Div 1 Ivy athletic recruit's academic stats on accepted and rejected recruits by the AO

Athletic Recruits
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@twoinanddone, we have been down this road before. I am not saying that kids in certain sports aren’t committing to Ivy schools as freshmen or whatever. Nor am I saying that coaches aren’t offering to support the kid when the time comes. I am saying that any such offer of support/committment must of necessity be conditional on at least a couple of things. First, that the kid hit some target GPA/test score that will achieve what the coach believes will be an acceptable AI in the recruit’s admit year. Second, that the coach’s estimate on his or her AI requirements two, three or four years out be accurate. And that is leaving aside all of the other academic issues that might pop up over the course of high school. I mean we are not talking about maintaining eligibility here. A kid with a 3.5 unweighted GPA in tough courses and a 30 ACT, which is in the top 5% nationally, is going to have an AI of 207. That is likely right at or below the midline (one standard deviation from the average of the four preceding classes) for admitted athletes at each Ivy. I doubt very seriously that most women’s lax players are being recruited and admitted below that line, and would argue that at most schools, most such recruits are being asked to hit a target somewhat above the one standard deviation mark. While you may be able to comfortably predict that some kids will hit such numbers coming out of 8th or 9th grade, for a lot of kids those are aspirational numbers which will require a lot of work and maybe a little luck. Personally, I do not think it wise to rely on any offer which has conditions attached, particularly conditions that may not be a sure thing, until those conditions are satisfied. That is really my only point.

FWIW, here is what the Harvard AD said about the issue in 2015 when the Ivy put together their proposed rule change to the NCAA:

And here is a quote from the Yale Daily News, discussing the same rule proposal:

It seems early committments in the Ivy are in some ways similar to the current fad of “non committable” offers that larger D1 schools have been throwing out in football over the last couple years - “Come to our camp and show us you can compete at x, y, or z and we will give you an offer” or “We already have an offer out to kid x, but we really think he is going to Penn State. Don’t commit anywhere else, because once he commits to PSU, we want you”. I wouldn’t rely on those offers either, although I know plenty of parents and kids who do. I watched one dad slowly melt down as senior fall turned to winter and his kid’s offer to the preferred school did not become committable until a couple weeks before signing date when the “other” kid finally committed elsewhere. I know for a fact that such offers are being reported on recruiting sites.

And a very minor point, but even if coaches cared about non committable or conditional offers being posted on recruiting sites, the NCAA prohibits the coach or school from publicly commenting on a recruit until after national signing day in the recruit’s senior year.

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Its all about increasing the camp/showcase revenue and maximizing recruiting magazine and website eyeballs.

People who don’t realize this are just fooling themselves.

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FWIW, I’ve always enjoyed these discussions. My Ivy athlete has graduated after four years on the squad ( more rare than you’d think). Ohiodad51 is incredibly knowledgable on the subject and gives the very best and most technically accurate advice you can find anywhere. I’ve looked. On the other hand, twoinanddone says things that are entirely consistent with our experience. My kid was offered in writing full support in the admission process in Jan of junior year of HS. She was told her recruiting process was over and she could tell anyone she wanted about her decision. She was told to stay out of trouble and not let her grades change too much and it would all work out. Her AI was 224, there was no guarantee of admission and we all held our breath until the LL came 9 months later. No preread until later. Legal? Wise? I don’t know. Certainly not by CC standards but by as we’ve come to learn it all worked out like it was supposed to by the standards of the sport. This was lax. Why is this different? I don’t know for sure, but I have some notions on the process and it is different than for some other sports. Maybe not in writing, but in practice and we know several dozen people now who had similar experiences to ours. At the time our only advisors in our area came from the hockey community where loads of kids from our area and school go Ivy and all their parents said this is the way it goes. We worried about ending the conversations our daughter was having with several other schools. Advice here on CC was not to. Advice from home was to do what the coach said. Turns out coaches at the two other schools that were most in the running were great long term friends with our school’s head coach. They definitely talked and if we’d played them off against each other I can’t imagine it would have been a good thing. At the time she was the earliest commit ever for her team. Six months later rising juniors were committing ( and ending up there). At this very moment, in lacrosse, Ivys are mostly recruiting for the class of 2023. No promises or guarantees, but it’s the way it goes and it works out for the vast majority of the kids. I closely tracked these recruiting announcement websites for 5 years and over 90% of the early ivy announcements in men’s and women’s lacrosse came to fruition. I was doing it in order to soothe my own nerves.

