CASE STUDY
Prep Network grows across sports without outgrowing its subscription infrastructure
TABLE OF CONTENTS
High school sports coverage tends to follow the spotlight.
Prep Network follows the athletes outside it.
Across nine sports and 150+ localized websites, Prep Network gives high school athletes and their families the coverage, rankings, and recruiting resources they need to navigate the path to college sports. That includes the players who are not already household names.
For Prep Network, subscription growth depends on repeating a proven model across brands, sports, and audiences, without making billing harder every time.
With Recurly, it can.
At a glance
56% dunning recovery rate, compared with a 35% peer average
$3.9M in lifetime recovered revenue
12.7x ROI
The challenge: grow the model, not the complexity
Prep Network began with basketball and volleyball. It has since expanded into nine sports, including football, soccer, softball, lacrosse, and gymnastics.
Each sport is its own brand. Each brand serves distinct audiences in distinct markets. What works in one market must be measured, learned from, and repeated in the next.
That requires clean data. It also requires infrastructure that does not demand a new project every time Prep Network launches a brand.
Its previous subscription platform could not keep up.
“[It] was always a mess,” says Anthony Garcia, Prep Network’s Director of Audience and Experience. “It was always kind of a scramble.”
The team needed a centralized view of its subscription business, and a faster way to bring new brands into it.
The solution: one system for launching and measuring
Recurly gives Prep Network a single place to manage subscriptions across its growing portfolio.
When the company launched gymnastics, the subscription setup was straightforward. “We just added a brand entity on Recurly and it’s good to go,” Garcia says.
From a subscription management platform piece, it’s extremely flawless and efficient.
Anthony Garcia
Director of Audience and Experience
That simplicity matters because the work does not stop at launch.
Prep Network studies which site cohorts perform well, identifies their shared traits, and applies what it learns to the next brand. Recurly analytics gives the team a common source of truth across its sites and subscriber groups.
Garcia checks those numbers first thing every Monday.
“Having a business that provides not only the management of the individual customer, but bundles that up and works as your source of truth for how your subscription business is doing, the health of your subscription business, is really powerful,” he says. “A one-stop shop is better than trying to piece together all of these different platforms.”
The opportunity hiding in plain sight: failed payments
Dunning is one of the most underutilized resources for millions in revenue, but how does that look in true business terms?
In 2022 and 2023, Prep Network doubled down on payment recovery. The team rewrote its dunning emails in its own voice, tested approaches for monthly and annual subscribers, and tailored its plans by subscriber type.
The results were immediate: a 56% dunning recovery rate, well above the 35% peer average, and ultimately translating to an additional $3.9M in subscriber lifetime revenue.
For Garcia, the impact is not just revenue. It is the efficiency behind it.
The machine learning that you all provide there and the [intelligent] smart retries are doing most of the work. It’s awesome to not have to really spend much time or human capital on these changes. You just kind of plug it in and let Recurly do its thing.
Anthony Garcia
Director of Audience and Experience
The team can also assign different dunning approaches to different plan types, then see the results in one place. That lets Prep Network keep refining its recovery strategy without creating more manual work.
Fast experiments. Clearer decisions.
Prep Network also uses Recurly to launch free trials and coupons without introducing unnecessary complexity.
“You can set it up in about five minutes,” Garcia says of free trials, “and you can be running your free trial by the end of the hour.”
Recurly also gives the team a dedicated view into trial performance and the flexibility to tailor messaging and dunning for trial subscribers. And when a trial converts, Recurly RevRec handles the revenue automatically without creating extra accounting work.
The point is not simply to add promotions. It is to test new ways to grow without slowing down the team responsible for growth.
Infrastructure that stays out of the way
For Garcia, the best billing platform is reliable enough to fade into the background, and useful enough to help when the team wants to go deeper.
“Usually, no news is good news with regards to your subscription billing platform,” he says. “On a day-to-day basis, you just kind of don’t have to think about it, in the best way possible.”
But when Prep Network needs help, Recurly’s documentation, workshops, customer service, and analytics are there.
That balance supports the company’s next chapter: a forthcoming app, continued premium-subscription growth, and a focus on helping more subscribers move from lower-paying plans to higher-value annual premium plans.
Prep Network does not need billing infrastructure to become the story.
It needs it to keep the story moving.
