#2 Campus visits are all over the place in terms of timing, some coaches will do them junior year, some won’t do them until senior year. Many D3 schools won’t do official visits (paid for by the school) at all. It may be difficult to coordinate timing for visits, all one can do is ask.
It’s also difficult to get the timing to work out if coaches do make verbal offers…some coaches will give a few days to get back to them with your decision, some a few weeks, some a month…but there’s no assurance any other coaches that you might be waiting for will be spurred to action in that time frame.
In your situation, I’d encourage you to figure out a time for a US visit if this is something within your budget and visit as many schools as possible. Last summer we drove 1250 miles in 4 days and hit several NESCACS, Dartmouth and Colgate, 9 schools in total. You should add/consider Colgate as a possible swim match for your DD. A slower D1 and excellent school. If you had a full week you could easily include all the Boston schools. This will help your DD figure out which schools she likes best, outside of swimming.
When you know when you will be visiting, you can email the coach and let them know you will be touring the school and ask if they would be available to meet with you. Most of the time, if you are on their radar, they will be happy to meet you and show you around.
Many coaches do the OVs on weekends in the fall (or spring if doing juniors) because they want the recruits to stay overnight, meet the others on the team, get to know the school. I don’t think it would be possible to do more than 2-3 schools on one trip to the US while the student is also in high school. You could do a big New England tour in the summer like others suggested, but the head coach might not be there when your schedule allows, and the campuses have a different atmosphere in the summer.
Yours is not the first international student they’ve recruited. They’ll work with you and maybe your D will be able to whittle her choices down early and get to visit the 2-3 schools she really likes the most for the overnights.
@twoinanddone & @TonyGrace
thanks very much for your pointed feedback. she will proceed one step at a time and connect with coached, and hopefully swim fast enough to be of interest to them. given our overseas situation, we will have limited ability to schedule OVs, so hope that there she’ll be lucky to have OV offers and then we’ll try to synch the times. Luckily, we expect her to be able to contact existing swimming athletes to help her learn about the whole experience and process of being an athlete seeking to be recruited by D3/ivy schools with high academic requirements
@Nivo, Most of the on-line recruiting questionnaires do allow for updating. By way of example, if your ACT score or race times improves, you can revise the questionnaire. So, it is best to keep an excel or other chart of your coach communications, on which you also can record the login information for each questionnaire.
I think you should complete the questionnaires, especially because a coach requested it, but as others have mentioned, don’t expect to be recruited by the questionnaire alone. Questionnaires function as a filing cabinet and source for a mailing list. For sports that have recruiting camps, the coach can reach out to everyone who has completed the questionnaire with an invite to the camp. Or, if a coach needs a swimmer in a given stroke at a given distance with a given time and a threshold ACT score, he/she finds it from the questionnaire. It is my experience, however, that the athletes who are more assertive in reaching out to the coach, making themselves available for both official and unofficial visits, and who provide video are the ones who are successful in recruiting.
Do check with the coach to see if they want a new questionnaire submitted with updates. Sometimes this adds another “account” and coaches have to merge them together and it can get complicated and messy.
We were told by coaches to fill out the questionnaire once, just to get in the database and on the coach’s radar. Follow up with an email explaining why you like that school and what you have to offer. Then send email updates with grades/times (reply in the same chain of messages so the coach can look back and see what you have talked about earlier). More communication also builds relationships.
Lots of good information here. Best to be both thorough and patient. As a 2024, you are in the right time frame now.
@NiVo
FYI. The academic requirements for Ivy for a recruited athlete are shockingly low so don’t fall into the trap that great grades/scores will help your athlete with ivys. They are true D1 schools and having seen the grades and scores of admitted athletes from a top us boarding school I’m pretty sure you’d be shocked by how below standard they are.
100% this. It used to be that very high stats might give a good but not great athlete an edge if a coach was trying to recruit a top athlete with poor grades/scores, but in the new TO environment it appears that AI calculations have become as subjective as everything else. If anyone has any inside on how AI is being used, please enlighten me.
I would third this. It’s actually harder to pass the pre-read at the NESCACS as an athlete than the Ivies, if you’re top recruit. The standars for the athlete are higher at the Ivies, while academic standards for the athletes are higher at the top NESCACS. It was a surprise for us.
Yup. Once my son got access to his school’s college stats it became immediately apparent that athletes are athletes to the Ivy schools and they pretty much don’t care about the rest. I have seen a ton of high academic kids slowly realize this over the past few years. It’s your performance in the pool, on the court, in the rink that matters. The academic threshold is very low (imo, as the parent of academic studs but only good athletes).
I’d be hesitant to generalize across the athletic population at Ivies. Sure, some athletes can be lower on the academic stats. Not all are though. The athletes I know at Ivies, mostly runners, were great students in HS with 35/36 ACTs and 3.9+ IB/AP students. I’ve interacted enough with current athletes over the years to see that this is a very bright group of students in general.
But I do agree that good academic stats will not boost a marginal athlete in terms of coach support.
So as to not generalize, my guess is that the “runners” you are referring to are the XC/Distance kids. That segment of runners is notorious for having high stats. Sprinters, on the other hand, not so much. My son is a sprinter and, as near as we could tell, his high stats made a difference during his recruitment.
Yep, you’re correct most of my experience is with distance kids, although I’ve helped out with a few super bright sprinters/jumpers/throwers over the years (I’m involved at the youth level so I have ended up as a sort of informal/volunteer resource for recruits looking at the more academic schools).
Interesting to hear that about your son, thanks for sharing.
obvious coaches’ primary objective is to build a robust team, that’s simply their job. the grades are only relevant to the extent the coach needs to deliver a “new prospect class” GPA / Academic Index that will be approved by admissions. the coach may seek couple recruits with higher grade, to gain more flexibility in seeking other recruits who have lower grades.
That is certainly the historical context for the Ivies’ creation of the AI. But, my impression is that it is applied in practice differently on a school-by-school and sport-by-sport (coach) basis. I am confident that my son’s head coach cares less about whether they are able to get a kid through admissions (and Varsity Blues tightened that up), and cares more about being confident that the kid can handle an Ivy academic load plus the athletic commitment.
This board is focused on how to get a kid into a school leveraging athletics, and rightly so, but I often think folks forget to analyze whether the kid can thrive academically, socially, culturally and athletically at the Name Brand school.
Thanks. your comment is pointed and accurate. the hurdle for admission is often so high, that one can often only worry about the thrive afterwards instead of before. certainly it would be helpful to have a gauge of which are demanding schools vs cruise/relax schools.
one could probably rank MIT, Caltech, Chicago, Cornell, Princeton, Berkeley amongst the hard schools. As opposed to Harvard, Stanford, or Brown which are more cruise schools. of course, that comment doesn’t mean to belittle the actual learning and content of their courses.
I don’t disagree with separating out schools by rigor, but using terms like “cruise/relax” for the colleges you were talking about is off base. No matter where a student-athlete attends, the demands on their time will be intense. They will always be fighting for a spot on the team and playing time as well.
Regarding AI, as many student-athletes are applying test optional at many schools, AI in those cases can’t be calculated/even approximated as SAT/ACT is 2/3 of the formula. Not sure what the many schools that previously used AI are doing now. We do know some coaches are requiring scores/calculating AI, but that seems to be a personal choice rather than an institution mandated one.