@twoinanddone, most in the sport would say the very top D2 and D3 lax teams are very competitive - once you get outside of the top D2 teams it falls apart fairly quickly, whereas D3 talent tends to be deeper - wasn’t touching academics or facilities as yes, outside of the top D1 teams, it’s hard to argue that the NESCAC and Centennial conferences don’t provide the best of all worlds.
Our experience – albeit with D3 Men’s Soccer – was that the college time line was accelerated by about 6 months as compared to the “typical” non-recruit applicant – kid really needed to know where he would be happy to go, and know whether he had an offer of a roster spot, by Sept-Oct of senior year, since most competitive recruiting at the D3 level includes an expectation for ED in Nov or ED2 in early Jan. That meant, admission and recruiting research took off in earnest throughout junior year and then the summer before senior year, and was pretty much done by mid fall of senior year.
As a parent, you can start charting admissions data plus lax ranking/selectivity – look at how teams do in their conference, read the roster info for players to see whether the current players seem aligned with your son’s skill and experience level. Current club/high school coaches are an important resource for an assessment about recruit-ability and the process. We had a sliding scale of safety/match/reaches which took into account both admissions and recruitment. Also, consider whether merit awards will be an important part of affordability, as that will affect your list.
Emails, film, tournament play are all part of the process. A basic intro email, with academic and lax info, plus a few sentences identifying why the student is interested in THAT school – easy enough to tailor with some basic research – gets things moving. Presumably lax uses online recruiting questionnaire similar to what soccer does, which is a way to get in the coach’s “system” as well.
Good luck, and enjoy – it was a lot of fun seeing my kid mature through the recruiting process, as he learned how to speak with coaches, managed disappointment and success, and weighed his options to find the best, and right place for him.
Also, I suggest searching this board - Athletic Recruits – for older threads on Men’s lacrosse, there are a number of threads focused on D3 lax recruiting and timeline. The collective knowledge here is priceless, it is definitely how we sorted out the timeline for D3 soccer.
Thank you @Midwestmomofboys . Great info.
@Lindagaf, I would check out Laxpower.com as well. There are lists of recruits by school and year. You can do some checking on previous recruits and see how closely their profile first your son’s. I used it as a way to target and segments schools when my D was going through the process.
As a rising junior, there should still be many opportunities at the D3 level. I would think that practically no D3 school is “full” for 2019s yet and there are some D1 and D2 schools with open spots still at this time, especially due to the new contact rules.
I agree with the advice to get to some camps and tournaments ASAP. I recommend a mix of 1-2 multi-schools showcases, 1-2 single school camps, and 1-2 tournaments, based on your budget and location. The big issue at this stage of the game is that you can’t afford to waste time going to places where you are not a fit (e.g., the MD or UNC school camp because breaking in there at this point is highly unlikely unless you have major skills), so make sure you go to events where your son is a realistic match for at least a good portion of the schools attending.
The blog and recruiting guide at www.sportsrecruits.com are excellent. No need to signup to access their excellent materials. Wise of you to focus on D3 . I tell kids that ACT 32 is the golden number … it will take you anywhere you want to go. I will PM you tonight with my analysis of a dozen, or so, tournaments.
FYI - One of my sons regretted not going to a “smarter” college . He transferred to a smarter college and discovered the smarter college had much better parties!
Sorry, my previous post should have read “closely their profile fits your son’s”.
@Burgermeister , that’s too funny! I will mention that to my son.
