Athletic recruits at Haverford-beware

Colleges and Universities A-Z Haverford College
21

Oldchief;

I agree with you there are two sides (at least) to every unhappy story. Certainly recruits and their parents want to hear good news, and coaches have a fine line to walk. In the end, the Admissions office makes admissions decisions. Full stop. I also agree with you that Haverford is not a “last resort” as a school in other respects. That was my son’s club coach’s phrase based on his personal experience with lacrosse recruits. Nevertheless, from personal conversations over the course of two years on the recruiting trail at various NESCAC and other D III schools of similar caliber, Haverford’s name kept coming up and the message was the same: beware.

My connection to the Haverford admissions process is simply this: my son looked at about a dozen colleges of which Haverford was one. The Haverford coach saw him play and actively recruited him for about nine months. He took my son’s file to admissions in June for an early read. The feedback from admissions was highly favorable. My son toured the campus and met the coach. The coach asked him to apply ED. Around the same time his first choice school also recruited him and that was his only college application. It worked out fine for all concerned.

I have nothing against Haverford and I don’t know the coach. In fact, I encouraged my son to take a hard look at the college based on its reputation. There are no grapes to sour and no ax to grind. This thread started as a warning to athletic recruits at Haverford two years ago. From what I heard in my travels on the lacrosse circuit that advice may still have merit. There is nothing more to my original post than that.

22

Oxbelha1 – Our Haverford experiences are similar. Good news is that ours kids got their first choices. I’ll go through this again with S3 someday at Haverford. Everyone’s thoughts on CC are appreciated. My gut, and a small data set, says that an athletic push at Haverford has an 80% probability of success.

23

Burgermeister;

I have not been able to find the Laxpower thread on this. Would you mind responding with a link to that thread, please?

24

Oxbelha1 – Drill down Laxpower’s Forums/Men’s- Division III/Centennial Conference. Or enter Haverford in search. Also note that data in the Recruits tab, for various years, shows that Haverford gets approx 8 recruits each year and this seems okay compared to other DIII schools. I called Haverford and very politely shared all the NYT/CC/Laxpower buzz…and a friend’s letdown. They said student’ selections are based on holistic criteria. Hope S3 will start taking piano lessons more seriously! I don’t like the drive to NESCAC country.

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Oxbelha1 – Discussion is on 3rd page. Link at http://network.laxpower.com/laxforum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=52453&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=40

26

Thank you, Burgermeister;

Interesting supposition there about relationship between the topic of this thread and a 1-13 season. I don’t buy that because the admissions issues seem to long pre-date Haverford’s recent slide in lacrosse-CB explained 1-13 as due to injuries-but time will tell.

Again, thanks for the link.

27

I think it varies by school and by sport.

I agree with one poster on coach ignorance. Vassar just hired a new guy to head up both their women’s and men’s rowing (which tells you how important Vassar thinks rowing is). He is very new and very uninformed. I had to tell him to run the adcom review before we’d waist any time with them, and D has the numbers to get into Vassar w/o sports. He just doesn’t get the process yet.

Wesleyan had their sh*t together, as did Williams, Tufts and Amherst. Of course Lafayette is another beast.

But Wes was the one that wanted ALL the academic info. up front before spending much time, which was great. Their coach told me, “I get a list. It’s not a long list, but your daughter will be on it. I have a guy in adcom with whom I work and, while I can never guarantee anything, your D is not making a mistake applying here ED.”

Those were his exact words. I suspect if D were more on the border line, he might have left out the last part about not making a mistake and I expect might’ve said something like, “and it’s possible she won’t be admitted. Being on the list helps, but she’s on the line and has a good shot but it might go the other way.”

With kids who are recruits in more than one sport, it has been said to me on more than one occasion that some sports have more pull than others at various schools. Women’s soccer tends to have a lot of pull - not as much as football, but it’s as strong as any women’s sport at a lot of schools. Rowing tends to get you the least help, not because they don’t care, but apparently the academic pool of good rowers is strong, so they can be more demanding of rowing recruits.