A few other things: once your kid is on the Ivy team, he/she will be doing recruiting – hosting the kids on visits. I personally met the parents of 10th grade kids my daughter and her friends were hosting on school visits. The coach will tell him/her who they really want, who they don’t, who’s on the fence and through all this not once did my daughter or any of her friends hear about the term AI – and they’ve recruited some academically suspect kids. I’ve spoken to parents of girls on the team in the stands and no one was talked to about their kid’s AI. They’d heard of it but it was never mentioned in the process and I think I was the only geek who knew what it was and how to figure it. The same is true of the hockey crowd we know. The only thing they’d ever hear the coach say is that kid isn’t good enough skill wise to make it worth the effort of getting them in with questionable grades. Also, support your kid as much as you can with advice and communication tips but let them do most of the talking. I don’t think the coaches really want to hear from the parents too much.

My advice to anyone who’s interested in Ivy sport is to get your testing done early. Grades and tests do matter. I’m not trying to suggest otherwise. And tests do carry outsize weight in determining AI ( even if it was mentioned to us) so it stands to reason that the sooner you show yourself to be academically capable the longer you stay on a coach’s radar. Presumably you’ve already notified the coach with your interest so when they see you at a game, a camp or on tape and they think you’re really good when they see you also have great grades and test scores you’ve made their life a bit easier. Most everyone likes it when their day gets a little easier. Class rigor? I’m not sure. UWGPA and rank are figured in the AI without regard to rigor, but if you can’t do tough HS classes I think you’ll find an Ivy league or any elite college education extremely taxing. My kid did take a lot of APs and what’s more, went to a very demanding HS that sends approx 20% to ivy each year, so it’s a known entity. You see a lot of this type of school in lacrosse which is part of the reason why I think it seems like such an exception to the rules. Lacrosse is a very small, clubby, elite and refreshingly close community which is part of why I think it’s different than other sports. And I can tell you from my own research that as of a few years ago, no one was writing about it as clearly and honestly as Ohiodad51 writes about football. One of my wife’s good friends has a kid who’s going to play ivy bball next year. That process was much more typical of what Ohiodad51 describes as they asked us a lot of questions along the way.

Everyone wants guarantees. I get that, but until you get a LL you really just have to go on trust. Someone gets screwed nearly every year at nearly every school and probably in nearly every sport with this process. That said, it works for the vast majority of the kids. And please realize that your athlete is getting a huge ( yuuge! an advantage like you’ve never seen before. believe me, people!) advantage over most every valedictorian, 2400, 36, 4.0, concert pianist, debate champ out there. They, generally speaking, have a lot more uncertainty than the recruited athletes. So rather than complaining abut the unknown, be thankful for the incredible opportunity and leg up you have over the others and have plan B ready to launch at any moment.

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Timely article came out yesterday on this topic:

http://www.uslaxmagazine.com/college/landmark-decision-upcoming-ncaa-vote-on-early-recruiting

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That article has been out for several weeks, and I don’t think it really tells the story of early recruiting. They featured one Maryland lacrosse superstar who didn’t commit until her senior year of high school, but she is so good that she could have picked any school and they would have bumped someone for her. The superstars will always get a scholarship. The majority of high school kids looking for D1 roster spots will be left out if they wait, or at least drop down many ranking spots, because there are so many who are just as good, just as smart, who will take the spots early. The entire system has to change, and all the coaches say that’s what they want, but no coach wants to risk losing the top recruits by not recruiting early. The NCAA says they don’t want to get involved; this is not the first time this rule change has come before the NCAA committee. Everyone agrees that early recruiting should be banned, and yet the change never passes.

