Any admission advantage for walk on throwers?

Athletic Recruits
33

I think the OP is trying to square the circle a little bit. If DS doesn’t have the stats to be recruited, it is hard to imagine how to engage the system.

To start with, it’s best not to think of terminology like, “tips” vs. “slots” as though they were written in stone somewhere. They’re not. At Wesleyan, for example, I have only heard of tips, although if you said the word, “slot”, people would probably understand you to mean the same thing. In general, it means being on an actual list submitted to the adcom, composed of athletes who would not otherwise get in without the coach’s help. Yes, there are a certain number divided up per team; helmet sports (particularly football) get the most; swimming, diving and tennis get the least. The academic bands are an added striation within each sport, although, again, it is more common to hear it talked about wrt to football, wrestling, hockey, etc… This may or may not be analogous to the Ivy League’s Academic Index.

There is also a gray area, outside the tip system, that may or may not be relevant, depending on the college. Some NESCACs are so swamped with high-scoring applicants (and, by that I mean, SATs, ACTs and GPAs) that there are a lot of potential athletes who would be left high and dry because they fall somewhere between the highest band for their sport and the tippy-top non-hooked applicants in the general pool. In those situations, a coach may ask that a certain number of them be “protected”, that is, set aside and treated almost like URMs or legacies. My hunch (and, I could be wrong), is that the teams with the lowest number of allotted tips are more likely to ask for “protects”.

The thing to remember is that none of these terms would be relevant were it not for the fact that the candidate is being recruited, and by that I mean,

  1. the candidate has been on the coach’s radar for some time, either through the coach’s own network or through the Wesleyan Athletic Dept. portal, and,

  2. the coach, is seriously considering using one of his allotted tips, slots or protects on that candidate for admission purposes.

IMO, once the coach has thrown his fairy dust on you, you are not, technically speaking, a “walk-on”. You either have a place on the team or you don’t.