good to know. Thanks!
Hopefully this thread has given you the info you and your kid need to ask questions. Read past threads too, as others have suggested.
The Athletic Scholarship Playbook that cinnamon1212 recommended would also help with questions and is still pertinent even though D3 doesn’t have athletic scholarships.
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This is so critical. Enthusiasm is not enough. The language used above is deliberately vague, and can easily lead to misunderstandings and unrealistic expectations.
I’ve included the verbiage from a couple of offers D26 received. Hope it helps.
“We’re excited to offer you a roster spot in our Class of 2030 and full support of your application. If you accept the offer, we’d plan to have you apply ED1 and you would receive your admissions decision in mid-December.”
“I am pleased to offer you a roster spot on our team at XXXX. I believe you would be a great fit for our program, both in and out of the pool, and we would love to have you as part of our team. If you choose to accept this opportunity, you would commit to applying through Early Decision 1.”
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Your child is only a junior so every NPC out there should be treated as a rough estimate. This is especially true for third party estimates. This is why a financial pre-read directly from the school will be critical when the time comes for that.
Ideas of some things to ask about for a track athlete:
Training: what is the training approach; how does training look over the course of a year, season, week; what might a typical week look like in season; are athletes doubling and/or lifting and how is that integrated into the schedule; do they divide into training groups and how does that work; what does the transition from HS to college training usually look like—do incoming recruits usually make a quick transition, are they ramped up slowly, etc.
Competition: should a first year athlete assume they’d compete in every meet on the schedule or just some of them; does everyone travel to the big meets (and the conference meet) and if not how are those decisions made; what does a travel weekend with a meet on a F or Sat look like—when do they usually leave and return, do they stay overnight, are there opportunities to study, etc.
Student-athlete balance: how challenging is it for athletes to balance the demands of training and competition with a rigorous academic schedule; what if there are conflicts between classes/labs and practice sessions (many schools reserve a block of time for athletic practices but this might not help with lifting or doubling); how are conflicts with exams handled, or aren’t there any; have former athletes successfully balanced the sport with the various professional or academic development opportunities they might have at the school (interviews, internships, etc); asking about social life of team members is important but probably best to ask team members
Recruiting process: what does the process and timeline look like; does the coach have influence with admissions and when do they start narrowing down the pool and decide which recruits to support; are there pre-reads, academic and financial; do my marks put me in the range where you’d expect me to be a candidate for that group getting coach support; how often have athletes you’ve supported NOT been admitted; does the school issue likely letters
Get to know the coach: how did you get into coaching, what do you enjoy about it…just a personal question or two to get a sense of personality.
Some of the answers to these questions might be factors in choosing programs and answers should help form an image of what it’d be like to run there. But they’re also just an opportunity to get the coach talking and you can usually learn a lot from that.
Also, if need-based aid is important you should be aware (and probably are already) that there can be an enormous difference in need-based aid between high endowment schools and lower endowment schools. If your geographic filter is excluding most of the former you might want to consider whether it’s worth expanding the scope.
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This is critical.
Trading off social life, parties, etc. for team obligations is something most college athletes have already made peace with. Understanding that you may not have time/bandwidth to attend “how to interview” workshops at Career Development, miss on-campus recruiting events because you’ve got mandatory training sessions, etc. is something many college athletes don’t think about until it’s actually happening to them. A professor wants you to help them research, edit and fact-check a paper they are submitting to a major publication in their field- which would give you both incredible experience AND a “co-author” credit-- is this something you’ll have time and attention for based on the experiences of other student/athletes at this U?
Ask now.
And do a little google investigating. Shortly after my daughter signed her NLI, I read a story in the sport’s magazine about the Louisville coach and it was not a good picture. Top program, experienced coach, but she was cruel to the players. She was fired.
I really wished I’d done more investigating. It worked out for my daughter but it wasn’t perfect.
It is not always the coach’s fault. Another story about the Dartmouth coach seems to be a coach being a good coach but some ‘star’ players from HS not being a star in college and complaining about bad treatment because they weren’t getting playing time. Same result, a coach fired.
So take the stories with a grain of salt but decide what you want. Both coaches had been at their schools for a long time, so that is no guarantee that everything is peachy.
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These items are key and your child needs to go into everything knowing that these things can and do happen.
Slightly off topic but I know a kid that played on the Dartmouth team (volleyball) during the coaches first year and has said that she created a pretty toxic environment from the start. Some of that could have just been adjustments to style after the previous coach but they got off to a rough start.
