Tufts is fantastic @Grudemonk. Great result. D’s younger sister is next up, and Tufts is high on the list. Although I have my doubts about whether she’ll be in the right academic zip code for Tufts. She’s smart, also doing full IB, but she doesn’t have the academic work ethic of her sister as of now, and thus doesn’t have her GPA. That said, she’ll likely test in or around her sister’s range, and she has the rest of her soph. year and junior year to show the “upward trend” (aka “plan b”) that some schools will allow. That said, she’s a better soccer player than her sister (division 1 recruit-able) and any NESCAC school would love to have her on their varsity roster. But as we know, admissions runs the show in selective DIII. I can see her winding up at Whitman or some such place. Maybe one of the Seven Sisters. She’s more of a reader and less of a quant/science kid as compared to her sister, so that factors in too. Would love to see her land at a place like Middlebury too, but like Tufts, unlikely.
@Huskylawyer, is D2 considering Colorado College? Awesome school and D1 soccer. Just wondering since Whitman is on her list.
@lr4550 - you hit it! Yes, Colorado College is on the list as it has that odd combination of small college and D1 sports (at least in women’s soccer; I don’t know about the others). Kind of like skiing at Middlebury - nothing D3 about that ski team.
Oddly, their coach has been interested, but not overly so, in D2. Soccer is a funny sport in terms of coaches and their evaluations. You can have a kid like D2 who is 5’8", has blistering speed, can jump like a rabbit and has a howitzer for a right and left leg and with all that plays a very physical when called up to do so. If she were the athletic equivalent as a boy, football coaches would be drooling over her and not care about this or that detail of her game. They’d focus on the physical and what they can’t coach.
Soccer coaches are different. They are all looking for that player who gives them “pretty soccer.” D2 plays for Crossfire Premier and has that possession game tattoo’d to her brain, but I don’t think the CC coach sees it. Interestingly enough, other coaches from higher level programs do see it. It’s odd that way. I’ve found soccer to be among the more difficult sports to predict in terms of what a given coach will want among many similarly athletic and polished players.
For whatever reason, D2 is decorated enough to be on the Colorado Coach’s radar, but alas I’d be surprised if she wound up there.
Truth be told, she’d be a perfect fit at Williams soccer-wise, and they’d love to have her. But I don’t think she’ll get there academically. Her test scores will likely be in-range, but she has too much ground to make up for in her GPA. I predict that will happen with Vassar as well.
If she winds up choosing to focus on sport over school, I’d see her playing at a place like Gonzaga or one of the other WCC schools (LMU, St. Mary’s, etc.). If she chooses school over sport and focuses on DIII, which would be my preference, I could see her getting it together for a place like Bryn Mawr, where she’d be over-qualified on the field but challenged in the classroom (but not to the point where she can’t hold her own).
It’s interesting how this all works out in the end the way it’s supposed to.
Yes the college process is an interesting journey… sounds like she has some great options no matter what path she decides to pursue!
@lr4550 … we shall see if she does. Soccer is her passion, and so she’ll continue to push hard there, which will afford her some opportunity somewhere even if she decides to be one of those kids who finds their academic stride later in life. But if that’s what she chooses, the current fun of being recruited by the likes of Vassar and Williams will be short-lived, because those coaches know full well the limitations of their influence with admissions and will pull the plug on her soon if she doesn’t show marked improvement in her grades. She is taking the most rigorous academic path, and I am loathe to pull her out of that so that she can more easily score As for her GPA. The substantive preparation is more important to me, because of course you don’t want to just “get in.” You want to be able to hold your own when you get there.
We do love the laid back kid that she is. It’s a big part of her charm. We just need to get her to give a damn a bit more about the details of her school work. When she’s engaged, she can hit high marks pretty consistently. Problem with her is that she’s in and out during the course of the semester, and she often pays for it in the end. Sometimes she can pull it out and other times she can’t.
[Sigh]. Raising kids is an adventure. 