<p>When I requested information from NHM, I noted that I was interested in crew (“please choose up to 5 areas of interest”). I indicated crew, among others. This was about a month ago. I just received an e-mail form the girls’ crew coach at NHM informing me of the crew program and offering advice or reliance for further questions. She gave me her business number and whatnot, but also her home number. That seems like the personal contact only a coach who was recruiting someone favorable would offer… yes? NMH doesn’t have my stats yet, btw. Am I wrong, or are they just friendly and supportive? I responded and told her about how I was INTERESTED and asked to learn more about their program (with a lot of specific questions). Was the e-mail intended for an experienced, semi-recruited athlete, or just someone interested in crew?</p>
<p>As to the home number being included, that is typical for coaches to give out. As a practical matter, when they are not coaching or teaching, they typically don’t spend much time at their “office number”. If they live on campus (probably more typical with NMH), they are going to be at home in the evening or weekend (when you are most likely to call). They don’t like playing phone tag any more than you do.</p>
<p>Since you indicated that you only checked boxes on the interest form originally, I would guess that the coach has no idea of your background in crew. So I’m guessing this is only a general interest repsonse.</p>
<p>However, if you did show interest (and some skill) in the latest response you sent, you may get more attention.</p>
<p>Getting OT, NMH seems like a very different school (rural and not as highly competitive) from the others I’ve seen you discussing as candidates. Are you looking at this as a safety?</p>
<p>I think the crew coach would know whether she was ‘recruiting’ you or not. She may just be looking for potential spots to fill on the crew team because either there aren’t very many people already, or many will be graduating this year. As for giving you a home number, well maybe she just doesn’t mind people calling her and asking questions. Boarding schools often have to weight potential interest more heavily than it may actually be worth just so that they know that there is a chance they will have enough people interested in sports and school activities. </p>
<p>Other than that, I don’t really think “recruiting” really happens in the traditional sense on the high school level.</p>
<p>I disagree that recruiting doesn’t occur at the high school level. There is a lot of recruiting. The coaches want to win and they want the best players to help them do just that.</p>
<p>My son was heavily recruited by all of the boarding schools that he applied to. They called our house and sent emails.</p>
<p>I think it depends a lot on the school. At my boarding school, which was relatively small, most real recruiting took place among students who were transferring in from other high schools in later grades. This especially happened with our post-graduate population. I would imagine larger schools like Lawrenceville with very established programs would recruit more aggressively.</p>
<p>ahh <em>lawrenceville</em>* 
how id love to go there… </p>
<p>but exeter is still my #1 choice, ;)</p>
<p>BlairT- those personal notes are standard procedure at many private schools. My daughter received personal postcards from field hockey coaches at all four schools she applied to. She was an enthusiastic FH player with no talent. She also received personal notes from orchestra directors, music teachers, admissions directors and her tour guides. They really don’t mean much.</p>
<p>I know that recruiting definitely happens, but it makes sense that it happens more in the later grades. Eighth graders are still pretty young, and are still children, and their bodies have not developed completely. Their athletic potential is not fully apparent yet. They can certainly be dedicated to a sport, and that dedication can lead them to play it and be good at it throughout their adolescent years, but you can’t too often predict how good they will be come, especailly the boys.</p>
<p>Just like this kid at my school said Groton accepted him because they “heard” of his SSAT scores, but he hadn’t applied, I think that a coach handing out their personal home phone number is nothing but a friendly gesture. Take it lightly, but contact them if the need comes up.</p>
<p>In my experience the only sports that are recruited for are football, boys varsity ice hockey and lacrosse. Unfortunately, a double standard applies as most female coaches/sports have very little pull with top prep adcoms. You can bet a girl athlete at AESD is as academically qualified as any student applying, with extremely few exceptions.</p>
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<p>Blueliner, let’s start by separating recruiting (the act of getting athletes to apply and commit to a school) from admissions decisions.</p>
<p>My experience is with girls hockey. I’ve been to a few of the large tourneys the last couple of seasons before this year (including 2 years at nationals), and let me tell you that all of the major schools have coaches at the biggest tourneys, taking notes, meeting with parents, etc. In fact, with less potential talent available for nearly the same number of prep school varsity teams, girls coaches have to work harder than the guys coaches. In any given year, a typical top NE prep team will have about 2 or 3 academically qualified (within 15 percentile points of average admitted) AAA quality goalies apply for the typical opening from what my friends with male goalies tell me. Maybe it is fewer at AESD, but clearly there is not a shortage at the next tier of schools. </p>
<p>On the girls side, if there is a quality #1 goalie in place, it is often difficult to get even 1 quality goalie to apply to be a backup, from stories I’ve been told by other female goalie parents. Female goaltending is a VERY small planet. There are usually about 3 dozen quality (potential to play Div I hockey) goalies nationally in any birth year. I’d say only about 1/3 of those choose to play NE prep hockey.</p>
<p>And IIRC Andover’s Athletic Director is the girls hockey coach. I can’t imagine the boys lax coach pulling rank on getting an underqualified (more than 15 percentile points from school admitted average) prospect when the AD can’t do the same to fill her team to be competitive.</p>
<p>And I’ve mentioned on another thread talking to a top-10 prep school coach during the recruitment process who didn’t think my D’s lower than desired SSAT scores would be a problem with admissions. I’m glad we didn’t apply there in that we like the more supportive environment where she is now (not a top-10 school).</p>
