Comparison · stats publishing & team rankings

Lightning vs MaxPreps. An athlete profile vs a team stats page.

The affordable MaxPreps alternative.

MaxPreps is the dominant stats-publishing platform in HS sports — your team's coach uploads stats and MaxPreps publishes them at the team level. It's not a recruiting profile platform, and the athlete doesn't own the data. Lightning gives each athlete their own verified, owned recruiting profile that they keep across teams, sports, and schools.

See Lightning for Players & Parents →

MaxPreps publishes

Team stats + rankings

Lightning publishes

Verified athlete profiles + stats

Who owns the data

MaxPreps: the school / coach. Lightning: the athlete.

Cost to the athlete

MaxPreps free; Lightning $25-$50/yr

Feature by feature

What you get. What you don't.

Feature	Lightning	MaxPreps
Verified athlete recruiting profile	✓	✗
Team-level stats page	limited	✓
Athlete owns the data across teams + schools	✓	✗
Multi-sport profile (one athlete, many sports)	✓	✗
Verified stat workflow (coach + tournament push)	✓	✗
College coach search & messaging	✓	✗
High school team rankings	✗	✓
Game schedule + score publishing	limited	✓
Public team-page generator	✓	✓
Cost to athlete	$25-$50/yr	Free

Where Lightning wins

Why coaches switch.

Profile ownership — Lightning profiles travel with the athlete across teams, club programs, and sports. MaxPreps pages live at the team/school level; if the coach stops uploading, your stats stop appearing.
Verified stats — Lightning pushes stats from team game trackers and tournament systems with a "Verified" badge. MaxPreps stats are self-reported by coaches with no verification chain.
Recruiting workflow — Lightning is built for college-coach search and messaging. MaxPreps is a stats publication, not a recruiting platform; coaches must search elsewhere.
Multi-sport — Lightning supports one profile across all 16 supported sports. MaxPreps is per-sport, per-team, per-year.
Direct athlete access — Athletes update their own profile (highlight video, measurables, GPA, transcripts). On MaxPreps, the coach has to do the work and updates can lag the actual season.

Where MaxPreps might fit

Honest cases for staying.

Cost — MaxPreps is free to the athlete. Lightning is $25-$50/yr. If you only need a team stats page, MaxPreps is the cheaper option.
Ubiquity — MaxPreps has 20+ years of installed base. Most high school teams already report there; their team-rankings system is well-known.
CBS Sports integration — MaxPreps is owned by CBS Sports and benefits from cross-promotion. Local newspapers often cite MaxPreps rankings.
Game-score publishing — Real-time score updates from coaches during game day work well on MaxPreps for the community-news use case.

Switching

From MaxPreps to Lightning.

Keep your MaxPreps team page — it costs nothing and provides community visibility.
Build a Lightning profile for the recruiting layer: verified stats, college-coach search, owned profile.
Connect your sports + tournaments to Lightning to enable verified-stat push. Tournament-verified and team-verified badges build credibility.
Use both: MaxPreps for community / local-paper / school visibility, Lightning for the recruiting workflow and verified profile.

Frequently asked

Answered. No fine print.

Will college coaches look at my MaxPreps page?

Some will, especially for a sanity check on team-level results. But they cannot search MaxPreps for specific position needs or measurables the way they can on Lightning — MaxPreps is organized by team and league, not by athlete searchable attributes.

Why pay for Lightning if MaxPreps is free?

You're paying for athlete-owned verified data and active recruiting tools. MaxPreps is a team-stats publication owned by CBS Sports; Lightning is a profile platform you control, built to be searched by athlete attributes and sent directly to the coaches you're targeting — the recruiting layer MaxPreps doesn't have.

Can I import stats from MaxPreps?

Not directly — MaxPreps doesn't expose athlete-level data via export. The best workflow is to use Lightning's verified workflows (team game tracker auto-push or tournament receiver) for the stats you care about, and let MaxPreps publish the team page in parallel.

Does Lightning replace MaxPreps team rankings?

No — Lightning doesn't produce HS team rankings. Use MaxPreps for that. Use Lightning for the per-athlete recruiting layer.

Are MaxPreps stats considered "verified" by college coaches?

No. MaxPreps stats are coach-reported with no validation chain. College coaches treat them as informational, not verified.