Sorry that happened, but when I look at how competitive these schools are to get into, I wouldn’t trade having the hook of sports because, though it can be a weird and sometimes frustrating journey, it beats the hell out of having no hook. My girls are damn smart and accomplished, but none of them is going to hit a 2400 on the SATs. So I’m pretty grateful that they have something else to offer.

28

I don’t have a dog in this hunt, but would like to point out OP’s follow up point that he thinks Swat may a better fit for his kid anyway. Having worked with college-bound kids (and had my own go through it) over the last 5 years I am frequently surprised at how ‘right’ the admissions committees get it. Of course, we all know exceptionally qualified kids who get rejected by the top tier- dividing the number of beds by the number of applicants whose GPA & test scores qualify them tells you that is inevitable. But a surprising amount of the time they seem to get the fit right- especially at the LACs.

29

“I think the pre-read at these top colleges need to be more like the ivy likely letters. What is the point of the pre-read if it is still a crapshoot?”

It was for us, particularly among the NESCAC schools, which one might guess or surmise have their act together given the relative importance of sports to those schools. Williams may be a great academic institution (and it is), but they are serious about their sports, especially men’s football. So their coaches tend not to screw around.

Our experience with some schools outside of NESCAC did vary. Vassar, for example, seems more difficult to gauge, and my advice to anyone dealing with them would be to be careful. For example, they are currently recruiting my younger daughter to play soccer there pretty aggressively, and while it’s early yet, she does not project to be a Vassar admit other than what I would guess will be a test score w/in their range (just based on first round PSATs).

Wesleyan, on the other hand, had a dreadful soccer season and could sure as heck use my daughter, an ECNL player. But even though the coach knows about her from recruiting efforts with her older sister, there has been no contact since the first e-mail exchange because D2 does not currently have a Wesleyan-realistic GPA.

So I go back to, “it depends on the school.” I do agree, though, that a likely letter would be better than a “strong pre-read.” At least you’d have something in your hands.

30

“I think you can change Haverford to ANY top D3 school. Coaches simply don’t have the pull that parents/recruits think they have. It may just be that some of these coaches have less pull than they even realize.”

@pardullet, I disagree with this statement, but I will agree that it’s a fuzzy little world we operate in as we navigate elite school D3 recruiting. Some schools do it right and, it appears, others don’t.

31

@HuskyLawyer, your idea of adopting the ivy likely letter has my full support.

32

Having been through the process with two college-athlete kids and dozens of others from our regional club supporting families in the college process, I found Haverford was one of the best experiences we had.

Having said that, there are differences among coaches at every school. Some are more organized, some not, some highly ethical and great communicators, some are less so. Most are good at their job, but some struggle. At one Patriot league school a coach say they never received an email confirmation from my kid, even though the coach’s computer screen displayed my kid’s email in plain sight (that coach had issues… and a short tenure). At another school, the coach was clearly violating NCAA rules making promises that he shouldn’t have (he too, was gone within two years). Those were exceptions. In general, the coaches I’ve met from academically rigorous schools like Haverford, Middlebury, Williams, Tufts, Dartmouth, Brown, Swarthmore, Bowdoin and others, were all quite professional.

33

BEWARE is an understatement.

  1. My child was recruited by Haverford for a sport. I will not say which, but is was in the past couple of years.
  2. Admissions screened the file. Looked good, but obviously no guarantee. We know that no school can provide a guarantee.
  3. My child was also recruited by many other schools, but chose to apply ED to Haverford as it was the first choice. The coach gave full support and there was a read of the file from admissions, twice!
  4. Rejected at ED1.
  5. We found (through coaching grapevine in the ED2 search process) that at three other recruits for that sport were rejected at ED1 admission too! Other coaches told us the Haverford was notorious for this.
  6. Our child was accepted ED2 to an equally prestigious college (fortunately!), but missed out on some of the choices available before verbally committing to Haverford for ED1. That's right, many of the other choices were gone because those schools successfully filled their recruiting needs at ED1 (i.e., they got all of their student-athletes admitted).
  7. Seeing this post now make me sick...it still happens!!
  8. The data in the NY Times article appears to show a pervasive pattern of rejection of recruited athletes, not just for lacrosse as another poster suggested...it is for many of their sports, trust me I know. FAR HIGHER than comparable elite liberal arts colleges. Facts can be very inconvenient things, but if you research the facts, BEWARE!
  9. What is worse, they know about this issue and they have been criticized for this recruiting practice, yet they arrogantly continue to do it. If you recruit a kid to play a sport and apply ED, you owe the kid to a) put a good faith effort in to maintain your commitment and admit her/him, or b) tell them that it doesn't look promising/strong and that they should look elsewhere. When we heard at ED2 that most of the other coaches that GOT ALL OF THEIR RECRUITS admitted, and they were from schools just as academically rigorous/elite as Haverford, we know we had been duped.
  10. I think what they do is unethical, but they appear to think they are above the standard set by all of these other great schools.
  11. Don't be duped.
  12. This thread should survive until they fix the problem.
34

