NESCAC Football

varska
Sun, 14 Dec 2014 16:12:32 +0000

" It seems to me they, even IVY, will string the bottom-of-the-list kids along with their silence and see what holes they end up with. Is this a correct assumption?"

It sure seems that way at times. But in the coach’s defense - you have to remember there are hundreds of potential recruits he’s dealing with. So I wouldn’t say it’s really ‘stringing kids along with silence’ - rather he just doesn’t know how things are going to end up until he sees who is committing where. The ‘musical chairs’ analogy is a good one, but picture a thousand kids playing and they’re all sitting down at different times.

One difference, I think, is that we tell our kids to contact the other coaches that recruited them once they have made their decision. Coaches, on the other hand, tend not to call the kids that are left at the altar to let them know they’re no longer interested. One reason, I suppose, is that a coach doesn’t know for certain how secure his recruits are until admission decisions are released. The other is the sheer volume of recruits he’s dealing with. Similar to people interviewing for jobs that never hear a ‘thank you, but we hired someone else’

As for the athletic-student/student-athlete sliding scale being tough to gauge - it’s true that a very strong athlete may be able to get by with a slightly weaker academic profile at the top academic schools, but the inverse is rarely true. In other words, very strong academics doesn’t generally allow a weaker athlete to be recruited. There are some exceptions, of course - a coach may find he needs to boost the team academic index, for example. But if the athletic chops aren’t quite at the caliber the coach needs, you can’t compensate for that with high test scores.

Difficult times to be sure - with so much taking place behind the scenes that we just aren’t privy to.