He started contacting coaches during his junior year. Most schools will have a recruiting questionnaire posted on the team’s webpage, and the coaches will typically ask an athlete to complete the questionnaire as a first step. In the end, my son missed most of his junior year track season because of an injury and so was not very serious about getting recruited, but his list of schools still included only schools that had a credible track team. We did two rounds of school visits, one during the spring of his junior year and one during the spring of his senior year after acceptances were in. On both trips, he contacted each of the schools on the visit list, and was able to spend time with the coaches at almost all of them.
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While going through the recruiting process, one of the most helpful things for my distance runner was using Milesplit. He was able to look at college rosters and then look back at the times those kids were running in high school to see where he might fit into certain teams and what his recruiting profile might look like. It’s not quite that black and white, truthfully - especially in XC, where courses vary quite a bit - but you can get a sense of things. I also think that it’s important for your kid to consider what they want out of the experience - do they want to contribute to the team’s meet scores from an early stage or are they comfortable not doing that until later in college (or ever, even)? There are all kinds of other factors too, but I think this part of the process helped my son narrow his list down considerably.
I’m happy to privately talk about Denison specifically in terms of times, if you’d like - feel free to message me!
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Thank you so much for this wonderful information. How do we private message in this group? 
I’ve not done that before.
Just click on the icon next to the persons screen name. A pop up will appear and there will be a message button there. At least that is how it works for me. Hopefully this helps.
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My student received an email today saying they were invited to become a member of the EXORDIUM Scholar-Leader Program offered to 40 incoming first years for next fall. Does anyone have experience with this program?
My son also was invited to this group at Denison. Also interested in information regarding this opportunity!
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