You certainly aren’t hesitant to go low. “Willfully misrepresenting”? I have tried not to take offense at your personal jabs, but that just encourages you to dial up the theatrics. No, I have not willfully misrepresented anything. I have been clear about my assumptions, sources, and the basic math used. I’ve tried to be as helpful and patient as possible.
I’m not going through every roster for 4 years. First of all, I’ve seen players disappear from rosters if they quit during season. Secondly, the bios don’t always designate walk-ons. Third, the math is clear and there’s a range starting with 0 attrition which I offered before we even engaged. I’m here to help cause I found this site useful during our own search many years ago. I’ve shared info I believe to be accurate and useful, more so than you own but I’m trying to take the high ground. It’s ok for us to disagree, but the venom is kinda spooky.
If walk-ons were “insignificant” at selective D3s as you claim, not only would the numbers be different and probably our own experiences, but I don’t think we would see so many attempts to court walk-on players at the very schools in question.
Amherst and the schools that shared recruit numbers spared us the guesswork of figuring out how many are recruits vs walk-ons in their eyes. I’m trying to illustrate that it can get fuzzy enough to a student that they can refer to themselves as a recruit if they only received a roster spot. A poster further up already said they would consider a roster spot a type of recruiting. The point is, people aren’t always reliable reporters of what the college has actually done or thinks.
Out of curiosity, what in your mind has been suggested above? I find that in threads like this with so much misquoting and distortion people are sometimes reacting to what someone claims was asserted as opposed to what actually was.
The Wes article you reference above is from 2016- things have significantly changed since then, for all of the reasons referenced by others above. Regarding the Mid and Williams articles, both are from 2021 and relate to Covid impacts- rostered athletes studying remotely causing gaps in rosters, etc. The Mid one also references a specific disciplinary action that resulted in atypical roster spots being open that specific year. Again, not saying it doesn’t happen, but CURRENTLY, post Covid, with the portal, etc., etc. it is not common.
That Amherst article you shared managed to find 4 walk-ons in the whole school. And one of those was recruited in a different sport there (football) before getting injured and trying out for and walking on the track team.
Women’s soccer has one walk-on (a backup goalkeeper whose bio states both parents and a grandparent are Amherst legacies) on the roster out of 28-30 athletes.
The Williams article you cited specifically stated “Many walk-ons are, like Spiezio, recruited athletes who decided to try their hand at another sport.” And that was the case for every athlete they interviewed for the article. There were no non-recruited athletes mentioned!
In the Midd article, of the two athletes interviewed, none were on team sports, and relating to one “Bowman officially joined the roster in the spring of 2021, with the golf team desperately needing on-campus competitors with the majority of their team taking the semester off.” That is a specific pandemic-related circumstance.
In the Wes article, two of the walk-on athletes weren’t on team sports. The third who was, was a recruited athlete at Wes in a different sport.
The Middlebury article mentions Covid as both a reason why sports were so welcome and how it made walking on more challenging. It doesn’t claim they needed more walk-ons because of Covid. Here’s the key paragraph:
“Although the majority of Middlebury athletes are recruited through a process of communicating with coaches ahead of their admission to the college, there is a small but significant number of athletes who have joined the team after their admission.”
A small but “significant” number contradicts the characterization from others that the walk-on counts at NESCAC schools are “insignificant.”
If you are saying Wesleyan’s walk-on interests have changed in 7 years, that would be nice to back with data.
The Williams article describes the experiences of several athletes (half multi-sport, not that recruited athletes can’t be examples of walk-ons in other sports):
“Walk-on athletes like van Eck who joined a team that they were not initially recruited for have long played an important role for the Ephs.”
“Long played an important role” also seems pretty opposite to “insignificant.”
The only material reference I see to Covid was in relation to a student’s workload being easier due to restrictions. I do agree the students who were dismissed likely increased the need for extra in season recruiting, but some of the article talks walk-ons before that.
The Amherst article doesn’t mention Covid and describes only one multi-sport athlete. It describes the experiences of walk-ons positively, though hard work, with bits like “my teammates made me feel very included from the beginning, and I quickly realized that that’s where I wanted to be.”
