The State of Division III Men's Basketball in 2026: Better Players, Shorter Stays, New Rules
AUG 5, 2026
There is a version of the college basketball recruiting story that gets told constantly — the five-star, the offer list, the hat ceremony. And there is a much larger version that almost nobody tells: the 3.9 student who can really play, whose best future is a starting spot and a degree at a school that will still be paying dividends thirty years after his last game.
Academic Athletes exists for the second player.
Founded by Scott Martin and Ryan Silver, the organization has spent the last several years constructing something the grassroots basketball world had mostly left alone — a dedicated pipeline connecting high-academic student-athletes to the Ivy League, the Patriot League, and the country's most selective Division III programs.
Two backgrounds, one gap in the market
Martin and Silver have been building basketball infrastructure together for well over a decade.
West Coast Elite Basketball was the first act. Silver founded it; Martin helped build it — serving as Associate Director of West Coast Elite Under Armour and Director of Finance for West Coast Elite Basketball as the club grew from a Southern California program into one of the largest AAU organizations in the country. In 2020 it was acquired by 3 Step Sports and Fertitta Capital.
They ran it back with ALL IN ELITE Under Armour, now a national grassroots program spanning hundreds of teams, with Silver as founder and Martin as Vice President. Alongside it Silver launched Silver Waves Media, a global sports media organization, and Attitude of Gratitude Consulting. Across that body of work, their programs have been credited with helping secure hundreds of millions of dollars in scholarship money — and All In Elite today counts four active NBA players and more than fifty coaches working in college basketball among its alumni.
Silver is the architect: teams, events, media reach, relationships across every level of the sport. He was CIF California Coach of the Year in 2011, was inducted into the California Boys State Hall of Fame at 39, and has been recognized by the California State Senate and the Los Angeles City Council.
Martin came at it from the sideline and the spreadsheet. A Loyola Marymount graduate and the head varsity coach at El Segundo High School — where he was named CIF Division 5AA Coach of the Year in 2023-24 — he built his reputation one placement at a time. Families describe the same thing over and over in his testimonials: a coach who works the phones relentlessly, who knows which assistant at which program actually needs a guard next cycle, and who treats a Division III fit with the same seriousness most people reserve for a Division I offer. What he brought to the partnership is the specific, unglamorous expertise that high-academic recruiting demands: Academic Index math, pre-read timelines, transcript strategy, and a working knowledge of what a Williams roster needs that a Bucknell roster doesn't.
Neither the big national recruiting databases nor the traditional AAU circuit was serving that athlete well. One sold exposure by volume. The other optimized for the top 1% of talent. The high-academic kid — good player, exceptional student, wrong shape for both systems — fell through the middle.
The circuit as the front door
The most distinctive thing about the Academic Athletes model is that it starts on a court, not on a website.
Through the Attitude of Gratitude High Academic camp circuit, Martin and Silverrun events built specifically for this athlete: the High Academic Super Bowl, showcases in New York, the DMV, NorCal, and Southern California, and a summer Ivy League Elite Camp tour that puts rosters directly in front of coaching staffs at Harvard, Brown, Penn, and Columbia. The circuit has grown quickly — the July High Academic Super Bowl alone drew more than 450 athletes — and expansion out East is underway with events in the DMV and New York.
The design intent is straightforward. At a typical exposure event, a 6'1" guard with a 4.4 GPA is competing for attention against players the coaches came to see. At a high-academic event, that guard is the player the coaches came to see. Rosters are built around graduation year and academic profile. The gyms are full of staffs from schools where a transcript is a genuine competitive advantage rather than an afterthought.
Just as important, the events double as education. Recruitment seminars for parents run alongside the games, covering the things families almost never learn in time: how the Academic Index actually works, when pre-reads happen, why the Division III timeline runs differently from the Division I one, and what a coach means when he says he's "monitoring" a player.
The consulting side: small on purpose
The second half of the business is one-on-one consulting — and it is deliberately narrow. Academic Athletes takes only a handful of clients per graduating class, a constraint that would be commercially irrational if the product were exposure. It isn't. The product is Martin's time and his network.
Engagements run on monthly meetings that intensify as deadlines close in, with direct access to Martin rather than a rotating account manager. The work is granular: building a realistic school list from the 1,300-plus colleges in the country, calibrating academic targets against actual admissions math, packaging film and transcripts the way college staffs want to receive them, and then — the part almost no platform does — picking up the phone and advocating.
That last piece is what families keep citing. The recurring theme in Academic Athletes testimonials isn't a database or a dashboard. It's a coach who kept working the network after everyone else had stopped.
