Anecdotally, I will add that what you are saying wasn’t our own personal experience. Our child was told they would be welcomed as a walk-on for 6 teams over 4 different LACs.
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Ditto - we toured a NESCAC school in the spring and our tour guide was a walk-on for a highly ranked and regarded sport.
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Oh, and 2 of the 6 teams were soccer. All were highly ranked schools.
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Gosh, I guess you all know better than me, then.
My kid’s NESCAC school had 1 soccer walk-on in 2 years. At another LAC, he was told he could try out for a soccer walk-on position his sophomore year if he also played club freshman year. That coach actually knew him from film of other recruits and liked him a lot, but he couldn’t make it happen his first year because he had no roster spots left.
While all the freshmen in the top 2 varsity crews were recruited, walk-ons filled the novice boat and many managed to earn spots in the top 2 boats by the end of the season – usually displacing walk-ons who had gotten there the same way in prior years.
Lacrosse had lots of walk-ons but few actually played in games. But it allowed scrimmages at full strength in practice.
No walk-ons for alpine skiing.
While it depends on the school and sport, there is no way it approaches 50% at the NESCAC schools I know best. In fact, it’s common for recruits to ride the bench freshman year, not to be displaced by walk-ons.
Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, most sports had lots of walk-ons. Heck, I even played a sport in college I’d never done in high school – not even in gym class! There was a well developed JV league to allow player development. That also seems to be a thing of the past.
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Soccer being one of the three most popular youth sports probably has one of the lowest number of walk-ons. But I think even with that taken into account, one walk-on in two years sounds pretty different from our personal experience. There were I believe around 3 or 4 soccer walk-ons from my kid’s incoming class. Not a NESCAC, but the school is t10, and their soccer team reached t5 in the national standings this past year. If I recall correctly, their all-time leading scorer who graduated recently was also a walk-on. My kid was offered a walk-on spot but is a walk-on there in a different sport, and has competed in every league competition they weren’t injured for. For what’s it’s worth, one of the coaches that said they would welcome him as a walk-on was at a NESCAC.
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For an additional datapoint: women’s soccer team at an academically-selective D3 LAC that was mid-conference this year, but only about top-150 in Massey rankings (i.e., not close at all to making the NCAA tourney, but top third of all D3 programs), had two walk-ons on a total roster of ~30 players. One had some playing time this season, the other had zero. Starting players generally came from ECNL/DA/ECRL clubs.
I don’t know for sure, but my hunch is that most competitive D3 programs are closer to this than your experience.
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Not to quibble, but even most ECNL players don’t get recruited. The good news is they might still walk-on if it’s important to them! Clearly some teams and schools will be more open to that than others. But even if soccer has a lower walk-on rate than most sports by virtue of a highly competitive youth scene that starts very early, the best available data (ie, the data in the WaPo article that actually states the numbers of recruits and total athletes) tells us there’s a range of ~20-70% overall walk-ons at the highly selective D3 LACs mentioned before (Davidson being D1; the range for the others depending on both school and whether attrition assumed to be 0 or 25%, with the latter resulting in more walk-ons.) As for our personal experiences being with less competitive D3s, I can only offer anecdotes, but one of the schools that said he could walk-on was a NESCAC and another reached top 5 in their national rank.
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That’s neither here nor there. And it certainly wasn’t what I stated.
Your estimate of 50% of varsity athletes being walk-ons seems off-base if we are talking about selective D3 LACs. It seems you are applying some fuzzy assumptions to WaPo “data” that in itself has some fuzziness.
I’d been following our other conference teams’ recruiting/commitment announcements this past year and looking at roster lists, your assertion simply doesn’t ring true. Just as one example, the weakest team in the conference last season is trying to rebuild and added 11 first-years to their roster this season. Each one of those had a commitment announcement on social media before the summer. Did they all receive the same level of coach support in admissions? Doubtful. But I wouldn’t classify any as “walk-ons” either.
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What’s fuzzy about subtracting the number of school reported recruits over 4 years by the total number of school reported varsity athletes, with and without a 25% attrition assumption? The midpoint for the D3 LACs with attrition is 51% walk-on. Without attrition it’s 35%.
Do you not consider CMC (10%), Colgate (12%), and Richmond (24%) selective?
Three schools are a small sample, as I mentioned at the start. But we don’t have a lot of great alternative data, just anecdotes. I believe your anecdote about few walk-ons at selective schools, but I have different anecdotes demonstrating walk-ons at selective schools are not rare.
As for the ECNL comment, you had mentioned most D3 starters played ECNL or ECRL or DA. My point was since most of these don’t get recruited, most of the players from leagues you cite as evidence of the high D3 level of play are in fact available as walk-ons, that’s all.