<p>And as much as winning “boys” championships seems to mean something to these schools, placing Ivy League and top LAC athletes is every bit as important to the athletic department. And when it comes to this, gender doesn’t matter in the rules of admissions. </p>
<p>So as much as popular myth would like to believe AESD’s boys benches have a large number of underqualified players where the girls bench doesn’t, I would be interested in seeing numbers to prove that.</p>
<p>However, I do think it is a mistake to put a kid in an environment where they are truly not academically a match. When the kid comes to understand that the only reason s/he is at a school is because of athletic skill (they are not that dumb so as not to figure that out), the academics become a lower priority, lessening the value of sending him/her to that school.</p>
<p>Of course, some parents of athletes are as star-struck as their kids and fail to understand how to make a prep school experience work academically for their child as well as it does athletically.</p>
<p>i agree with blue…</p>
<p>“So as much as popular myth would like to believe AESD’s boys benches have a large number of underqualified players where the girls bench doesn’t, I would be interested in seeing numbers to prove that.”</p>
<p>Go to a top school like AESDCH, you will feel it… sometimes things cannot be proven with numbers, since we cant get people’s numbers anyway (they are supposed to be confidential)…but you go to classes with these people, you talk with them, you watch them do their hw (or not do their school work)…and you can feel the difference</p>
<p>and since neither you nor your daughter go to a top 10 school, it would be hard for you to believe it… but I am merely chipping in my 2 cents based on PERSONAL experience living with these people…</p>
<p>one day I was talking with some of the boys hockey player, this is what some of them said “I hope I get a 25(or 26 I dont remember) on the ACT to meet the recruitment standard at the ivies…damn…”</p>
<p>if you think about it , 25 translates to about 1200 on the SATs, that’s not really hotchkiss standard is it?</p>
<p>Yes, bearcats, a 1200 SAT equates to a 26 ACT. And that by statistics would put a person in the bottom quartile of Hotchkiss graduates. Boardingschool review places the top of the bottom quartile at 1920/2400 or about 1280/1600. Assuming a normal bell curve, a 1200 would be 1 standard deviation below average, with a rough estimate being between the 15th and 20th percentile of Hotchkiss graduates. Not the students that Hotchkiss takes pride in necessarily, but hardly a village idiot.</p>
<p>Now why would a hockey worry about going below a 1200? Perhaps he is trying to manage his AI (academic index - which Ivy’s use to regulate admissions of athletes - AI = SAT/10 + CRS (ranking score based upon school size). Hotchkiss being a medium size prep school, but extremely small compared to public high schools that send kids to Ivy’s, doesn’t give as much credit to class rank from a smaller school than it does to a larger school, so he has a lot more to worry about.</p>
<p>Based upon a graduating class between 100 and 149, in order to get to the lowest AI score necessary for bottom of the low-low band (171) a SAT score of 1200 would have to be paired with a class rank of no lower than 54th. </p>
<p>That would indicate that he is in the upper half of his graduating class by rank, so I guess that would make him pretty smart and just worried about test taking. </p>
<p>I think you take his worry over test scores as a sign of lesser intellegence. I think it is misplaced.</p>
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<p>So you can sense a dumb student a mile away, eh? Yes, you didn’t say dumb, but you are certainly making the implication. Please do not stereotype athletes.</p>
<p>not dumb people, but lazy people, or less motivated academically… most of them</p>
<p>btw, blueliner and I are chipping in our opinion based on OUR EXPERIENCE, which you dont have, and what are you talking based on? and it is also VERY OBVIOUS how much more the school and the student body weighs the boys hockey, boys lax and football program more than their counterpart… BASICALLY ALL THE PG SPOTS go to these sports…
and according to my dorm faculty who’s an ADMISSION OFFICIER (first hand experience), coaches from those 3 sports have A LOT MORE PULL than the girls’ coaches…</p>
<p>and from according to my college advisor, they dont use AI for top schools like AESDCH or basically the top 10s, once you meet a benchmark SATs from a school of this calibre, the coaches would have a big chance of pulling you in, unless you are extremely amazing, like that kid from salisbury who went to harvard with a 1060…ya…those are extreme cases…also our graduating class is 190 kids</p>
<p>goaliedad, I go to hotchkiss like bearcats and I have to agree with blueliner and bearcats…</p>
<p>I also agree with bearcat and blueliner. All you have to do is go to a girls hockey game at one of the top schools. There are maybe 15 people there. Compared to a boys hockey game that is packed with students, parents, scouts, etc. I am not putting down girls hockey or any girls’ sport for that matter, but that is the reality. Schools are willing to look the other way and admit lower performing athletes for the top sports (lax, football, and hockey). So are the colleges. I know of one kid who took the SAT at least 5 times and still couldn’t score above 1100. He’s now a freshman at Harvard and is a starter. Not sure how they massaged his AI.</p>
<p>I would guess there may be other factors at play with respect to allocation of PG spots. What is the point of the PG year for a student athlete? To help make some prep school’s team better or to better position that athlete for a college athletic career? Could it be that the necessity of playing a PG year for athletes in order to create college opportunities is significantly greater for boys than for girls? Perhaps the pool of applicants is very skewed toward boys and the school is merely crafting the allocation of those spots to fit demands.</p>
<p>That being said, I don’t think your experience at Hotchkiss is representative of the entire boarding school community. There was at least one school we visited (admittedly not one you would consider Hotchkiss’ academic peer, but one that has almost annually had a top 5 division 1 girls hockey program) where every year something like 1/3 of the team is Canadian PGs.</p>