I’m no expert, but I actually know of “recruits” in lacrosse and baseball who got into Ivies with coach support after the likely letters/slots had been used up. I believe there is a softer recruiting tier. Of course, those applicants need to be reasonably strong and able to get into the school with only moderate support.
@fenwaypark. I don’t believe anyone is asserting that the Ivy Common Agreement covers only “Ivy Championship” sports. The point though that I was making is that I believe the number of potential supported recruits varies by school, based on the number of varsity sports the individual school supports, rather than a universal cap of 230. As far as hockey, I was positing that one of the reasons it may be subject to different or additional AI rules (like football and men’s basketball) is because not all of the schools compete in that sport.
That is correct. Each school is free to set its own cap lower than the one mandated from the Ivy League. For example, much attention has been given to Yale’s former president capping their number at about 180.
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/10/18/future-of-athletic-recruitment-remains-uncertain/
^that’s true @skieurope, but I think @Ohiodad51 was referencing the formula based on the number of varsity sports the school fields and the size of the travel squad for each sport. The league enforces a uniform travel squad limit for each sport. The total travel squad numbers are added together and multiplied by 1.4 to get the grand total for the total number of recruits that may be admitted over a rolling four year period. Each school can allocate where to use their recruit spots - but the overall number is controlled by the league.
I can see where a smaller school may choose to only use 200 or 210 of the spots, but that Cornell would want the full 230 since it has so many more students.
@twoinanddone , it’s really more about the number of teams they field than the number of students on campus. That, and the relationship administration has with the athletic department.
^^^Yes. And in the case of Brown, it was about an internal policy review about academic goals and athletic interests. Brown’s move from 225 to 205 slots, as noted on the previous page of this thread (the term “slots” is the term used in the review) was based on a directive from former President Ruth Simmons.
http://www.brown.edu/web/athletics-review/documents/RJS-athletic-response.pdf
(By the way, lots of other good reading here too, I think)
Are we certain that OP was offered a likely letter? Some Ivy coaches offer support during the regular admissions cycle, which Is a different animal. I don’t see the OP using the words official visit of likely letter on his post,
Someone wrote: “Each year the total number of slots is allocated among teams according to factors such as how many roster spots need to be filled as a result of graduation/attrition, W-L record, post-season play, and fundraising.”
Does anyone know when that process takes place? Generally, in the Ivy, when are the slots are allocated among the teams?
@classicalmama, likely letters are offered in the regular decision cycle, not just the ED round. It may be that some coaches in some sports only offer letters in the ED round, but at least in football letters are routinely provided in the RD round. As I have said before all of the available information, along with the simple logic inherent in the process, indicates that there is a single level of support a coach can provide to a recruit within the Ivy League.
@okthenyeah, if I understand your question, I doubt seriously that anyone here can provide an answer. Once the league sets the number of supportable recruits for each school, then each school will follow its own internal process to determine how to allocate those numbers. The exception to this rule is football, Men’s basketball and Men’s hockey, which are governed a bit differently.
@Ohiodad51 You’re right…I worded that incorrectly. The point I wanted to make (having talked to parents on my older kid’s Ivy team whose kids got in without a likely) is that there is in fact a second level of support that Ivy coaches sometimes offer . Sometimes Ivy coaches don’t offer a likely slot, but support kids more informally with a letter in the admit file or by calling admissions if a kid is waitlisted.
Given that OP is talking about olympic level players on his team, I’m guessing he’s not being recruited for football. If it’s swimming or rowing or (if @varska 's daughter’s experience is any indication) track, the teams don’t generally need low skill/high AI index kids to bring up the AI on their teams–enough of their recruits have both high AIs and competitive athletic skill.
So I’m wondering if the coach is using the word support, rather than OV/likely to indicate something different than we’re all imagining here. If that’s the case, the Ivy support is no better than the MIT support. It would be good to get some clarification on this from the OP.
I have heard Ivy coaches talk about “support” in the sense of writing a letter to admissions for a student they don’t want to use a LL/slot on, but with the caveat that in that situation, sometimes the students get in and sometimes they don’t. My sense is that once you get beyond the recruits that are LL eligible, the chances of admission go down quite a bit - maybe not to the single digit baseline levels of many of the Ivies, but nowhere close to being LL eligible. As noted above, in that case sports is just another extracurricular activity.
Every applicant to an Ivy is “LL eligible”, athlete or not, until they are rejected. I don’t think any Ivy coach would be so tricky, but if any youngster asks an Ivy coach if he/she is LL eligible and the coach says “yes”, the coach has not really told you much.