It’s irrelevant that they are “available” if they aren’t trying to walk on.
Another datapoint from Amherst from 2016 (from p. 7):
“Walk-ons are students who have been admitted without any recommendation from a coach, but have successfully tried out for the team. One of the major changes in college athletics over the past two decades has been the decline in the number of walk-ons in any sport. Amherst is no different. There are ~20 walk-ons per class, but few of them see much playing time, and many drop the sport after freshman year.”
And on p. 8: “Amherst College offers an impressive number of varsity sports in intercollegiate competition for its size: 13 for men and 14 for women… In 2014-205, 607 individuals were counted on varsity sports rosters.”
Their data showed about 3% of varsity athletes in an entering class were walk-ons – an average of less than one per team per year – with many not returning for a second year. It’s insignificant.
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Many are!
With all due respect, I believe you are mistaken. Their data shows ~13% of the varsity athletes from the incoming class are walk-ons. You need to divide the 20 they mention as walk-ons per class by the 125-150 they say are recruited per class plus the 20. While they also say some qualitative things about walk-ons getting less playing time and being less likely to continue (neither is surprising), it does not say anything about the athletes that quit and need to be replaced. I could be wrong, but I think the report you shared demonstrates that at any point in time the likely percentage of walk-on athletes at Amherst will be closer to 20%. There are 13% walk-on first years; those walk-ons continue or quit; if quitting they need to be replaced by walk-ons already on campus since recruits are already budgeted for (since we used the mid point of the 125-150 range in getting to 20/(137.5+20) to get the 13%.) The recruited athletes that quit are also probably replaced by walk-ons, again because recruits are already accounted for. I think it’s very unlikely that Amherst has no attrition of recruited athletes, and I think a coach who already was awarded their average allotment by Admissions over time is going to be granted extra spots to surpass the allotment because they used some on athletes who quit. There’s an incentive for the Admissions office not to reward those coaches requesting multiple admission spots for a single roster spot. But hey I could be wrong.
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Ooops, yes, thanks for the correction! I neglected to divide total athletes across 4 years. However, due to attrition it isn’t a simple matter of dividing total varsity athletes by 4 to figure out the incoming varsity athlete class size. With 607 individual varsity athletes, at the attrition rates you have been previously assuming, the entering class of varsity athletes would be much larger than 25% (=152). Even at the low-end annual attrition rate you mention of 10% per year–much lower than you have been assuming-- that first-year class would be about 177 varsity athletes. 20 walk-ons out of that total is 11%. I stand by my previous characterization: it’s insignificant. It’s certainly far, far less than your previous guesstimate of 50%. Less than one athlete per team per year.
I don’t know what you are getting at with your further hypothesis that walk-ons who quit after their first-year are replaced by more walk-ons already on campus. That assertion is not supported by any evidence–and in reality that’s not how it works. The idea that at “any point in time the likely percentage of walk-on athletes at Amherst will be closer to 20%” is far-fetched.
One more point for now: with advent of the transfer portal, even at the D3 level, walk-ons are even less needed and likely than in 2016. I’d be shocked if you could find more than a handful of first-year walk-ons on all of Amherst’s rosters combined.
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That’s not what I did. To get the number of varsity athletes in the incoming class, I took the ~20 walk-ons per class mentioned on p7 and added it to the mean number of incoming recruits (range of 125-150, so mean of 137.5) mentioned on p8. So 20+137.5 is 157.5 incoming varsity athletes, and 20/157.5= 12.6 is the percent walk-on in that class.
Sorry, I don’t follow what you are saying. But to be clear, the estimates I offered before assumed 0 and 25% attrition, not 10% and 25%. Can’t get much lower than 0%! Even at that level, the walk-on rates for CMC, Colgate, and Richmond averaged 35%. As for my 50% estimate, that was an average across D3 LACs since that’s what I had data for. Does the Amherst data argue for lower than 50%? Perhaps. But my gut is that Amherst in this context is not representative of the typical D3 LAC, not even the typical selective D3 LAC. For some that’s a good thing, for others it is not, but I digress. I still feel like the D3 LAC walk-on percentage is close to 50%. I believe I mentioned a range of 20-70% before. Amherst is in the low end of that range in my view.
I don’t think it’s far fetched that a school with 13% walk ons in the first year class would rise to 20+ after attrition effects seen later are taken into account. If there’s no attrition, the number is 13%. If there’s 25% attrition with an incoming athlete group of 158, and the total number of athletes is 607, we can try to guess how many subsequent walk-ons there are. Four years of 158 incoming athletes gets to 632. The actual is 25 less, or 607, which suggests at least 4% attrition. If they were actually losing 25% but ended up at 607, there would need to be 133 new athletes from somewhere other than new recruits which are already accounted for (632*.75= 158, from which we subtract 25.) So even if all the first year walk-ons quit, there’s at any point the original 20 plus 133 which is 153. That’s 25% walk-ons of the varsity athlete pool at Amherst, but it does assume a 25% attrition rate and doesn’t count transfers, which I understand to be very few in most years (~15). I could see the attrition being lower than thar, but I can also see it being higher.
