways to do it yourself:

From the Contacts page, click Create Contact to fill in a coach’s name, email, and school by hand.
From the Organizations page, use the Add School flow — search for the school, and Inbox Athletics looks up its coaching staff so you can select which coaches to add at once.

Adding Your First Event

Click Add Event to put a campus visit, camp, clinic, phone call, or deadline on your calendar. Attaching a school and the coaches involved to that event is what lets Inbox Athletics generate a personalized message tied to it later.

Sending Your First Message

You don’t need an event on the calendar to send your first message. Two options work right away:

Use the AI input bar available on your Dashboard, Calendar, or Organizations page — describe in plain language what you want to say, and Inbox Athletics drafts it.
From a specific school’s Organization Profile page, use the option to generate a message to that coaching staff.

(If you’re looking for the Follow-Ups feature instead, that one’s built for messages tied to a specific game or event you’ve already added — it’s the right tool once you have one on your calendar, just not for your very first message.)

Either way, nothing gets sent until you review it. Every draft is yours to edit or rewrite before it goes out.

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