I think the proof is in the number of those early commits who are admitted to the Ivies. If the process didn’t work, if none of the early freshmen and sophomore commits could get admitted to the Ivies, the coaches would have abandoned the practice years ago. Most are admitted because it isn’t a random group of high school kids in the pool. They start on the track to get top grades and scores and they are likely to be successful because they have all the extra help they need. Many of them have taken an SAT before high school so the Ivy coaches aren’t just hoping they’ll test well, they already know they will. These are top students at top suburban or prep schools who just happen to play on state championship lacrosse (or tennis or golf or soccer) team.

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First, @doubtful, thanks for the kind words. Second, I don’t think that @twoinanddone and I are really in opposition. He or she is saying that early recruiting happens in certain sports outside of the general Ivy calendar, and I am saying that the Ivy system makes such recruiting inherently unstable and untrustworthy. We may disagree about how early is early, and whether the Ivy teams can actually fill up their rosters with 8th and 9th graders or whether the Ivy schools are fishing for early commits from some sliver of 10th and first semester 11th graders with at least some testing and GPA history. But in general, I think we are all talking about different facets of the same thing.

I think we are all in agreement that whether we are talking about 8th graders committing to Harvard, which was the premise that started this whole digression, or 10th graders committing to ACC schools, the recruiting calendar is getting earlier. I have posted before that when my son was getting recruited a couple years ago he was getting weekly e mails from Penn that said don’t trust these early offers (which at that point meant in the winter/early spring of junior year) being thrown out by some schools (cough - Harvard - cough) and that Penn did things the “right way”, and no offers would go out until the pre reads were done and the coach knew where the recruit sat in the band system, etc. Last year I helped a kid who will play in the Ivy next year and Penn offered him in March. I don’t think anyone believes that to be a good thing, regardless of sport.

Personally, I am kind of fatalistic on whether the NCAA will jump in. One, the change to recruiting rules last year loosened, rather than tightened, early contact. Two, I wonder how much appetite the NCAA will have to what seems like a “stop us before we kill again” type of argument. Three, I haven’t seen the NCAA carve out specific rules for sports other than the revenue sports (and hockey) very often, so even if it sounds like the offer that lacrosse can be a kind of guinea pig makes sense, I wonder if the NCAA will go for it.

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The date on the article is 3/21/17.

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^^yet the magazine’s been in my bathroom for about 2 weeks.

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^^ SInce no one had shared it on the thread…I did…thanks for your input.

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@justverycurious I have a freshman son recruited for track that’s at an Ivy. When he was recruited, he was pursued by Harvard, Brown and Cornell. His HS stats were 4.4 weighted 30 ACT 7 AP courses (was AP scholar with distinction). On his official visits with HBC, he was offered a spot on their track teams at the end of his visits. All three schools vetted him with transcripts, test scores and the like beforehand. He decided that Cornell was the best fit for him so he applied RD. He still had to get in on his own merit…the coach assisted by letting admissions know his application was as a recruit. Hope this helps!

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@CALSmom Thanks for your reply. Did your son also go through with the Harvard application, if so, did the coach’s input help with his admission? Our son currently a junior was given unofficial verbal commitment from all the Ivy coaches, but contingent upon his board scores and grades, which obviously isn’t complete yet. Curious as to your son’s academic stats (which is similar to my son’s) whether Harvard and Brown admissions accepted him with a recruit hook.

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No, he only submitted application with Cornell after doing visits at Harvard Brown and Cornell. He stopped the recruiting process (i.e., turned down the offers) with the Harvard and brown coaches. This let Cornell know he was serious about them. And by that point, Cornell had already given us their estimated financial aid package which was very generous. My son was ok if he didn’t get admitted because he had a back up school in California.
So to answer your question, I can’t really speak to Harvard and browns process because he stopped the process, but with Cornell, he applied regular decision after getting a verbal offer in November. The coach flagged his application with admissions but again Cornell is different in that they have separate colleges with different admissions criteria. It depends on which college within Cornell you apply to.

