This seems like a good time to talk about NESCAC athletic recruiting and limits. Each year football teams get 14 coach fully supported slots. Each other varsity sport gets two. These numbers can vary a bit from year to year, coaches can make trades, and some coaches of smaller teams, say golf, might get only one recruit in a given year. So, depending on the number of sports, NESCACs have 60-80 recruits each. (Some schools like Amherst further limit the athletic recruits, what they refer to ‘as Athletic factors’ in the 2016 report I linked above.)
There is also another recruited group of athletes who receive a bump in admissions. The Amherst report refers to them as ‘coded’ athletes. Some might refer to these as athletic tips or athletes with soft support.
It is difficult to walk on to many teams at these schools. But, there are walk-ons, on some teams more than others. IME NESCACs value athletic activities in HS so enroll plenty of students who have some form of athletic competition in their past, even if they aren’t a recruited athlete.
And even when students are not receiving an admission bump, they are still recruited onto the team by the coach. You can’t just join a varsity sport with a few exceptions.
This is too broad a statement IME. There are walk-ons because so many recruited athletes stop playing at some point. I posted above the sports where I’ve seen the most walk-ons in NESCAC schools.
ETA some of the NESCAC coaches (and Ivies for that matter) are required to hold open tryouts.
You are certainly right about crew and sailing (often not a varsity sport.) What are the sports where open tryouts are required? I was a walkon athlete myself at a NESCAC school, but the climate has changed so much and like I said there are so few at my daughters school that she can name them all regardless of sport.
Just to be clear, there are kids who are true recruits. They get full coach support, and in the context of the ED discussion we were having, they “take up” ED spots.
Then there are kids that coaches want, who have a good shot of getting in, but who aren’t getting recruit designation. The coach may tell admissions they want them, and that seems to be a finger on the scale. This is a murky area in terms of taking ED spots, but I suspect most (like @franklynn suggests above) would consider them recruits.
Then there is the category who the coach says, no I won’t support you, (or the kid doesn’t pursue recruitment), but if you get in on your own, you can be on the team/have a roster spot. Maybe this is what you are talking about. My kid didn’t pursue recruitment in his primary sport, but had 3 of these post-admission, including one NESCAC (but not where he attended, alas.) I know a kid who had a similar experience in XC at Bowdoin where the coach flat out said no support, but you can run. These kids show up on rosters but did not take ED recruit spots.
So if 30% of the students are varsity athletes, some are in group 3 and didn’t take/get spots reserved for recruits. Some in group 2 definitely had an edge, or more. And group 1 for sure.
This, from Colby’s athletic policy. There’s more which you can look up. How this translates into reality is what really matters, of course.
“All students who meet eligibility requirements set by Colby College, the NESCAC, and the NCAA will be given a fair opportunity to try out and be considered for selection to any Colby College team. Coaches must communicate team membership criteria and expectations to students in a clear and transparent manner.”
When I talk about a “Recruit,” it’s synonymous with coach’s support with admissions, to my mind. There are only a very few chits per coach at the NESCAC schools with which I am familiar.
I’m friends with the head track coach at one (the NESCAC championships are going on right now, coincidentally) and its kinda like there are between two and five each year he can tag for admissions if the kid “commits” to applying ED. The rest are like “Glad you applied and think you’d be a good addition to the program” and may voice this to admissions, but he’s not urging them to apply ED. In fact, if the IG posts are any indication, far more kids are “Committed” after ED period than before. And based on their Athletic.net performances, many of the ones who do go ED aren’t what we would conventionally think of as recruited athletes (they are good students who run, but not great, applied ED and got in, but the coach had nothing to do with it).
Nor are some of the times posted by the current teams athletes. And I don’t think the girl who ran a 5:28-ish 1500 had to “try out” and “make the team.” Anybody can run track at that school, which adds to the number of athletes in the numerator.
But getting out of that rabbit hole, I still believe the correlation between the absolute number of athletes and ED stats is weak.
I think there are still a fair number of walk-ons on NESCAC track and XC teams. By walk-on I mean athletes who were admitted without coach support. Usually it’s just email communication with the coach that leads to these athletes joining the team. There’s a threshold below which these inquiries wouldn’t lead anywhere, but that varies by event and program. It’d be fairly rare for a decent varsity level HS distance runner to be turned away from most of these XC teams, for example.
My daughter was a swimmer in high school. She contacted Amherst’s swim coach after she was admitted. He looked at her times and told her she would probably never swim varsity but she could swim with the team and see what happened. I believe she would have showed up on the roster. She decided to row instead.
Sorry to keep belaboring this point. Do you mean athletes who go through the preread process and are admitted without using one of the slots or do you truly mean a fair number of people who contact the coach in the spring after they’ve been admitted to inquire if they can run? In my experience, all of the team members have come for on campus visits in the fall and are known to the rest of the team and then hopefully commit ED. People don’t just show up on the team. Tryout athletes are almost always on a different team at the college, not someone who wasn’t recruited but decided after the fact to try and run or throw at the school. My knowledge is limited to two NESCAC schools and Vassar.
No worries, happy to clarify. What I’m talking about are athletes who were not supported through admissions by the coach. I suspect what happened in most of those cases is that the athletes contacted various coaches during the recruiting process and were politely told that the coaches couldn’t offer support, but would love to have them on the team if they were admitted on their own. But I don’t think such prior contact is essential. For the most part if an athlete can fit within a training group based on HS performances (some of which can come spring of senior year), they’re usually welcomed. It’d be sort of malpractice for Track and XC coaches not to take on such athletes
I don’t want to drill too far down and start discussing specific thresholds or teams but you can look at TFRRS and see that there’s a decent sized group of athletes in most events who would not have been recruited out of HS. They still bring a lot to the team and get a lot out of the experience.
