<p>"Barbara Reinalda, head coach of softball, said the number of recruiting spots allotted to her team has also dropped over the last few years, from five to six slots per year to about four, depending on the number of players that graduate each year. **** She added that she does ask recruits with competitive grades to apply on their own so that she does not have to use one of her recruiting spots."****</p>
<p>there you go. work your butt off BOTH academically AND athletically and boom, you're not as likely to get an LL or official recruiting spot at Yale as an equally-skilled athlete with lower grades/scores. disheartening -- but I had hypothesized this in the Scores thread.</p>
<p>If you are a top recruit and the coach wants you, you will get a Likely Letter, even with competitive grades and scores. I think this will impact the bottom half of the recruiting list much more than the top half. The strongest athletes are still going to get the LL, even if they are academically competitive.</p>
<p>Absolutely right fishymom. Scoring lower on tests is definitely not a good strategy to boost your chances of receiving a LL. In fact, the higher your AI, the more attractive you become to a coach - freeing up room to recruit lower AI kids and keep the team AI within range.</p>
<p>The thing is, I think some coaches promote this belief that one can academically push oneself out of range for a LL. It’s a lot easier for a coach to tell a recruit, “your grades are high enough that I think you have a good shot at it without my help”, than to tell a kid, “your sports skills just aren’t quite at the level that I want to use a LL on you”.</p>
<p>With admit rates under 10%, no coach is going to take those odds with an athlete they really want.</p>
<p>Spot on Varska! I absolutely agree that it is an easy out for a coach who has better recruits, but would be happy to have the athlete, if they get in on there own.</p>
<p>I agree with varska and fishymom, but Yale recruiting caps are putting the coaches in a tight spot. In a pinch, I can see them choosing to gamble on a high stat recruit.</p>
<p>the Yale softball coach point blank admitted this does occur. my hypothesis regards EQAULLY-ranked athletes. But I choose to beleive youi are correct about the ends of the spectrum.</p>
<p>I bthink this is why monstor (344(?) with a 239 AI and outstanding sports stats didn;t get recruited there.</p>
<p>I took the liberty of contacting Coach Reinalda and asking her to clarify her statement in the article. She graciously replied,</p>
<p>"Actually what I said was “if they were not one of my slots. Like if they were number 5 on our list then we ask them to apply on their own. . If they are top on our list they get one of my slots
Hope this clears things up for you”</p>
<p>So I think we can put the old chestnut to bed that one can be overqualified for a LL Top recruits get Likely Letters.</p>
<p>I’m quite glad that Yale is setting caps on recruiting spots, this sort of balancing game that Ivy’s play with “athletes that are good, not great, that are also good, but not great, in academics” (generalization of course) produces lackluster sports teams and weakens the academic quality of the student body. And this is coming from a two sport Varsity athlete too.</p>
Just to clarify, my take on my situation was that the lower number of spots for Y compared to other schools led to a scramble by Yale for players as quickly as possible (they filled their slots much earlier than all of the other Ivies this year; why the coaches there felt this the best course of action is up to interpretation, but one might speculate that they didn’t want to be left in a situation where they got unlucky by waiting on potential recruits and ended up with only marginal guys in their six slots, each one holding a much larger slice of the cake, so to speak, than a school with nine/ten recruits. How did they avoid waiting on recruit? This I can ascertain - they gave he players whom they offered a week to decide - if they didn’t pull the trigger after a week, the offer was gone forever). While this got Y’s recruiting situation solved early, perhaps they missed out on even better recruits, academically and/or athletically, that would have gotten to them had they waited (I would not include myself amongst this group as, in truth, my college decision would not have changed had they posed me a slot opportunity; it’s strange to think, though, that perhaps had P’s camp been, say, two weeks after Y’s as opposed to immediately after, I might have felt the pressure to take an offer and go with it). </p>
<p>It’s hard to say that these schools are necessarily looking to get top AI guys all the time; they have floors to meet, not higher thresholds that, once crossed, gain them some sort of favor from the athletic department. Academic “overqualification” is definitely a bit of a fuzzy part in Ivy recruiting - what I will say is that, yes, there was subliminally, in dialogue from some coaches, the notion that I would and ought to just get into a school on my own, so that they could pull in another recruit and really construe a big, dominant class of ballplayers. However, I don’t think this contradicts more than slightly with what’s been said, as I wouldn’t have necessarily considered myself a top recruit (then again, these schools out of, say, an average of 8 slots, only tend to get ~2 of those “BOOM!” sort of players, so I would suspect that “overqualification” affects a few more players than some of the previous posters would expect).</p>
seems she was mildly misquoted. glad to hear this :)</p>