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@justverycurious this is chronological order of recruitment for my track and field son:

Junior year: won state championship in June
July: attended a high profile T&F camp. Was approached by Harvard and Brown coaches
August: Senior year starts. Receives recruitment email from Cornell
September: arranges OV for fall with coaches (Univ of Michigan and Davidson College were in the mix too)
November: completes 3 OV and receives verbal offer to join all teams. C gives us est financial aid award. Notifies C(yes) and HB and others (no). Cornell visit hooked him and the rest were toast
December: submits application to Cornell under RD
January: gets verbal notification from coach that LL is coming
February: receives LL from C; participates in ‘signing’ ceremony at his HS
April: receives official acceptance letter by regular mail from C
June: connects with his C coach at his HS state championships (coach is there recruiting for 2017)
August: begins his D1 dream

I just want to add that stats isn’t the only factor. Teams are looking for specific positions, the athlete’s ability AND potential to get to next level in their program, chemistry with team and academic major. They’re also looking for ethnic diversity to round out their demographics. It helped that my son happened to fit all their criteria. Did he have the highest gpa, test score, # of AP courses? Nope, but then again Ivies don’t want clones…everybody who applies to Ivies are super students.

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@justverycurious if your kid is interested in Harvard, I can say that the head track coach liked everything about my son except for his SAT score. I guess H does not like ACT as they didn’t consider it (30) and asked my son to take the SAT 2 subject test. At this point (summer between jr and sr year) my son had only taken the SAT once and did not score well (at least to his ability). He put more effort into the ACT. Anyway, H coach said if he could attain a certain score in the SAT he would help his application along. H has an athletic admissions advisor that babysits the apps. Even though all this happened, H still mailed him a great recruiting letter immediately after that T&F clinic saying he was on the top of their interest list and his name was one that was discussed a lot among the coaches (something along those lines). Hope that helps!

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What was the magic SAT score, if you don’t mind me asking?

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@CALSmom – I did not realize that athletic recruiting took place during the RD round; I thought it was all wrapped up by ED. (I do not have a recruitable athlete, so only hear of things via the school grapevine.)

Do you think your son’s recruiting cycle was typical? We hear of so many athletes recruited spring of Jr year to summer before senior year.

Thanks!

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I can’t remember the SAT desired score otherwise I would have listed it. A lot of this is fuzzy as it happened summer of 2015. Come to think of it, he did retake the ACT because Harvard coach said his 28 would be iffy to pass admissions so he did retake ACT his senior year and bumped it to 30. My son by this time was so over the recruiting process and sick of traveling back and forth to the east coast back to back weekends. By the time he visited Cornell he came back and said he knew this was where he wanted to go. I was bummed he didn’t give Harvard a chance but he said he just didn’t ‘vibe’ with the team…it felt better with the C team and plus he liked the college for his major. The way C is set up and how you can attain your degree in your major and take so many other interesting courses from the other colleges appealed to him. The size of school was what he wanted too (14,000).
That said, I think his track recruiting was typical as he had teammates that were both elite and very good. The elite and very good teammates took their visits 2-3 months ahead of my son and they signed in the early period (November). The Cornell coach pushed for my son to do ED but my son still had Univ of Michigan to consider (and visit). He called UM coach and told him C’s financial aid pkg and the coach said to choose C because he wouldn’t be able to come close to it. So that decided it and visit was canceled. Other teammates signed in April of their senior year.

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@FLMomof3 I am so sorry to hear that! Your daughter has excellent stats! I hope your daughter is happy wherever she ended up. Would you mind sharing her sport? Thanks so much!

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Thanks - she was recruited for lightweight crew.