Thanks for pointing that out. I knew them as LACs but not D1. I think this only makes it more likely that the D3 LACs have similar to lower recruit percentages (and therefore similar to higher walk-on rates), but it’s good to get the details right!
I don’t think you can make broad brush assumptions about all D3 schools. You have heard from multiple people on this thread who have direct experience with NESCAC athletics, for example, where teams had nothing close to the percentage of walk-ons you are talking about. Of course it’s your prerogative to ignore that and give more credence to some WaPo reporter who may not have any idea what they are talking about.
Of course, there can be recruiting/walk-on differences by D3 schools and by sport within D3 athletics…one example is not all sailing coaches could have many full or even partial support slots, so certain sailing teams have a relatively high proportion of walk-ons. Men’s soccer in NESCAC? Not so much. Men’s D3 hockey at any school? Not so much. Do schools like Knox and Beloit have a higher percentage of walk-ons than Williams? Probably, in general. OTOH, the percentage of recruited athletes at some less selective D3s is literally keeping the school in business.
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I agree, it would be interesting to see walk-on data per year. I don’t think walk-ons are disproportionately turned away in the first year before the incoming class has started dropping, though. Our personal experience suggested coaches if anything were very open to first year walk-ons, and if I had to guess why, it’s that they knew there would be attrition later, and getting walk-ons early gave coaches more time to develop the athlete. I think they continue to welcome walk-ons that have potential later on because the attrition has started or is still expected, but now there’s a balance of “is there still time to develop this athlete?” and “oh snap, so-and-so quit…”
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More anecdote from D3 – recruits who drop off the team are not replaced as that attrition is actually part of the expectation. In my kid’s recruiting experience, coaches generally said a recruit had a guaranteed spot on the team for 1, maybe 2 years. A soccer team may show a group of 10 1st years on the roster, but that is often down to 5 by senior year. Some kids drop, others are told they don’t have a spot anymore.
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Good points. Agreed that even recruits (at whatever level of coach support) aren’t always guaranteed a spot on the team and/or playing time. Even scholarships in D1/D2 are often just year to year.
Your comments also made me remember that over-recruiting happens happens…not only to help with attrition, but to make sure there are ample practice players (volleyball is a good example of this).
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I’m not sure what broad brush assumptions you feel I have made…. Are you referring to my assumption it would be surprising if a D1 LAC had less aggressive recruiting than an average D3 LAC? That doesn’t mean there’s not a range. I did approach this thread thinking it was about a broader pool than one league. As for NESCAC specifically, I don’t recall singling it out, other than perhaps to note a certain member would be in the very broad 20-70% D3 LAC range for walk-ons I theorized if certain attrition conditions were met? I guess I also mentioned our child had a NESCAC experience (a walk-on invitation), but I don’t think that’s what you are referring to. I think there’s great variability from one school and league to the next. I am surprised there’s as much focus on what appears like a set of outliers not being outlying enough, since, to me, more walk-ons than universities offer is a useful differentiator for an LAC.
Yeah, and for our purposes here we can consider some different scenarios taking this as a core hypothetical.
Let’s assume by class-year cohort the recruits look 10, 9, 6, 5 (kinda arbitrary but this is modeling recruits maybe getting up to two years of commitment coming in). Let’s assume the total percentage of true walk-ons is 25%, which would mean we need to be putting 10 more true walk-ons into these years somewhere (30 total recruits, 10 true walk ons, is 25% true walk ons).
One (extreme) possibility is recruits + walk-ons looks like 10 + 0, 9 + 1, 6 + 4, 5 + 5. In this hypothetical, the walk-on percentage at the first-year point is 0%, and it goes up to 50% by senior year.
OK, but I understand that coaches may look ahead. But how much?
Another (extreme) would be it looks like 10 + 4, 9 + 3, 6 + 2, 5 + 1. Now walk ons are almost 29% of the first-year cohort, but I am not sure it is realistic to have such little room for replacement walk ons, or indeed so few upper class students.
So a middling scenario would be something like 10 + 2, 9 + 1, 6 + 3, 5 + 4. The first year cohort is biggest, but it is not allowed to drop too much. Now true walk ons are like 17% of the first-year cohort.
