Our son is in a similar spot (good sophomore year, thinking high academic, high athletic DIII/lower athletic DI) though his jump happened during sophomore year XC and he is more a pure distance recruit (9:26 3200). So far he is looking mostly at UAA and NCAC (maybe a Patriot league or Ivy eventually, but no bites so far) schools at this point. He took a lot of the excellent advice from this forum and had good responses from coaches when he emailed about visiting schools this summer (using the subject lines suggested by @LurkerJoe above, though also adding academic info to the subject line too). He was able to meet with the coaches at all the DIII schools he visited. One piece of advice is if you don’t hear from a coach, get admission involved when you there in person–we ultimately had a very good visit with one of the coaches we hadn’t heard back from (busy summer travelling), but it was evident he was quite interested once we were there in person, wanting to talk to him. I do think getting an early SAT in June of sophomore year helped our son - he got in the mid 1400s, and while I think he ultimately hopes to do better, he can show that he is a reasonable match for the higher academic schools he is looking at. We were already planning a college tour to look at different types of schools, so he emailed before those visits asking if he could meet while on campus. He did hear back from even a Big 10 school, but it was more a “let me know when you hit 9:08” but I thought it was really nice that he got back to us. I would also recommend asking to see his email once a week–mine isn’t good about checking things, and he had some important emails that I had to point out (and some of them went straight into the promotions tab), and he wasn’t checking them!
Good luck to you and your son–it is definitely an exciting but stressful time! What I need to get mine on now is the more scattershot sending of emails before planning a visit (since other schools he might be interested in are much more broadly dispersed). He did do a great job (on his own) sending follow up thank you notes to coaches after meeting with them and has gotten handwritten follow-up notes/post cards from some of them.
Just a follow up on this comment–my son (once just a skinny, tall runner) does tons of those bodyweight exercises too, but he is also enrolled in his school’s “Strength and Speed” course with real barbells and even he (as a pure distance runner) has benefitted tremendously from it and is a lot more powerful. I’d imagine something like that would be even more helpful for a middle-distance guy! Two pictures below are from freshman and junior year (almost no difference in height). I admit I was skeptical taking away an academic course for this (and his overall weighted class ranking dropped a bit too) but the strength has helped him a lot!