The placements
The results have accumulated across exactly the range of schools the model targets. Charlie Goetz to MIT. Austin Brinker to Johns Hopkins. Max McCalla to Claremont McKenna. Ryan Nagle to Carnegie Mellon. Scott Ruegg to Colorado College. Nick Lundy to Grinnell. Darreson Naruse to UC Santa Cruz. Jake Goldberg to Division I NJIT and later Cal Poly Pomona. Dillon McLennan to Hiram and then Whittier. Jaden Penberthy to Biola. Evan Hansen to Ottawa University Arizona.
Read that list as a whole and the thesis comes into focus. These are not consolation outcomes. They are, for the right student, the best available combination of playing time, degree value, and long-term optionality — and most of them are invisible to a recruiting industry built to chase scholarship dollars.
The Ivy League pipeline
The Ancient Eight is the hardest recruiting environment in college basketball to navigate from the outside. There are no athletic scholarships, the Academic Index governs who a staff can even pursue, pre-reads happen on a timeline most families discover a year too late, and the eight programs collectively sign a tiny number of players each cycle. Getting into that conversation requires being in the right gym in front of the right assistant at the right point on the calendar — which is precisely what the Academic Athletes calendar is engineered to produce.
Every July, Martin and Silver take rosters directly onto Ivy campuses through the Ivy League Elite Camp tour, running Brown, Harvard, Columbia, and Penn in a single week. Players aren't sending unsolicited film into an inbox; they're being evaluated in person by the staffs that will decide their cycle, with Martin working the sideline conversations that follow.
Ivy League players who came through their programs:
Tommy McCarthy — Harvard. A guard out of La Costa Canyon in Rancho Santa Fe, McCarthy spent four years in Cambridge and was part of back-to-back Ivy League championship teams.
Balsa Dragovic — Harvard. A 6'10" forward who arrived from Serbia by way of Cantwell-Sacred Heart of Mary in Montebello — and, notably, McCarthy's AAU teammate for two years before the two committed to the same school weeks apart.
Christian Juzang — Harvard. A point guard from Viewpoint School in Calabasas.
Spencer Freedman — Harvard. One of the most decorated high school guards in Southern California before heading to Cambridge.
Clark Slajchert — Penn. The Oak Park High School scoring guard became a 1,000-point scorer at the Palestra and one of the most productive guards in the Ivy League.
Wes Slajchert — Dartmouth. Clark's older brother, a four-year contributor in Hanover out of the same Oak Park program.
Four Harvard players. A Penn guard who scored 1,000 points. A Dartmouth rotation piece. Two brothers from the same Southern California high school landing in two different Ivy programs. That is not a lucky year — that is a pipeline.
Silver Waves Media: recognition and the rooms it opens
Running parallel to all of it is Silver Waves Media, founded by Silver in 2020 and now one of the more influential recognition platforms in college basketball. Its Impactful Lists — top assistant coaches in America, top athletic directors, top grassroots programs and circuits — carry weight precisely because of Silver's standing in the sport. Silver Waves has also produced professional-quality video for more than 20,000 athletes and teams.
Martin works the media side as well, serving as an event coordinator for SilverWaves Media's marquee gatherings: the Future of NIL Power Conference in Las Vegas, the Elite 75 Power Lunch that has become a fixture of Final Four week, and invitation-only receptions for athletic directors and rising ADs. Those rooms are not incidental to the recruiting work — they are where the relationships that move a student-athlete's file get built.
In January 2026, Silver Waves Media named All In Elite one of the Top 27 Grassroots Programs in America, recognizing the program as a pillar of the basketball community for helping thousands of athletes earn college scholarships and hundreds of coaches advance their careers. Martin, accepting the recognition as Vice President, framed it around access — the program's aim has been to create as many opportunities for its student-athletes as possible.
That same year, All In Elite and Silver were honored with a community impact award from California State Senator Henry Stern.
What comes next
Academic Athletes is now consolidating under a broader identity, moving away from the "Ivy" framing that led families to assume the service only served eight schools. The reality has always been wider: the Ivy League, the Patriot League, and the deep bench of academically elite Division III programs, with growing interest arriving from families in swimming, soccer, and other sports beyond basketball.
New tools are in development too, including an Academic Index and college-fit calculator designed to give families an honest read on where they actually stand before the process begins — the kind of clarity that, in this corner of recruiting, is often worth more than another highlight reel.
The underlying bet hasn't changed since the beginning. Most recruiting services help athletes get seen. Martin and Silver built something to help a specific kind of athlete get placed — at a school that will keep paying off long after the ball stops bouncing.