Lots of good advice - having just gone through this for a different sport, my best recommendation is to find schools that fit his choice of degrees and your financial ability first and then pursue athletics. Things happen - injuries, coaches, change, other interests, etc and they may not play all the way through. The last thing you want is to get part way there and realize they are stuck pursuing a degree that was not what they wanted or at a school where they cannot transfer. My son was not a D1 level athlete, but loves his sport and really hoped to continue playing. He played club level at a high level- not the highest. He was offered a spot at a NAIA school early senior year and had several other NAIA ask him to come try out. It was exciting, but we quickly realized that his choice of degree was not readily available at those schools. Also, since he wasn’t 100% sure on his degree it also left him little to no room to change if he didn’t like where he started with majors. Now, if he knew what he wanted to do and it was available there and we could afford it financially even without an athletic scholarship then I’d of been all for it since they were great schools. He ended up at a D2 school playing on a reserves team this fall. It’s a great fit for him. The school had the major he wanted with options if he changes his mind, the academic and other scholarships he could receive there matched or outweighed what he was getting offered at the NAIA schools with athletic scholarships (not always the case, just was here) and he still gets the opportunity to be part of the program, play games, and potentially move up. He will be happy there with or without the sport, but it is a huge plus for him right now. How he approached recruiting – emails individually to coaches letting them know about himself, why he was interested in that particular school (degrees, programs, sports, etc). It helped to be able to say to some of them that he had already been accepted as a student. He listed different showcase tournaments he would attend, his team schedule, his number, what position he played. As the year went on he would send updates with new information/tournaments. He also included references the coach could contact (club and HS coach - after asking their permission of course). Sometimes he got responses before that the coach would catch a couple games. Other times he would get a response a week or two after the games that the coach had watched him. Sometimes nothing. That all just kept evolving. Being patient, but persistent. If they aren’t the top level athletes there is a spot for them, but chances are you need to look more at academic scholarships than athletics and look at athletics as a bonus!
Do check out laxpower and the old threads here, but remember that lax recruiting has just changed the timeline. No recruiting at all until Sept 1 of junior year. There are tons of recruits listed on laxpower for 2018-19 because they committed before the rule change but they have had no contact with those coaches since April and things may have changed over the summer which they are free to do because a ‘commitment’ really means nothing until senior year. Everyone is still trying to figure out how the new timeline will work.
Of about 900 recruits reported on laxpower for 2018-19 (rising juniors), about 100 are heading to D3 schools. This was before recruiting was cut off for this class under the new rules. Reporting is by no means scientific as commitments can be add by the athlete, school, or coach, or not reported at all.
@twoinanddone, given rule change, don’t you think it’s fair to assume that there will be a fair amount of movement outside that of the top programs?
Also, I think it’s quite funny that laxpower and similar blogs allowed kids or their parents to fill in the commitment line without any fact checking - hopefully that nonsense stops now as even D1 football doesn’t allow that until NLI - yes, they track schools in the hunt, but no there isn’t one single school listed.
Maybe that’s why parents lash out at highly selective schools like Haverford when their kid who “had committed” but didn’t get accepted, as the key person that wasn’t in the loop on that back and forth was the admissions department…
Other than the fact that laxpower and connectlax are in the business of making money, can anyone tell me with a straight face why there are any lists for 2019 or 2020 “commitments” given the rule change - this is like the emperor has no clothes fairly tale.
What is there to fact check when a sophomore says ‘Yes, I will play for State U’? There is nothing in writing, nothing to check. I don’t think there are a lot of students posting that they are going to Maryland or UNC if they really haven’t received an offer, and some of the posts are made by the schools. The reason there are about 600 recruits (300 boys, 300 girls) who are on the 2019-20 list are because they committed before the rule change in April. In the past, Laxpower put up the list in January for the sophomores. Usually the lists had 200+ names already on them, and I don’t know who was keeping that list or who reported the recruits (most likely a mix of the colleges and a few club coaches and a few parents), but when the list went up the names on it were assigned ID numbers in alphabetical order of the colleges, so you couldn’t tell if they’d been recruited as 8th graders or just the month before. After that, ID numbers are issued by posting date.
What do I think will happen? This year, since many of the coaches have been following these recruits through freshmen and sophomore years, I think there will be a lot of commits that normally would have happened over the summer announce in Sept and Oct. There will be the normal amount of kids switching teams over the junior year as there always have been, including kids who went to camps at a school they like better or kids who have really good junior years next spring and they move up in the recruiting ranks. There will be kids who can’t get into an Ivy or who decide they really want to go to Notre Dame and get a scholarship. Boys seem to switch more than girls but right now they can’t talk to the coaches and tell them they changed their mind. I don’t think there will be any change to recruiting at the lower ranked D1 schools or the D2, D3 schools. They will pick up a few juniors in the fall, but will add the majority of their recruits at the end of the spring season and through the summer (junior to senior summer).
