So in the game as far as I can tell I can only recruit high school seniors.

I don't know if the rules for recruiting have changed since I was in school over a decade ago, but when I was in middle school, I had a teammate who was in 8th grade and at the time it felt like he was getting recruited by the local Division 1 schools.

I was thinking there should be a feature where you start recruiting players, mostly potential 4 or 5-star recruits, as high school freshmen.

In this game you can recruit HS seniors and JC players...not early teens or kindergarten.

While I like the idea of adding more depth to recruiting I feel something like this might make the whole process to repetitive and tedious. It makes me think that some kind of mechanic involving relationships with HS coaches could be an interesting idea for future versions.

Long ago I had a HS coach who formed and developed a league for middle and grade schoolers. He had joint team practices running the same concepts with lots of scrimmages and mix/matching of players. As a result this coach built a up his HS program by building and developing relationships with the lower level coaches and having them teach his systems. It also allowed him the opportunity to spot potential and work with it at a younger age.

What if we had a mechanic for developing HS coach relationships, not just for future interest of HS seniors but to pre-learn proficiencies? Obviously this is just a broad idea based on the OP but could be something new. For small school rebuilds it could be fun building a network of local HS coaches developing players for you to try and topple the big schools.

I like the 2k model of handling this issue. It allowed you to put local (In-state only) HS Freshman and Sophmores on your call list and look at tape. Then for Juniors you could also include them in your scouting visits.

This let smaller schools build relationships with local kids that gave them a fighting chance when the bigger name programs started showing interest.