For a school that prides itself on it’s Honor Code, this is troubling.

35

While I understand the frustration some feel towards Haverford for rejecting their children, I don’t understand how Haverford is unfair in the process it uses to determine admission for recruited athletes. The coaches only have so much influence. In the end, the admission officers evaluate fit along with academic accomplishment and a hook such as a sport. I have friends who weren’t accepted into Haverford but were accepted into more prestigious schools. Again, at a unique liberal arts like Haverford that really touts its Honor Code, fit matters! A coach can support an application and the applicant can be pre-screened by admissions and then still be rejected. I don’t see how that is dishonest, it merely points to the fact that Haverford only cares so much about sports.

36

It appears they are unfair in comparison with other elite schools because their admissions pre-read seems useless in predicting acceptance. If Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the like can do this with accuracy, which they can, then why can’t Haverford?

37

Well said GFG, I believe that is the crux of the matter. Another point to be mindful of is that these kids, by and large, make a good faith or “honorable” commitment by applying ED based on what they think is valid feedback from coaches and admissions. To then suggest they when the final decision is made they they were not a fit is, I believe, disingenuous and a form of bait-and-switch. Not very honorable IMHO. Moreover, to somehow assume the because of the institutional importance of the Honor Code that they have a more honorable process of how/why they admit kids is both arrogant and naive. If their approach consistently results in so many rejected potential student athletes then they should be honorable and stop recruiting them with the pretense that they are scrutinizing these student-athletes the same way as other colleges. As has been said here already, numbers don’t lie or distort or spin.

38

Wow! I wish I had read this thread earlier in the year to save my S from bitter disappointment. He was recruited by Coach Bathory (Haverford’s men’s lacrosse coach) last Sept. He turned down Oberlin, Skidmore, Wooster and Swarthmore to apply ED to Haverford. Coach assured him his application looked strong. Dec 15th: rejection letter. My S is a strong student coming from a top 10 boarding school. His club coach was flabbergasted, said he’ll never deal with Haverford again. The worst though was Bathory never returned emails or calls from my S to explain what happened. The joke is that Haverford sells itself as such an ethical school.

39

I think that a factor in these ED1 results is that Haverford has only 1200 students. Lots of the other LACs have about 2000 and the universities are 5000+. So, ED1 at Haverford accepts about 150/300, and these 150 may be close to 45% of the freshman class. I can understand why the school doesn’t want to go much above 150; not many do 50% or more of the class early. Then, how many of the 150 should be reserved for athletes? Typically, that is in the 25% range, or at a smaller LAC, proportionally higher to 30-35%. Or about 50 students, in Haverford’s case, divided among many teams. A recruited athlete’s passing early read then has the hurdle of leaping over other good scholar-athletes to make this 50. I think that the coaches have to be resigned to the fact that lots of players on their roster will come from the regular round. Maybe the NESCAC coaches do a better job advising of prospects for admission, I don’t know.

Still, if this is not so difficult to comprehend, the coaches at Haverford should be able to let families make the final choice of ED or regular app from a more informed sense of these realities.

40

@frutsun Are the numbers presented by Charger78 consistent with your observations and with whatever Haverford told your S?