If you’ve ever watched movies about college recruiting, there’s almost always a scene with college coaches huddled in a war room around a giant list of recruits, moving them up and down the wall based on the coaches’ interest or player availability. Usually, these meetings are kept hush-hush, blinds down, invite-only. And this isn’t too far from how college athletic recruiting boards work.

While every program handles recruiting a little differently, coaches usually have some form of a recruiting board where they rank and keep track of athletes they’re interested in. To better understand how coaches recruit players and decide who gets an offer, athletes should brush up on how recruiting boards work. I talked to Mike Thrower, director of coach product for FrontRush, to get an insider’s perspective on how coaches use recruiting boards.