There is a version of the college basketball recruiting story that gets told constantly — the five-star, the offer list, the hat ceremony. And there is a much larger version that almost nobody tells: the 3.9 student who can really play, whose best future is a starting spot and a degree at a school that will still be paying dividends thirty years after his last game.
Academic Athletes exists for the second player.
Founded by Scott Martin and Ryan Silver, the organization has spent the last several years constructing something the grassroots basketball world had mostly left alone — a dedicated pipeline connecting high-academic student-athletes to the Ivy League, the Patriot League, and the country's most selective Division III programs.
Two backgrounds, one gap in the market
Martin and Silver have been building basketball infrastructure together for well over a decade.
West Coast Elite Basketball was the first act. Silver founded it; Martin helped build it — serving as Associate Director of West Coast Elite Under Armour and Director of Finance for West Coast Elite Basketball as the club grew from a Southern California program into one of the largest AAU organizations in the country. In 2020 it was acquired by 3 Step Sports and Fertitta Capital.
They ran it back with ALL IN ELITE Under Armour, now a national grassroots program spanning hundreds of teams, with Silver as founder and Martin as Vice President. Alongside it Silver launched Silver Waves Media, a global sports media organization, and Attitude of Gratitude Consulting. Across that body of work, their programs have been credited with helping secure hundreds of millions of dollars in scholarship money — and All In Elite today counts four active NBA players and more than fifty coaches working in college basketball among its alumni.
Silver is the architect: teams, events, media reach, relationships across every level of the sport. He was CIF California Coach of the Year in 2011, was inducted into the California Boys State Hall of Fame at 39, and has been recognized by the California State Senate and the Los Angeles City Council.
Martin came at it from the sideline and the spreadsheet. A Loyola Marymount graduate and the head varsity coach at El Segundo High School — where he was named CIF Division 5AA Coach of the Year in 2023-24 — he built his reputation one placement at a time. Families describe the same thing over and over in his testimonials: a coach who works the phones relentlessly, who knows which assistant at which program actually needs a guard next cycle, and who treats a Division III fit with the same seriousness most people reserve for a Division I offer. What he brought to the partnership is the specific, unglamorous expertise that high-academic recruiting demands: Academic Index math, pre-read timelines, transcript strategy, and a working knowledge of what a Williams roster needs that a Bucknell roster doesn't.
Neither the big national recruiting databases nor the traditional AAU circuit was serving that athlete well. One sold exposure by volume. The other optimized for the top 1% of talent. The high-academic kid — good player, exceptional student, wrong shape for both systems — fell through the middle.
The circuit as the front door
The most distinctive thing about the Academic Athletes model is that it starts on a court, not on a website.
Through the Attitude of Gratitude High Academic camp circuit, Martin and Silverrun events built specifically for this athlete: the High Academic Super Bowl, showcases in New York, the DMV, NorCal, and Southern California, and a summer Ivy League Elite Camp tour that puts rosters directly in front of coaching staffs at Harvard, Brown, Penn, and Columbia. The circuit has grown quickly — the July High Academic Super Bowl alone drew more than 450 athletes — and expansion out East is underway with events in the DMV and New York.
The design intent is straightforward. At a typical exposure event, a 6'1" guard with a 4.4 GPA is competing for attention against players the coaches came to see. At a high-academic event, that guard is the player the coaches came to see. Rosters are built around graduation year and academic profile. The gyms are full of staffs from schools where a transcript is a genuine competitive advantage rather than an afterthought.
Just as important, the events double as education. Recruitment seminars for parents run alongside the games, covering the things families almost never learn in time: how the Academic Index actually works, when pre-reads happen, why the Division III timeline runs differently from the Division I one, and what a coach means when he says he's "monitoring" a player.
The consulting side: small on purpose
The second half of the business is one-on-one consulting — and it is deliberately narrow. Academic Athletes takes only a handful of clients per graduating class, a constraint that would be commercially irrational if the product were exposure. It isn't. The product is Martin's time and his network.
Engagements run on monthly meetings that intensify as deadlines close in, with direct access to Martin rather than a rotating account manager. The work is granular: building a realistic school list from the 1,300-plus colleges in the country, calibrating academic targets against actual admissions math, packaging film and transcripts the way college staffs want to receive them, and then — the part almost no platform does — picking up the phone and advocating.
That last piece is what families keep citing. The recurring theme in Academic Athletes testimonials isn't a database or a dashboard. It's a coach who kept working the network after everyone else had stopped.