We could continue, but here is the really interesting thing to me. If we took 40 total people on the roster, and just divided it by 4 to estimate the first-year recruits, we would get 10 recruited athletes in first-year admissions. The variable in these scenarios was just how the coach managed the roster over time using walk ons, but in scenarios where the coach wanted to get ahead of the process by having more walk ons earlier, that actually doesn’t really affect the number of recruited athletes in the first-year admit class.
Again, I am not insisting this is right, indeed to be very clear, this “conclusion” was really just in the original hypothetical assumptions.
But still, I think although interesting, a lot of this conversation about exactly how different coaches and different teams might manage walk ons over time perhaps does not really make much difference to the admissions question that is in the title.
Bates doesn’t participate in either Posse or Questbridge. It does participate in the Schuler Access Initiative.
I know several ED applicants to Bates who weren’t athletes or hooked in any way. I can’t find exact numbers, but athletes at Bates seem to range from 30-40% of students. Regardless, it’s safe to assume that a substantial number of ED applicants are athletes.
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What @Midwestmomofboys and @Mwfan1921 relayed is more consistent with our experience at a NESCAC for our D. There were much greater than the standard 4 recruits in her class for softball. The upper level classes had had serious attrition (there was just 1 senior), so I think the coach was given more spots for that class. During her 4 years, 2 classmates quit the team (their spots were not filled by walk-ons from her class). At any one time, there were max 1 or 2 walk-ons out of a roster of 18-20. The walk-ons were more likely frosh or transfers.
If you look down the roster of most any random NESCAC team, the rosters are pretty consistent, with frosh usually being the largest class represented. This makes sense if a coach has an open roster spot, he/she is more likely to give a roster spot to the younger player because they have more time to develop. It would be rare for a walk-on to be more skilled than the recruited players because presumably they otherwise would have been recruited, so it is not as if the coach is going to be looking at a player who can make an impact as a junior or senior. Also a freshmen walk-on prospect is fresh from HS and/or travel ball team vs a junior who hasn’t played organized ball in 2 years.
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Out of curiosity, do you think it’s possible there were some athletes that behaved like they were recruited that technically weren’t? In our case, it would’ve been very hard to tell. Our child was treated the same as the the others not just upon arrival but before. We knew the coach didn’t know our child when admissions was deliberating, but that didn’t stop what seemed like a full court press after the admission offer. I figured this was just a smart coach who knew he could get even more talent on his team by selling to the walk-ons in addition to the recruits. Our child was legitimately confused about whether to call themselves a recruit or a walk-on until we explained not getting the admissions bump meant they were a walk-on. I think most but not all other parents would have similarly advised their child, as there are some bragging rights to saying one (or one’s child) is a recruited athlete.
I can see how coaches would prefer first year walk-ons for development purposes, but there are ways for enrolled students to improve at a sport without being on the varsity team; club teams being an example.
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Those walk-ons wouldn’t show up in recruiting commitment announcements that happen well before the fall.
Go look at U of Richmond (which is D1 by the way). Their eight committed recruits for women’s soccer for Fall 2023 were announced in a news release months beforehand. They match the roster for first-years. Your guesstimate for 37% walk-ons for UR teams is wildly off-base
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At D3 LACs, the club talent level and level of play in the vast majority of cases is not going to be sufficient to maintain skills, much less “improve” them to turn athletes who weren’t recruitable out of high school into athletes who can win a varsity college roster spot. Furthermore, there aren’t clubs teams for many sports.
At D1 schools: this sometimes happens. For example, Cal Poly SLO will occasionally (every couple of years) bring a player up off of the club soccer team to the varsity team. It’s still very rare.
I don’t know why you persist in insisting there’s this vast cohort of first-year walk-on athletes out there at selective LACs with competitive D3 athletic programs, and that furthermore, there’s a large cohort of older walk-ons who replace them. This is not the case for team sports in conferences like NESCAC, UAA, Centennial Conference, Liberty League, NEWMAC. As posters are telling you, you’ll typically find 1-2 walk-ons (not 10-20 as your guesstimates state) per roster of 20-30 athletes, With the transfer portal, you’ll see even fewer moving forward.
Another thing you seem to have not considered but that other posters have brought up: there are a subset of recruited D3 LAC athletes who get “soft support” from coaches in the admissions process. And some coaches are over-recruiting knowing that not all of their athletes with less support will get in.