Sure, in some of those cases the athletes might have visited given that most D3 visits are not paid for by the school, and are seen as an admissions (not athletics) recruiting tool. But this wasn’t the case for the athletes I’ve known that went the D3 “I’ll run wherever I get in without support” route.
Maybe some of the difference in views has to do with how we’re defining recruit? I do agree that these programs are not like HS where a random student can just show up on day one and expect locker space.
ETA: btw, while rare this walk-on dynamic can happen at Ivies and mid-majors as well. Less common now at more competitive D1 programs than in the past.
I think the safe thing to say is that it’s a rough proxy. There are going to be variables by school when accounting for the varsity / club distinction (crew is club at Amherst, Bowdoin and Midd and varsity at the others), and then also accounting for prominence of the sport at a particular school. For example, it’s less likely that you’d find a walk-on in the 1V or many in the 2V at Wes or Bates and more likely you’d see it at Conn; I would be surprised to learn that there were any walk-ons at Middlebury’s vaunted women’s L-X team, which is a machine. My D played on a very competitive college soccer team and the program was just not that open to walk-ons and so they tended to not have many, or any that stuck around.
So, that’s to say that, sure, it’s not going to be close to 100% accurate to infer ED % from athlete concentration %. But all schools will have these variations - individual sport competitiveness and variation in roster spots and hence recruiting slots/tips capacity, as well as the varsity / club distinctions. But assuming that most of that kind of nets out so as to make the schools overall fairly comparable, then it would be a mistake IMO to ignore it altogether.
The other thing I would add is that D3 sports, particularly in the NESCAC, have become much more competitive. I work with a former Colby soccer player who is some 20+ years removed from her playing days who says all the time that she’d never see the field there today.
The XC athlete I was thinking of at Bowdoin had approached the coach in HS and was not given a pre-read (and obviously, no support, no OV) but was told he could be on the team if admitted on his own. Which he was. I followed his running career because I knew him, and he did get to race. He was, as expected, not a star. But he wasn’t the slowest on the team either, suggesting that there were others who had similar stories.
Maybe part of the reason for that is that XC is a relatively cheap sport to administer. Where you might find some separation is the ability to go to competitions that are on the road and involve a stay-over, or sports with naturally smaller rosters or sports that require a lot of equipment. For sure in my D’s rowing experience at Wes, a relatively strong program, not everybody made the bus rides and for NCAAs the only people who went were the competing rowers (1V and 2V) and a couple of back-ups and that’s all.
D3 sports is competitive. Wes has a sprinter who has run a 10.5 in the 100 meter and a 21.3 in the 200. Both are times that would get him on and competing for a number of D1 programs. He was undoubtedly recruited, though I do understand the point that some programs have room for walk-ons. That is also undoubtedly true. I also believe, and we haven’t talked about this a lot in this thread, that some sports are not as open to them as others. I would be surprised, for example, if there were many (if any) walk-ons on the Middlebury women’s L-X team, or Wesleyan’s women’s tennis team. There are definitely walk-ons on Wes’ women’s crew team but they are almost never in the 1V and not all that common in the 2V. Still, to a point made by another poster, they are included (and deserve to be included) on the roster.
Yes, the marginal cost of adding an XC runner (or track athlete in most events) is pretty low. The potential benefit is asymmetrically high. Plus track and XC just tend to be inclusive and participatory sports by nature. There aren’t any real roster or playing time constraints as there are in most sports, as one can just add training groups, run more heats at a meet, etc.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that there aren’t good athletes at the D3 level. I just don’t think that competitiveness at the top end leads to exclusivity in the sports I know well. There are good teams with national caliber D3 athletes who also welcome walk-on athletes who will never come near a podium. I understand this all sounds anecdotal but it’s pretty obvious when attending meets, looking at results, talking to athletes and coaches.
I think this is a particularly important point and why it’s hard to generalize across sports. As a former track athlete myself, you are quite right. There isn’t much of a “team” dynamic and there is always room on the track for one more.
If I am reading the Colby men’s lax roster correctly, there are 21 freshmen! Can’t imagine that some of them weren’t non-recruits! Tufts has 13 and is often at the NCAA finals, so even the competitive programs seem to have more than their allotment of recruits.
At the same time, I’d guess that a sport like tennis, constrained by the number of courts, rarely ends up with many kids who didn’t go through the recruitment process.
It likely varies by school and sport, depending on both facilities and competitiveness of the program.
I also count 5 seniors on the roster, which may explain the heavy recent class. There may have been some reason for a lot of upperclassmen attrition that is somehow related to why there are so many underclassmen. There may be some flexibility in the NESCAC recruiting guidelines afforded to a program when that happens - @Mwfan1921 any thoughts? And then there may be a communication or “buzz” out there in Lax land that Colby is light on upperclassmen and that there will be more room for players to join and compete for playing time. Otherwise, I’ve no idea why they have so many freshman and so few seniors. I would expect on the other end of the spectrum, at a program like Midd’s women’s lacrosse, there probably isn’t as much of a general understanding that you have a chance to compete for playing time if you’re not recruited. Too much talent on that roster.
I’ll note Colby finished next to last and almost tied for last with Conn in NESCAC play. There may be something there.