For college coaches, a recruitment violation spells disaster. USC football coach Lane Kiffin could be fined more than $15,000 and risk game suspensions if he calls a high school recruit one time too many, for example.

So to help coaches like Kiffin manage their recruitment programs and avoid a train wreck, the USC athletic department has started using a software program developed by former Trojan athletes.

The software, FieldLevel Team, stores information about recruits, keeps track of a coaches’ communication with players and alerts coaches if they’re about to commit a violation.

“Hopefully with this system, we now have a technology to cut down on telephone call violations,” said Dave Roberts, vice president of athletic compliance for USC. “In a perfect world, we’d avoid them 100 percent.”

Kai Sato and Brenton Sullivan co-founded FieldLevel in Santa Monica with some investor backing in 2008, and they launched their software last year.

When a team signs up, each coach gets access to the team’s online account, where they can add information about recruits and track the phone calls they’ve made. Coaches also can access information about the NCAA recruiting calendar and rules, letting them know what time of year they can call recruits and how many calls a week they are allowed to make. The NCAA has its own software, but Sato and Sullivan claim it’s not as efficient. FieldLevel also has a BlackBerry application so coaches can use the service while on the road.

Sullivan, chief executive of the 10-person company, was a USC baseball team walk-on. Sato, the chief operating officer, played club lacrosse. They had thought of the software in their playing days, but Sullivan saw the opportunity more clearly when he worked for the baseball team after graduation.

“I was in charge of writing down all the contacts that our staff had with recruits. So I would collect coaches’ phones and go through their call logs,” he said. “It was a very archaic system and a huge pain.”

FieldLevel has about 100 clients, including large universities, junior colleges and military academies. All 19 of USC’s sports teams use the software. The price of a subscription to FieldLevel varies based on the number of teams from a university that sign up and the size of those teams. Rates start at $129 a month but go above $600.

Sato said the NCAA is becoming stricter about punishments for recruiting violations, which should help increase demand for FieldLevel.

“There’s more and more scrutiny, and penalties are increasing,” he said. “With so many kids to keep track of, schools need a way to bridge the gap between what the coach is doing, what the compliance office records and what is being sent to the NCAA.”