I took the path much more similar to recent posters than earlier ones... I advised as needed but made sure that son had plenty of skin in the recruiting efforts side of the game. In my view, this was going to be a decision that would likely significantly impact the rest of his life, so I felt he both needed proper adult guidance and needed to have a lot of input and awareness during the process. It provided very good learning lessons for him, made him take more ownership and the coaches definitely expect to communicate with the player and not the parent. The few years of involvement with the recruiting process for him was probably better than any other single school-related project during those years in regards to learning how to become an adult. I say this, even though injury largely derailed and re-routed his particular path. The journey as much as the destination..
To RJM's point, I think the coaches usually have a pretty good idea of whether they were receiving communication that was mostly from the player or mostly from the parent.
I did set up the spreadsheet for him and managed reorganization from time to time. And, as it relates to another of Francis' threads, I did spend a fair amount of time helping research schools, including roster/coach surfing 
There is a ton that you can extrapolate but I think most of it became as much entertainment as anything.