It can happen anywhere, there is a NESCAC school which currently has some significant team issues in the same sport.
Everyone gets excited about the opportunity as they should but the school needs to make sense without the sport. The broken leg test is so important.
2 posts were split to a new thread: Recruited athlete question
This thread/forum has been useful to me as a parent of a S27 throughout the last few months so maybe sharing our experience will help someone else. Though it’s far from unique, at least it’s extremely current!
S27 received an official offer (in writing…exact words were “Based on your athletic and academic performance we feel secure in offering you a roster spot”) this week at his top choice midwest SLAC. About an hour after he received this email he received another email from the admissions office saying the coach had submitted him for a financial pre-read to determine an estimate for both need-based and merit aid. The school is known for giving generous merit aid in addition to need-based aid, plus S27 is in-state for this school and will receive a significant discount off the price of attending already just for this, which is obviously a huge perk.
S27 replied to the coach’s email saying he was very grateful and excited, and asked about 5 additional questions including “where do you see me fitting into the program right away from an playing time and role perspective?” (answer: depth guy as a first year with good opportunities to earn playing time from the beginning) and “does this offer guarantee admission to the school?” (answer: yes based on academic record and pre-read) and “do you do overnight visits as part of the decision-making process?” (answer: no) He received this response with detailed answers within a couple of hours. The whole thing is so funny, because this is a coach who NEVER responded to S27’s emails over the last year, but when they saw each other in person which happened about 3 times at camps and showcases he always remembered exactly what S27’s emails said…now that S27 is an official recruit he apparently gets answers right away lol. This is just how it works I suppose.
S27 is absolutely thrilled and will be officially committing this week. This is a school that we originally visited about 15 months ago and he liked it right away. Recruiting for his sport took us all over the country and was more or less a brutal and humbling experience throughout. My advice is to cast a very wide net, keep an open mind, be pleasantly persistent with coaches, and believe that coaches are reading what you’re sending even if they don’t respond. Most importantly, if this is something your kid really wants, be prepared to weather low lows with them and ask them throughout the process if playing their sport in college is something they still want to do. I tried to give S27 an out at every stage and with every “no” or mediocre camp/showcase performance, and he still wanted to keep going.
S27’s journey has been both unpredictable and extremely predictable in that he is going to wind up at a school that all along we all believed would be a great fit for him that is two hours from home…but it was touch and go for a while and we weren’t sure how it would all work out. He had his NARP college list ready to go if it was going to be time to give up on his sport.
Good luck to everyone just starting or still just persevering. My second child (D30) will likely not be pursuing her sport in college and I know this will be a different experience. I guess with athletes you pay the dues up front in terms of uncertainty, rejection, and resilience - but in a few weeks S27 will get to sit back and enjoy senior year while his non-athlete classmates go through the spin cycle of regular college admissions. It’s a trade off for sure!
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Thank you for sharing, and especially thank you for this reminder. When the ED decisions start coming in, it’s easy to envy the athletes. And while some of that is legitimate – they got in front of the NARPs because they were athletes – most people have no idea how fraught that whole process is!
Congratulations to your son!
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Until your kid goes through recruiting, it is hard to appreciate how brutal and time consuming it can be. One of the hardest parts is that you often have no idea where your kid actually stands. In some sports, there are so many variables that self-scouting is nearly impossible. Coaches may express strong interest because they want a large pool of prospects, even when they have little intention of recruiting a particular kid.
I have seen claims that college athletes do better in the workplace. If that is true, I wonder how much of it comes from the skills it takes to get recruited in the first place. The process can require a teenager to market himself, build relationships, handle rejection, assess competing opportunities and make decisions with incomplete information. That experience probably looks different for a top D1 recruit, but it was certainly part of my son’s experience.
My son made a sophomore varsity highlight reel and sent it to probably 50 D1 coaches to start the process (he’s a borderline D1 recruit). That led mainly to Ivy camp invitations the summer before his junior year, followed by game invitations that fall. The messages ranged from generic team emails to a head coach contacting him directly and making him feel like a top recruit, which he wasn’t. Interest from D2 and D3 programs followed. Along the way, coaching staffs changed, position coaches moved on, and he had to keep figuring out whether interest from a school was real.
By the spring of junior year, there were practice and junior day invitations, along with coaches visiting his school. Those visits could be highly disruptive to class, and the level of interest behind them was hard to judge. Then came more summer camp invitations than anyone could reasonably attend, including a couple of suggestions that an offer might follow if he came to camp.