What youngsters should be getting straight with the coach is whether the coach is offering a slot. Likely letters are separate issues that are handled in different ways for different sports by different Ivy admissions offices.
If a youngster is coveted by an Ivy coach, and tells the Ivy coach that there is an opportunity to sign a D1 Letter of Intent during the early signing period of Nov 11-18 this year, I would expect the Ivy coach to say he/she will do everything possible to get Admissions to issue an LL to the youngster, so that the youngster has an extra measure of comfort in maintaining the ED/EA application to the Ivy instead of withdrawing and applying to the D1.
The chances of admission for a youngster who has been granted an Ivy athletic slot are unaffected by whether or not an LL is received, and are in the neighborhood of 99.9%
I have definitely heard of Ivy coaches offering unofficial support to athletes in ED/EA or RD. One coach we met with claimed to have a 50% success rate. He offered support selectively, less than once per year.
@fenwaypark : Could you explain what you mean here? If an athlete is offered a slot, but not a likely (not something that I think happens often because of academic pre-reads), how would the chance of admission continue to be 99.9%? My sense was always that the likely are sometimes not offered until the athlete, say, got a higher SAT score, but that they are, eventually, granted for the admitted recruits. As OhioDad pointed out, this sometimes doesn’t happen until later in the year.
I really think the statement is clear.
We have seen the Ivy Manual which says “probabilistic communications” may be issued. This connotes that the number of slots is greater than the number of likely letters, or the statement would be meaningless. Here is more from the Ivy Manual, page 144:
I do not see in the Ivy Manual or anywhere else where it says that recruited athletes must be granted likely letters. People in this thread have confirmed that they know cases where athletes who were granted slots and (of course) were admitted did not get likely letters.
Also, see post #36 in this thread by @Swimkidsdad
This is not a challenge, but a sincere question: Where are you getting your information that all Ivy recruited athletes who are admitted must receive likely letters?
I think this is the problem with getting buried in semantics. The key is first, will the coach support the athlete to admissions? Second, will that support result in a request for a likely letter? If not, why not? As has been discussed in some detail, there may be good reasons why support from a coach may not result in a request to admissions to issue a letter, whether because the school has decided for whatever reason not to provide them for that sport, timing of the decision, etc. What I think most of us would agree on is that some expression of support that is less than full and unconditional support is likely unreliable, and probably not worth much more than any other significant extra curricular.
The likely letter is obviously the ideal situation. Speaking from personal experience, it is one thing for a coach to tell a kid that he has passed the pre read and is being supported to admissions. It is quite another to get the letter from admissions saying yep, if things stay on track academically, you will be offered admission. It is not that I think Ivy coaches play fast and loose, in fact my experience has been exactly the opposite. But until there is something in writing from admissions, the situation is of necessity fluid, and unresolved.
@classicalmama, I think the confusion stems from the fact that some Ivy schools will send the physical Likely Letter via snail mail to all of their supported recruits, but others may chose to only issue the letter if the recruit is weighing an offer from a scholarship school and needs that assurance to pass on signing day.
But whether or not the letter actually arrives in the mailbox, they are all supported recruits. The number of these recruits is capped by the league and their academic index (indices?) are used in calculating the athletic average for the school.
This is not the same thing as a coach writing a letter to admissions on behalf of a recruit.
It would certainly make life simpler if every school just mailed the LL to all of their supported recruits…
@Ohiodad51 wrote:
So true. Some Ivy coaches have been known to try to “turn” recruits that have already committed. My daughter’s college coach told of a recruit that he supported and thought everything was a go. After winter break he called the kid to touch base and found that he had committed elsewhere. Apparently a competing Ivy coach called and planted the seed in this kid’s head that the absence of communication over winter break meant they may not be supporting him after all. All’s fair in love, war and college recruiting, I guess.
The programs that aren’t getting the written assurance from admissions (LL) for every recruit are really putting themselves at a disadvantage, IMO.
Interesting. I can see how the likely might be irrelevant for the athlete who is still working on test scores or who doesn’t decide until the EA/ED due date to where to apply. But I’m puzzled over why a school and athlete that commit to one another well before the application deadline wouldn’t seal the deal with a likely. Without a likely, I agree that the promised Ivy slot just seems much less solid, though y’all say it’s not.
Which brings me to another question–maybe a stupid one. Given that OVs and offers can sometimes extend past the EA/ED date, do athletes apply to just one school in the regular admissions cycle if they’ve been promised a slot/support?