<p>We're putting together an article for our club swimming website on the college swimming recruitment process and want to solicit your input on the (free :-) ) recruiting websites you used - and more importantly you found college coaches used - and served you well in the recruitment process. I am definitely aware of collegeswimming.com and less so with berecruited.com. Of interest too is whether any of you know whether particular colleges in particular parts of the country use one website over the other. Your feedback is appreciated as we have kids interested in a variety of colleges!</p>
<p>Collegeswimming.com has by far the best website for swimming recruitment. College swimming.com is used by a wide spectrum of colleges from major D1 programs to new D3 programs. The power index (basically a national percentile rank for two of the swimmers best events) can quickly give an athlete a good idea which school they would fit into by seeing if their index matches the index of last year’s recruits. In addition one can quickly find the league championship results. The top time section is also easy to use and a recruit can easily find the top 3 times for a college for a particular event.</p>
<p>Short course Junior nationals was a very fast meet this year with many National age group records being broken and many 8th, 9th, and 10th graders swimming faster than many college swimmers. As a result the times need for recruitment at top colleges will be dropping. In this situation national rankings of recruits as provided by college swimming.com can give a swimmer another tool to help find which colleges would be a good fit.</p>
<p>@swimkidsdad</p>
<p>As always, thanks for your very informative posts. Definitely could not have said it better than you did re: collegeswimming.com and all it has to offer the potential recruit. Also agree that Junior Nats are crazy fast as we watch a kid break 19 seconds for his 50 free @ Greensboro. The college coaches were out in full force at that meet - must be looking to secure those remaining uncommitted seniors. Again thanks for sharing your wisdom and experience on this topic.</p>
<p>We didn’t use any web sites. We researched colleges - academics - availability of major as well as reputation, student life, swim times, length of time coach was the coach, standings, location, look and feel of campus. Decided which schools to visit then contacted coaches and asked for them to meet with us when we visited. Kept in touch with those coaches. Coaches then asked son for overnight visits. He visited, applied Early Decision I and was accepted! Sounds so easy right!? It was a lot of work, but ultimately I think coaches want to hear from the students. I read lots and lots of posts right here on College Confidential on the recruiting process. This was very invaluable to us.</p>