I believe it was Amherst that did an assessment of its sports culture a few years back. One of the things that leapt out at me was a coach noting that one of the reasons sports do not necessarily bring the diversity to campus that might be hoped for was that most D3 coaches recruit relatively locally because they lack the staff and budget to scout outside their region. This may not impact timed sports ( t&f, swimming) as much as ones in which a coach needs to see a player in the context of a game to assess not just skills but “sport IQ”. To that end, a rare player hoping to be recruited by a NESCAC school (or an Ivy) could be well served by having a year in a “local” BS league although the timeline could be very challenging - it would only work for a fall sport and a player who was already on the radar of a coach. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that football would be the most likely sport where this might work.
This, btw, would probably make no difference for sports in which the elite players are participating in non-school competition. So @ShanFerg3 , not fencing!
PGs are popular with boys soccer too. Sometimes the boy already has a commitment. The schools I’m familiar with limit the number of PGs the school can take every year. Some schools (Berkshire, I"m looking at you) get around this by bringing in seniors as well. This past year Berkshire brought in 9 PG/senior boys soccer players. It creates a very different culture on the team. (I would guess not in the school).
I know Hotchkiss took a female PG one year because Yale asked them to. A very impressive girl from Rwanda was going to to go Yale but Yale felt she wasn’t quite ready for school in the US, so she spent a year at Hotchkiss and was a tremendous, and impressive, asset to the school that year.
Bringing in 9 PG/senior recruits just for soccer is pretty terrible IMO. 2-3 is fine but more than that is pretty detrimental to the kids who actually spend 4 years there. I hope they are upfront about this. If playing high level sports is a big part of why you are choosing BS this is something to research. Some coaches were pretty upfront about recruiting star players junior year or later, others are not. Also we found that at quite a few schools aside from the PGs the varsity players are almost exclusively day students who also play on competitive travel teams all year. You really have to do your homework, we know kids who were solid travel players before BS but without significant supplementation of the boarding school season they never moved up from the thirds teams.
You can cry all you want about Post Graduates. As long as the Boarding Schools offer them students will be attracted to the PG programs. My son graduated from high school and was a good enough student. He got the recruitment email from one boarding school in Connecticut which he nearly deleted. After researching what a PG program was we decided to visit the school. When we visited my son fell in love with the program and decided that he wanted to do a PG instead of going to College. My son is an Eagle Scout, an athlete, and SATs were very good. His GPA was good as well and he was talking to a few Ivies and other top LACs for his sport. He came from a public school and he really liked the sports facility the boarding school had. He was made captain of his sport. My son was a role model to a lot of other kids who were immature for their age. During his year at the boarding school, he did challenging subjects. He graduated with 4.0. He ended up a top LAC, his friend another PG matriculated to Princeton. He made great friends at the boarding school and most of them were not PGs.
To be clear, at least I was not crying about PG’s. However, when the coach brings in 9 PGs and seniors on one team (that only has 11 on the field) that move was not popular with the existing players and families. That said, none of them blamed the PGs, they are unhappy with the Coach’s policy.
Berkshire has a very good soccer program and they win most of the time. From a coaching point of view maybe it makes sense to recruit so that they maintain the reputation of the school. My son goes to a boarding school that doesn’t have a great soccer program. My son played travel club soccer before going to this school. Every time when my son’s soccer team plays schools like Berkshire they are thrashed by a huge margin. This has been so demoralizing to my son and to some of the good players. My son complains that their soccer program is not good because they don’t actively recruit players. The parents at my son’s school will be so happy to have those 9 players if they can. They have since got a new soccer coach who is now looking to recruit some of the better players. I am sure once the soccer team becomes good the coach will face the same complaints from parents of why they are recruiting so many players. If those parents were not happy why did they not raise the issue with the school? I am sure they can find a workable solution.
@Zipsta happy to have another prep boys soccer parent! I am immersed in that world. (And, disclaimer, my son does not go to Berkshire).
I will just say that there’s recruiting, and then there’s recruiting. ALL the top programs recruit, but also they limit the number of PGs (to 5, I believe). Berkshire is an outlier bringing in 9, no other top program does it with those numbers. And they weren’t hugely successful this year, either.