Through all of this, my son was emailing and texting coaches, arranging visits, scheduling calls, sending transcripts and class schedules, and responding to whatever else they requested. At times it felt like a full-time job. He was also 15 to 17 years old, trying to interpret what adults were telling him and decide where to spend his time. A coach can call you, give you his personal cell number and invite you to campus while having only passing interest in recruiting you. How is a teenager supposed to know the difference? I certainly couldn’t interpret the signals.
Then your kids attends a camp or does a visit and meets all the other kids competing for the same spots. Everyone is being measured and weighed, and the kids stand around awkwardly sizing one another up. In person a coach might ignore one kid, but give another kid a lot of attention. A coach who seemed excited about a kid may go quiet. You see another kid get an offer and wonder whether the difference was something you could control, like your play, or something you couldn’t, like being two inches taller. Sometimes a coach who had ignored your kid suddenly becomes interested again. And some coaches are simply better communicators than others, which can make their interest seem stronger than it is.
I could go on, but the point is that recruiting can be a beatdown. My son went through all of that, along with a serious surgery, to reach an ED offer. I am grateful for where he landed and proud of the work he put in. When people see an athlete get admitted ED, I understand why it can look like an advantage. But from our side, there was a long, uncertain process behind that result. Even after a public commitment, other programs can keep reaching out to see if the kid will change his mind. Recruiting never really ends.
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100% to all of that.
Adding that recruiting out of HS is much more difficult now with the changes to transfer rules, and that impact has even trickled down to D3.
Once one gets to their college and team, the athletes have to constantly worry about playing time and whether they will keep their spot on the team, as the coach is always trying to recruit better players than what they currently have, whether from HS or picked up via the portal.
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And as I mentioned, coaching staffs can change during this process. The staff at the school my son committed to could be fired before ED decisions come out, which would throw a massive wrench into everything. He liked several schools about equally, but chose this one largely because of the coaches and the quality of the athletic program. If those things changed, he would probably decommit and try to move on to his second choice.
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Do better compared to whom? College performers-- particularly in musical theater where you can get dinged because you are a 5’11" female and the leading man they’ve already cast is 5"8 and the director cannot abide a female love interest taller than the male? College entrepreneurs, who start successful businesses out of their dorm room (even if not as successful as Mark Zuckerberg- but there are tons of incredible and innovative companies that college kids create. Some which don’t get out of the starting get, some of which get VC money when the founder isn’t even old enough to rent a car. College journalists- many of whom are vying for attention from a withering media market, but some of whom have broken important stories that weren’t being covered by traditional outlets. And getting interviews with elusive public figures which have had a meaningful impact on public discourse.
Etc. The “athletes do be better in the workplace” is a convenient narrative for companies (many in private wealth management) who want an excuse for continuing to hire out of 8 or 10 colleges and faced with the choice of a chess champion and a lacrosse player will go for the lacrosse player every single time.
College athletes work very, very hard and the recruiting process can be mean and unnerving and filled with disappointment. That’s a full sentence. No need to embroider it.
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what would you do if a D3 coach says to apply and thats all. We are interested in the school and my daughter met the coach at a camp after her sophmore year. the coach then told her to go to her ID Camp and then to apply.
I think we mostly agree. I wasn’t saying athletes do better than performers, entrepreneurs, journalists or other students. I said I had seen claims about workplace outcomes and wondered whether, if those claims hold up, some of the difference reflects skills developed during recruiting. I wasn’t making a claim about who deserves to be hired.
My point was that people often see the ED admission without seeing the years of work and uncertainty that led to it. The same may well be true of a student auditioning for theater or trying to break into journalism. I was describing the process my son went through, not ranking it above anyone else’s.
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I would apply if your daughter would want to attend the school even without athletics. The coach’s encouragement to apply could mean they would be happy to have your daughter on the team if she gets in, or it could be a polite way of saying they are not offering admissions support. I wouldn’t assume either from that statement alone. Your daughter should just reach out directly and ask the question.
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yes she is going to apply but we are unsure where she really stands. She did reach back out to the coach and said she will apply but no follow up.
She can ask if she has coach support in admissions and at what level. Will she have a roster spot? Playing time?
Or is the coach saying “get in on your own, and then we’ll see if there’s room for you in the program.”
If applying is RD and your D isn’t limited by other options from doing that, it sounds like there is no harm in it, but if she is in any way prioritizing this school because she thinks she can play her sport there, that would be a hard no without more commitment by the coach.
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