D3 Soccer Walk on

EMM1
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:18:45 +0000

Unless the school is cheating, the only thing of value that a coach has to offer is support in the admissions process. If you don’t need that support, there is at best only a marginal advantage to “committing” to him (I put the term in quotes because in RD, even if you commit, at D3 schools you have only a moral obligation to honor the commitment).

If your son does not commit, and just shows up on the first day of practice, a coach would have to be a fool not to give him a roster spot if he is better than the other players on the field. I suspect that the worst that could happen is that the coach would be predisposed to favor those whom he actually recruited. But superior performance would generally outweigh predisposition.

That being said, the safest thing to do is to broach the issue with the relevant coaches directly and explicitly. You may not get a completely straight answer, but it will at least give you something concreteto go on.