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You’re relying on a handful of anecdotes at this point when there’s hard data from 3 different highly selective D3 LACs that says their walk-on rate is between 35 and 50%. You shared data from Amherst that suggests the walk on rate is between 13 and 25%, not the 3% you claimed. Where in that 13-25 range the rate lands depends on a measure your few anecdotes are simply not capable of capturing: the overall attrition rate over time. The closest thing to hard data on attrition in this thread are the d3 study and the Harvard article both describing 25% attrition. There’s also the below article from Brown stating 30%. Now, Harvard and Brown are D1, but they are unusual D1s that behave more like D3s, so their data is more helpful than your anecdotes on three random squads you happened to pick. Amherst is D3, but it’s a school with academics not unlike the Ivies with nontrivial commute times that can cut into study time. (Yes, I know, they sorta study on the bus, but it’s not the same.) I have no compelling reason to believe the only data I have on D3 attrition or the data I have on highly academic, zero athletic scholarship D1 attrition doesn’t also apply to Amherst, your anecdotes and personal jabs notwithstanding. With a 25% attrition rate, the math says they have about 25% walk-ons, thanks to the report you were kind enough to share.
Stepping back, I will say I have no affiliation with Amherst, but that I think it’s more positive than not if they have more walk-ons. From this article in their student paper, it seems there’s a considerable divide between athletes and non-athletes on campus. I imagine it would only help if a larger percentage (than 25 even!) were walk-ons, more like certain peers. I can sense how it might be challenging to change that culture.
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Can we step back? There are students who are not counted as a coach’s allocation but who have gone through the recruiting process and who get softer support. This may be a kid with great academics and legacy or some other hook, so one who is likely to be admitted without being simply the coach’s choice. But the coach will still tell admissions “I don’t need a slot or tip for this one, but I’d like him.” It’s a plus for the kid’s application, he’s admitted ED, and he gets a roster spot.
He is unlikely to count in the numbers reported as recruited, but that kid looks no different to his teammates and coach than a recruit. Importantly, he also gets in front of any true walk-ons. We have known kids in this bucket.
From their POV, they are recruits, and they have a finger on the scale with that coach endorsement, but they also are technically outside the league’s hard count of recruits.
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Exactly. In Amherst parlance it’s the 67 or so ‘athletic factors’ each year with full coach support, and the 60-90 ‘coded athletes’ per year who have partial/soft support.
The high end of those numbers multiplied by 4 gets us to roughly the total number of unduplicated Amherst athletes (597) last year. Equity in Athletics
At my D’s NESCAC school there were multiple teams with no walk-ons over her 4 years. IME walk-ons are less likely to continue with their sport than recruits. Plus walk-ons are relatively more at risk from getting cut each year as new and better recruits come in. One walk-on on my D’s team lasted for one year, then couldn’t make the cut the following year.
I’m not sure why you are mixing in D1 schools…recruiting at Richmond and Colgate is not like recruiting at CMC, which although D3, is not like NESCAC recruiting.
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I don’t know about anyone else, but all this suggests to me that dividing the total number of varsity athletes by four is still not a bad estimate of the number of first-year admits who were ED athletes with some sort of admissions support, at least at LACs with really serious athletic programs such as the NESCAC LACs. There are lots of nuances, but it still seems to me that roughly speaking the true walk on effect (so not recruited walk ons who apply ED with some sort of support) and the attrition effect are largely offsetting each other.
Meaning it seems to me like the broadly-defined recruited athletes obviously start at the largest number at the point of first-year admission. Then due to attrition there are more and more spots opening up for true walk ons through the final season, which increases the overall true walk on percentage. But as of the point of first-year admissions, those spots for true walk ons have not been created yet because no broadly-defined recruits have dropped out yet.
And in fact, it would be interesting to count, but I wonder if the total size of teams per class tends to go down too, on the theory maybe there is not a total replacement of first-year players who drop out.
Anyway, I am sure that is not perfectly right either (just dividing the varsity athletes by four), but I am still feeling it is closer to right then assuming the total true walk on percentage is the same for all four years.
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I agree. I was trying to get at this earlier when I wrote:
“As for walk-ons being a rarity in your experience, it’s possible that the walk-ons aren’t always made known. A walk-on could still have been in touch with the coach who invited the player to day 1 of training camp despite not being an actual recruit.“
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