Most schools publish recruiting standards for track and field, but I have noticed that there are some athletes that have signed with a particular Ivy with PRs well below these standards. Is this because their academic index is so high that the coach will purposely include them as a recruit in order to offset a potential olympian in a much lower band? Or is this because they were admitted outside of any recruitment but the coach has determined that they are qualified to be part of the team and thus have “signed” the student.
I don’t think this is unusual or unique to that particular Ivy. If you searched recruiting standards for most schools you would find that many of their roster members do not meet them. It’s hard to say with this particular Ivy if the scenarios you propose are in play of if the coach perhaps sees some potential and invited the athlete onto the team.
Also keep in mind that multi-events athletes will post marks below those standards, as will specialists competing outside their specialty. Most teams do have walk ons also, for various reasons. I think it’s unlikely that much balancing is going on in track and field as that is a pretty bright group on average.
Occam’s Razor: There are some kids who never do as well in college as they did in high school, whether it be due to getting fat, injured or losing interest. They learn to drink, they discover sex, sometimes they even discover academics. There are even reported cases of poorly maintained web sites that have bad information on them, or things written by a previous coaching staff. Lots could be going on that’s less diabolical than admissions manipulations.
As stated above, the kids with lower scores/results are sometimes the athletes that compete in multis. i.e. heptathlon.
Those kids have to be more well rounded to compete in all of their events. They might put up decent scores in some areas, but weak in other events.
There are also kids that started peaking in senior year of high school, and missed the recruiting cycle. They contact a coach after they have been admitted on their own, and show the coach their new results. He invites them on as a walk on and tries to coach them up. A lot of high schoolers do not have the best coaching or training facilities, so a good college coach and training program can really help a kid improve.
In other cases the kids get slower because they get injured, party too much, sleep too little, gain too much weight, don’t care as much etc.
For at least a few Ivy track teams, those recruiting standards are more guidelines than true requirements. I am confident saying this because my son was recruited by several Ivy’s (and now runs at one) even though he did not hit published times.
Some Ivy programs emphasize winning team championships so they fill out their rosters with athletes to cover all of the events even if a few didn’t hit the standards in high school.
And yes, I think there are cases where a less accomplished athlete is taken to offset the academic index of another rock star athlete.
^^ true @Startingblock my son17 was offered a spot on a Div II lax team and the coach said the biggest reason was his GPA would help the team, and he had plenty of knuckle heads on the team as it was.
If his team finished with the highest GPA in their league the coach was also awarded an extra scholarship he could dole out. M son was only offered a small scholarship, but was told with a good work ethic and good grades the coach would look to increase the amount year by year.
My son went elsewhere, but I respected the coach’s honesty and transparency.
^^This could only happen if the school wasn’t fully funding lax and trying to get the coach to change recruiting practices. The conference can’t give anything as the NCAA limits the number of scholarships to 10.8 for the team. I can’t think that the athletic director would give and remove the number of scholarships for each sport each year. That could really hurt recruiting if the coach though he had 7 scholarships like he did the year before and really only had 6.
D’s conference has an honor roll and they list all the students who have a certain gpa. One school we play had 35 of the 37 on the team on the list (and what was the problem with the other 2?). Grade inflation, anyone? It’s an entirely different type of school, LAC as compared to a STEM. Kind of silly to compare the gpa’s between different schools with different majors, different grading scales, different professors. I don’t think our coach cares that the Evil Empire has grade inflation. She does care if our team has the highest gpa at our school (we were second this year) and that the recruits can handle the rigor of a STEM school.
@twoinanddone it happened at a mens DII school. The coach said directly to us that his team usually wins the GPA award every year for their respective conference, and the winner of the conference is awarded one additional scholarship for winning. So, he likes to have high GPA kids on team, and he tries very hard to recruit the kids with good gpa’s. I’m pretty sure he showed me the award that they had won and showed me some info on being awarded the extra scholarship.
Anyways, I don’t want to argue, or derail this thread, just stating what I was told in a face to face sit down meeting in a coach/athletic director office. But there was a clear understanding that the coach liked my son for his grades/personal qualities as much if not more than his lax skills and he would be rewarded accordingly if he helped out the team.
The school can give the coach an ‘extra’ scholarship (more money to divide among the players) if he doesn’t already have 10.8, but the conference can’t give a school permission to go above the NCAA max. If the coach already gives 10.8, he can win all the conference gpa contests in the world, but can’t go above the 10.8. The school can award or take away money from the lax coach as it wants to but the conference can’t.
Not all D2 conferences are made up of similar schools but are formed because of athletic similarities (and not necessarily in all sports as our schools plays football in a different conference), maybe public v private, and most often location. Is Adelphi really an academic equal with American International or St. Anselm? Same conference. In our conference we have 2 STEM schools, 2 smaller religious schools, 2 wealthy private schools, one large Catholic school, etc. They just don’t attract the same types of students academically, so why compare them academically? Does Northwestern compare its athletic gpas against Nebraska? Same conference.
I don’t know lacrosse but I do know that some D2 conferences set scholarship limits for some sports below the NCAA limit. So it the conference limit is 6 for example, they could allow one school to go to 7 without violating any NCAA rules.
I wouldn’t want the conference to control our scholarships. The COA’s run from $38k to $69k. I know two schools give no athletic scholarships but do give more in merit (overall, not just lax) so for them getting an extra athletic scholarship would mean nothing as they don’t do their funding that way. Our team is not fully funded, so even if the coach wins the gpa contest and the conference could allow her one more scholarship, the school isn’t necessarily giving her more money to give out.
The schools in a conference aren’t always academic peers, just in the same athletic conference.
I haven’t heard that a conference further limits the number of scholarships allowed. I do not see why the conference cares if one school gives out 8 scholarships while another gives out 10. Different schools, different tuition requirements, different merit scholarships, alum scholarships, maybe even state aid or instate tuition breaks. Why would a conference care?
@twoinanddone, some conferences limit scholarships under the NCAA limits because the schools don’t want to be forced into the expense of an arms race. The Patriot (60) and NEC (40) (out of an allowable 63 for FCS football) are two examples. So my guess is @dadof4kids probably has the right of it.
The first not the second. AI booster=grade inflater and they exist in every sport.
Recruiting standards for schools should be viewed as guidelines. There will always be athletes on the team who do not meet the standards for all sorts of reasons. Keep in mind “signing” with an Ivy is simply a commitment to attend as there is no athletic scholarship money given or NLI to “sign”.
The coach may have recruited a particular athlete because he/she needed to fill a void on the roster and all the athletes who met the performance guideline in this graduating hs class are going elsewhere or not Ivy caliber academically. Despite the love for the Ivy’s on CC, not all students want to go to one. Recruiting is all about finding the right fit for your level of performance at the right school at the right time, so a coach will fill the roster with the best they can get at the time.
This is why so many of us on this board always advise to contact the coaches at the schools you are interested in because you just never know.
I know a lot of athletes that were recruited to Ivies for track and many of them did not meet the “recruiting” standards but all met the “walk-on” standards.
Let’s try not to revive threads that are dead.