<p>I agree that it depends on the school, and the weird thing is, my son has a recruit camp within a few days of ED and the coach is encouraging kids to attend so they are “in time to apply ED”. Five days to put together an ED application for that school. We did have his scores sent to them though.</p>
<p>Also agree about assistant coaches. No guarantee they will respond, but they might.</p>
<p>My son has gone to combination recruit/walk-on days for some schools in the summer. Also, there was a walk-on sophomore at a D1 school who scored a goal early in the season this year. A school that is academically challenging can lose freshmen who were admitted ED with the athletic bump, but they couldn’t maintain grades.</p>
<p>My comment was based on our experience, but it may just be that he isn’t a top choice so far so there is no push for ED. Which is okay for now, there are a lot of tournaments coming up for him in November and December and having extra time for essays and so on might be a good idea.</p>
<p>It’s a leverage game, some coaches want ED because it is binding and they know who they will have. The proportion noted by my son’s top D3 choice was something like 3 ED and 6 RD each year, with some leaving each year due to academics or other reasons. The coach even said that he doesn’t suggest applying ED to get a spot on his team unless the student is sure it is his first choice. Maybe that coach is an outlier. </p>
<p>It’s hard to judge if the soccer or the academics is more important to him. There are a few D1 schools that might not want him for their varsity team but they have a well-organized club team that plays at different colleges.</p>
<p>He’s so up in the air right now that maybe it is comforting he isn’t forced to choose yet.</p>
<p>PS - he has a friend recruited to D2 with a nice scholarship, and the kid has 20 minutes so far in 5 games. This kid played every minute of every game they played last year on the same club team. Even if you end up recruited, there may be a lot of sitting. One reason we are talking to him about club-level college soccer.</p>
<p>This is not a full list of colleges with club soccer:
<a href=“http://www.nirsa.org/wcm/_play_soccer/links/wcm/_Play/Soccer/links.aspx?hkey=42589de2-71c4-4d2b-b33f-0bd038986a66”>http://www.nirsa.org/wcm/_play_soccer/links/wcm/_Play/Soccer/links.aspx?hkey=42589de2-71c4-4d2b-b33f-0bd038986a66</a></p>
<p>best to check on your specific college.</p>
<p>Same thing for track, club track:
<a href=“Membership - NIRCA”>http://www.clubrunning.org/membership/</a></p>
<p>(for my son, we are trying to find schools that have both varsity and club levels, in case varsity is too much for him or he sits more than he would want to.)</p>