The placements
The results have accumulated across exactly the range of schools the model targets. Charlie Goetz to MIT. Austin Brinker to Johns Hopkins. Max McCalla to Claremont McKenna. Ryan Nagle to Carnegie Mellon. Scott Ruegg to Colorado College. Nick Lundy to Grinnell. Darreson Naruse to UC Santa Cruz. Jake Goldberg to Division I NJIT and later Cal Poly Pomona. Dillon McLennan to Hiram and then Whittier. Jaden Penberthy to Biola. Evan Hansen to Ottawa University Arizona.
Read that list as a whole and the thesis comes into focus. These are not consolation outcomes. They are, for the right student, the best available combination of playing time, degree value, and long-term optionality — and most of them are invisible to a recruiting industry built to chase scholarship dollars.
The Ivy League pipeline
The Ancient Eight is the hardest recruiting environment in college basketball to navigate from the outside. There are no athletic scholarships, the Academic Index governs who a staff can even pursue, pre-reads happen on a timeline most families discover a year too late, and the eight programs collectively sign a tiny number of players each cycle. Getting into that conversation requires being in the right gym in front of the right assistant at the right point on the calendar — which is precisely what the Academic Athletes calendar is engineered to produce.
Every July, Martin and Silver take rosters directly onto Ivy campuses through the Ivy League Elite Camp tour, running Brown, Harvard, Columbia, and Penn in a single week. Players aren't sending unsolicited film into an inbox; they're being evaluated in person by the staffs that will decide their cycle, with Martin working the sideline conversations that follow.
Ivy League players who came through their programs:
Tommy McCarthy — Harvard. A guard out of La Costa Canyon in Rancho Santa Fe, McCarthy spent four years in Cambridge and was part of back-to-back Ivy League championship teams.
Balsa Dragovic — Harvard. A 6'10" forward who arrived from Serbia by way of Cantwell-Sacred Heart of Mary in Montebello — and, notably, McCarthy's AAU teammate for two years before the two committed to the same school weeks apart.
Christian Juzang — Harvard. A point guard from Viewpoint School in Calabasas.
Spencer Freedman — Harvard. One of the most decorated high school guards in Southern California before heading to Cambridge.
Clark Slajchert — Penn. The Oak Park High School scoring guard became a 1,000-point scorer at the Palestra and one of the most productive guards in the Ivy League.
Wes Slajchert — Dartmouth. Clark's older brother, a four-year contributor in Hanover out of the same Oak Park program.
Four Harvard players. A Penn guard who scored 1,000 points. A Dartmouth rotation piece. Two brothers from the same Southern California high school landing in two different Ivy programs. That is not a lucky year — that is a pipeline.
Silver Waves Media: recognition and the rooms it opens
Running parallel to all of it is Silver Waves Media, founded by Silver in 2020 and now one of the more influential recognition platforms in college basketball. Its Impactful Lists — top assistant coaches in America, top athletic directors, top grassroots programs and circuits — carry weight precisely because of Silver's standing in the sport. Silver Waves has also produced professional-quality video for more than 20,000 athletes and teams.
Martin works the media side as well, serving as an event coordinator for SilverWaves Media's marquee gatherings: the Future of NIL Power Conference in Las Vegas, the Elite 75 Power Lunch that has become a fixture of Final Four week, and invitation-only receptions for athletic directors and rising ADs. Those rooms are not incidental to the recruiting work — they are where the relationships that move a student-athlete's file get built.
In January 2026, Silver Waves Media named All In Elite one of the Top 27 Grassroots Programs in America, recognizing the program as a pillar of the basketball community for helping thousands of athletes earn college scholarships and hundreds of coaches advance their careers. Martin, accepting the recognition as Vice President, framed it around access — the program's aim has been to create as many opportunities for its student-athletes as possible.
That same year, All In Elite and Silver were honored with a community impact award from California State Senator Henry Stern.
What comes next
Academic Athletes is now consolidating under a broader identity, moving away from the "Ivy" framing that led families to assume the service only served eight schools. The reality has always been wider: the Ivy League, the Patriot League, and the deep bench of academically elite Division III programs, with growing interest arriving from families in swimming, soccer, and other sports beyond basketball.
New tools are in development too, including an Academic Index and college-fit calculator designed to give families an honest read on where they actually stand before the process begins — the kind of clarity that, in this corner of recruiting, is often worth more than another highlight reel.
The underlying bet hasn't changed since the beginning. Most recruiting services help athletes get seen. Martin and Silver built something to help a specific kind of athlete get placed — at a school that will keep paying off long after the ball stops bouncing.