Next year? I think it will take until Nov and Dec of their junior year to make a big dent in D1 top recruiting. The recruiting that used to happen from sophomore year (and earlier) though fall of junior year will now happen in those 4 months from Sept 1 to the beginning of spring semester. Coaches will have notes and film from summer tournaments and camps, they’ll still have their contacts with high school and club coaches. Those phones will be busy in September.
I don’t think there will be much difference in who goes where, they just won’t know where until they are juniors.
One place where I think it might be really tricky is the service academies. Part of recruiting for the academies is recruiting for sports. Currently they listing 20+ recruits from sophomores. But they can’t talk about lacrosse before they are juniors. Many start their preparations and applications long before junior year. The timing will be interesting.
@dadof4kids, thanks for the helpful information you share. I wanted to send a short note to possibly influence your use of the term “OCD” to describe your level of focus on your child’s college athletic prospects.
As the family member of a few people whose lives are greatly affected by OCD, I try to speak out when I think the diagnosis is being used as shorthand for a focused approach. OCD is defined as intrusive, UNWANTED thoughts that lead to physical or mental compulsions that take up at least an hour a day. If it’s enjoyable for you to learn about prospects for your child, and you’re getting something beneficial out of doing so, it’s almost certain that these actions are not a result of OCD.
I am sorry that this is off topic, but perhaps there are others reading this who might pause before using OCD to describe their actions if they know how hard it is for OCD sufferers and their loved ones to hear the term misused.
@twoinanddone, as you know, lax is generally a sport dominated by higher income HS schools and as very few significant athletic scholarships are provided at the top academic schools, I believe it was another way to both lock in full pay ED applicants and field a team.
I don’t know what you mean. The top schools like Maryland, Virginia,Duke give scholarships. The schools that don’t give need based aid. But either way, the ED ‘lock in’ or the NLI ‘lock in’ doesn’t happen until senior year. The commitments from juniors will not be any more firm than the commitments from sophomores were. It’s just a later, more compressed time table for recruiting for top D1’s, and I don’t think there will be much difference in D2 or D3, who were always looking more at juniors and seniors than younger kids.
I think those who would have committed to Virginia or Brown or Duke will still end up at those schools, it’s just they will commit as juniors and not as sophomores.
@twoimandone, there are only 6,000 D1 lax players and of those about 700 play for Ivy League or equivalent teams, and of the remainder the avg scholarship is only $12k so less than 1/4 of the cost of attendance - even at the best programs you are only getting 40% covered.
My assumption is far less stacking of athletic and need based scholarships need to happen in lax so if a well off cohort can lock their kid into a college, even it’s it’s only non binding, they will do it all day long - why not.
http://www.scholarshipstats.com/lacrosse.html
Maybe we’ll see highly selective colleges that provide substantial merit scholarships start recruiting STEM students in the 9th and 10th grade as well.
I doubt most players, even on Maryland and Syracuse and Duke are getting 40% scholarships. Schools are splitting 12 full scholarships among teams of 40+ players for men, 35 for women. Some are getting 1/4 scholarships, most less. Very few are getting more, especially freshmen. Sometimes upperclassmen get increases.
Athletic and need based grants from the college don’t stack. An athlete can’t accept both or it all counts against the team total. Some schools allow merit to stack (if conditions are met), some do not.
No one can commit early. No one can discuss lax scholarships until Sept 1 of junior year. If a school wants to start making promises to 10th graders for STEM admission, that’s up to the admission office. However, they can’t discuss lax recruiting until junior year and those STEM scholarships better be available to anyone at the school on the same terms the athletes receive them.
The schools/coaches said they didn’t want early recruiting anymore, didn’t want to get them committed as soon as possible, binding or not. I think the parents wanted it, I think there was a lot of bragging about it, but it’s gone now, at least in lacrosse. If someone wants to commit early, play soccer.
@tr831 I should have used the term obsessive, not OCD. I apologize.
Chembiodad mentioned over recruiting by colleges to seek full pay students. Some teams recruit 16 kids per year. Only four or five will get meaningful playing time. Academics first. Buyer beware.