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I have heard of walk-on announcements. I think you have a more narrow idea of walk-ons only happening after school has started. There are preferred walk-ons that don’t get a coach’s recruitment boost with admissions but do get a commitment for a roster spot. There’s incentives for coaches to sell their schools to walk-ons even during the ED phase, especially in competitive conferences. Happened to a kid we know during ED; happened to our kid after admission decision was already made.
WaPo reported 80 recruited athletes with a total varsity pool of 380. If there were no attrition, that leaves 60. If the attrition is in-line with the 25% from the only sources that have actually published attrition data that I’ve seen, then there are 140 spots. That
would be 37% walk-on (assuming as I have said many times no transfers, but there probably is a small number.)
I think we are going around in circles. It’s ok to disagree. I think some of your rhetoric has been over the top and further think we aren’t benefiting each other or anyone else, but i will reply to the posts you’ve already written.
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I definitely agree that the walk on % is not nearly what is suggested above, in our experience, certainly at NESCACs. My D plays at a NESCAC and the recruiting process was EXTREMELY competitive. She went through the process with several NESCACs and at least a couple of them were more competitive than lower tier D1s. Her freshmen group on her team is large and talented, with only a couple of them (including D) getting any playing time at all thus far. They had 2 walk on tryouts the first week of pre-season and neither athlete made it; D mentioned there was a big difference in play. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but in our experience, it is limited. We’re not aware of any.
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For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t limit a recruit to someone who gets admission support – I’d call a recruit someone who gets an offer of a roster spot in exchange for applying ED. That broader definition includes applicants getting “soft-support” or who would get in anyway, possibly as legacy or another “bucket” which doesn’t require coach support.
My own recruited athlete was not worried about admissions, his focus was the roster spot, which was far more competitive process. And some highly competitive athletic programs in a sport may not be the most competitive admissions, so getting the roster spot is the bigger achievement. For ex., Ohio Wesleyan, John Carroll, Messiah, and Calvin all have excellent Men’s Soccer programs – getting the roster spot would typically be harder than getting admitted.
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and often the smaller SLACs have a larger number of sports teams so actually more athletes
That’s bound to be true some of the time but not all the time.
Partly because my kid got walk-on invitations from 6 different coaches in the top 20, partly other anecdotes, partly cause it’s what the math shows for the few schools that have shared their recruit numbers vs total athletes.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a large cohort of older players who replace them if a sufficiently large percentage of the first years is walk-on overall. As I have said more times than I care to count, there are bound to be fewer walk-ons in certain sports (like soccer which you have brought up repeatedly), at certain schools, and in certain leagues. Note certain schools is not all schools, not even if you stick “selective” between before “schools.”
I am not unaware of degrees of admissions support from coaches. I’ve left it to the colleges to decide what they consider a “recruit” in their self-reported data. Soft can be anything, not all of which appreciably bumps admission odds.
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coaches in smaller sports (everything except football and maybe basketball) have very limited supported slots at many highly regarded schools so they have to count on “walk ons” to fill rosters because they dont have enough slots to give. Most, if not all, of those kids also go through a “recruiting” process, they just didn’t get the coach support in the end but were told that they had a spot if they could get in on their own merit. Happened to my daughter at an ivy and a nescac. Yes a “walk on” but very different then a kid who just shows up on campus and at the first day of practice without any coach interaction
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Those aren’t really walk-ons. They have gone through the recruiting process, likely including admissions pre-reads. They are also likely getting soft support from the coach with admissions that can still help on the margins—maybe not the full support of a “tip” or “slot”, but there’s a letter in the file. The “preferred walk-on” parlance is really more applicable to D1 athletics anyway. Do some athletes get a “if you can get in, we’d love to have you” response from a coach at selective D3 schools? Yes, but these are relatively rare. Certainly not anywhere close to 50% of the roster.
Look at how Amherst defined things: “Walk-ons are students who have been admitted without any recommendation from a coach, but have successfully tried out for the team.” They documented in 2016 that they were getting around 20 across all sports every year, or less than one per team on average. Because of the transfer portal, that figure is currently likely much less.
If everybody on here with experience in selective D3 athletic programs and who have seen roster composition and changes over time first-hand is telling you what your “math says” doesn’t accord with the on-the-ground-reality, you might want to step back and reexamine your assumptions.
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