Windmills SportsCustom Sports Recruitment Website
Custom recruitment platform for Windmills Sports. Athlete profiles, university network, and news articles all powered by the Nurani client portal CMS. Bilingual, portal-managed, and built to scale.
The Brief
Windmills Sports places European athletes at American universities on sports scholarships across 16 sports. Founded by Guido Klompenmaker, a former Dutch college basketball player who went through the process himself. The old website was a static Squarespace site where every change required manual editing: adding a new athlete meant building a page from scratch, publishing a commitment announcement meant duplicating and rewriting a template page. Player profile links were embedded in email campaigns to over 20,000 American coaches, so the migration needed zero broken links. The new platform had to do three things: give Windmills full control over their content through the portal, showcase committed placements as proof for parents, and preserve every URL that coaches were already clicking.
Portal-Managed Athlete Profiles
Every athlete on the website is created, edited, and published from the Nurani client portal. Windmills logs into their dashboard, fills in an athlete's details (photo, stats, position, height, GPA, skills, YouTube highlight video), and the profile goes live on the site immediately. When an athlete commits to a university, Windmills updates the status in the portal and the website reflects the change: committed badge, school name, placement branding. No developer needed, no deployment, no waiting. The public athletes page shows all 38 profiles with real-time search and sport filters (Basketball, Soccer, Volleyball), so American coaches browsing the site find who they need in seconds.
Proof That Sells
The homepage features a scrolling university network showing 27+ American partner schools with real logos, state locations, and conference badges (NCAA D2, NAIA, JUCO, Prep). Below it, a committed athletes section displays each successful placement as a visual card: athlete photo, university name, and a direct link to their full profile with stats, achievements, and video. Testimonials from placed athletes sit alongside. For a parent considering Windmills, this is the page that closes: 17 athletes already studying and playing at American universities, each with a detailed profile proving the placement is real.
News from the Portal, Zero Broken Links
Commitment announcements are published through the portal blog CMS: Windmills writes the article, uploads a photo, and it appears on the website's news section instantly. No code, no deploys, just content management. The migration from Squarespace preserved all 54 player profile URLs and 17 news article URLs with permanent redirects mapped to the new structure. Links that American coaches had bookmarked, saved in email threads, or received in campaigns still work. The old Squarespace site was a dead end. The new platform is a system Windmills controls and grows from their portal.
“The new website looks professional and the portal makes it easy to manage our athletes. Adding new profiles and publishing news takes minutes instead of hours.”
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