Help me make the Athletic Recruits forum better

As some of you may have noticed, there have been some changes on college confidential. Part of this is to appoint people to be “forum champions” for a particular forum. In case it is not obvious, that is me for this forum. Basically I believe the idea is to try and clean the forums up to make them more user friendly. As part of that effort, I would like to repopulate the “featured threads” portion of this forum. You will see that a few threads have been “pinned” to the first page of the discussion board. I have done this because I haven’t yet figured out how to put these threads into the “featured” category. Hopefully, I will be able to figure that out before too long.

Ideally, I would like to collect two types of threads. One set of general interest threads and another set that are more focused on particular sports. The idea being to harness some useful information for visitors and newbies to the forum to use as a starting point. On the sport specific side, I have tentatively selected the huge fencing thread, my own football thread and a thread on swimming recruiting that generated a lot of interest. I would ask some of you regulars to post suggestions for other useful threads, particularly more generic sport specific threads, here. I know there have been great discussions on track, lax, crew, baseball and other sports I know little about. Many of you do know what you are talking about relative to those sports. Help me separate the wheat from the chaff and highlight the really helpful threads, please.

On the more generic side I have selected a thread I started which contained a fair amount of information on the Ivy process generally, a thread on admissions help in D3, a compare and contrast thread on the Ivy and the NESCAC and a thread on the challenges faced by Div 1 athletes. I am sure there are others I have missed. Tell me what they are. While I understand that this forum is predominately focused on high academic recruiting, any threads that deal with recruiting generally would also be particularly helpful.

Thanks in advance.

You’re a good egg for taking on this task. For the sport-specific featured threads, this rowing one was seemed pretty deep…though perhaps the title should be changed so that it doesn’t seem dated:

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/athletic-recruits/1834641-the-rowing-class-of-2017-recruiting-thread.html#latest

Although there was not a lot of info regarding women’s DIII basketball, I was able to gleen a lot of information from this forum. How to approach a coach, the kinds of questions to ask, film, keeping stats, etc. Thank you for keeping this going.

@Ohiodad51 - Thanks for taking on this task - you’re an excellent candidate. Some dad published a “everything he learned” during recruiting thread years ago. It was really long, but I remember it was so helpful as a singular starting point. I’ll try to find it. I would also put a sticky on a thread related to ivy athletics because it has its own set of rules.

Thank you for doing this! For soccer, KeeperDad did a series of “how to” posts on soccer recruiting based on his daughter’s goalkeeper recruiting process. That thread has been the “gold standard” for advice here for men’s and women’s soccer recruiting, and is not limited to GK rather than field players.

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/athletic-recruits/1291234-college-recruiting-tips-for-soccer-p1.html

@Midwestmomofboys, thanks for the idea. Are there any helpful soccer threads of a more recent vintage? I am trying to keep the featured threads somewhat current (I went back and forth over including my football thread from 2016 for that reason) and the cited thread has been inactive for quite a few years.

@Ohiodad51 I’ll take a look, but while that thread is 6 years old, to my mind, it remains a gem of a “how to” for men’s and women’s soccer.

@Ohiodad51 I think this is a great idea. My only suggestion would be sub-categories by sport and possibly additional stickies by division. Each sport is very different and one sport might be a serious priority at one school but not so much at another. The various sports often have different recruiting schedules as well i.e football v hockey v lacrosse.

Our son has been invited on several official visits to Ivies. Does this mean that the coaches believe he would be a good candidate for a likely letter and would get through admissions? He has already submitted all of his test scores/subject tests/GPA to all of the coaches. Any insight would be helpful. Thanks.

I am going to keep this open one more day and then start culling responses. So anymore tidbits of general wisdom, please add them soon.

I like the idea of divying up the topics by sport, then sub categories for Div 1,2,3 and then LACs Ivies, Recruiting paths to take, Academics, pink letters, likely letters etc. That way we don’t run into sports we are not part of or have no interest in. So for example: Athletic Recruits-> Baseball-> LACs-> Likely Letter process-> Grades needed → time to start. Something like this. Thanks for doing this! Appreciated. Sometimes it is hard to navigate through to what I want to know.

Ohiodad51 - would you be able to dm me when you have a chance? Wanted to run something by you and I don’t know if I have enough posts to DM yet. Thank you.