I note this relates to a prior discussion of how the number of unique varsity athletes can be significantly less than the total count of varsity athletes across teams. Fortunately another poster linked a data source with “unduplicated” counts.
OK, so if (as seems very likely and as is supported by articles like this one) a lot of the non-recruited athletes on some varsity teams were recruited for other varsity teams, our “fix” above of working with just the unduplicated count of varsity athletes would also seem to be very helpful in terms of at least cutting back significantly on the number of varsity athletes who were not recruited by any team as a first-year.
So not to beat a dead horse, but it still seems to me like as long as we are taking that unduplicated number of varsity athletes and dividing by four, we are likely not going to be that far off from the number of of recruited athletes in a given first-year admit class, at least not with LACs in the more serious athletic conferences.
In a funny way that was the situation with my D who was recruited but turned down the support because we thought she was going to get offered by an Ivy. She ended up getting in RD but the coach texted her as soon as the admissions decision was announced and ended up starting from freshmen year. We got the sense that the other girls were recruits by the way they and their parents presented themselves.
Perhaps for some sports, especially timed and individual sports, it may be easier to walk on as an upperclassmen, but team sports requiring specialized skills (hitting a 60 mph+ softball or an 80+ baseball) you are not going to get enough high quality reps club.
Given that I am extremely familiar with soccer recruiting at selective D3’s with strong programs (my son’s team just made the Sweet 16), I call, um, nonsense, on the claims of huge numbers of walk ons at selective d3s.
I think perhaps the OP and another poster are highly intelligent, and believe they are smart enough to figure out the recruiting landscape from the outside looking in. But, as all of us on the inside are saying, they are wrong.
This echoes a quote from an old MIT Admissions blog post that accurately diagnoses the issue in this thread with what the “math says” and the wayward conclusions that are being drawn (not by you):
“But there is a problem with social science, and that problem is this: sometimes, you don’t have all of the data, either because it is unavailable to you, or because something can’t be captured. And then, if you try to build a model based on these incomplete data, you are liable to draw conclusions consistent with the data but descriptively incorrect.”
I think you suggested walk-ons basically balance out the attrition. May I ask what attrition rate you are thinking of for selective LACs?
Regarding your point about unique athletes, it would certainly be interesting to understand better the number of walk-ons that were recruited for a different sport, but I’m not sure I’ve seen direct data for that. The profiles in the Williams article were limited to four, as the purpose appeared to be to inspire others with more descriptive personal accounts on the rewards of trying something new. As far as I can tell, only half of those were actually described as being recruited for their original sport, but the sample size makes that particular point a footnote either way.
I certainly believe you are accurately representing your personal experiences with specific D3 soccer programs at selective schools, but may I ask if you think it’s possible there are other selective LACs and/or other sports where the numbers are substantially different?
Putting aside our own walk-on friendly experiences with athletics at selective schools, the discrepancies raised earlier about total recruit vs total athlete numbers published in various sources (and attrition reports), and efforts by schools to encourage walk-on try-outs from existing students, I suspect it would be helpful to some families to know there’s at least a range with some selective schools offering more walk-on opportunity than others. In a way, walk-on athletics seem very much in the spirit of the core LAC value proposition of encouraging exploration across a range of interests. I can see how some who are interested in that experience in the classroom might also be interested in it on the field or in the gym. It might be helpful to those families to find such matches, should they exist.
I don’t have some one rate in mind. I do know anecdotally a combination of injuries, conflicting priorities, general disappointment with the experience (not playing much, not liking the coach, etc.), and so on lead to a number of recruited athletes dropping out of their original sport, at least at the varsity level. But I am sure the resulting rate varies between sports, possibly between leagues, possibly between different coaching regimes, and so on.
I just went on a selective D3 (below 20% acceptance) and I counted 42 freshmen just on the football team.
Seeing these kinds of numbers, I don’t know how a non athlete, non Questbridge kid gets accepted in the ED round.
This school also said (I heard in a presentation) that 50% of ED1 applications were athletes and 10% of ED2.
Oh I certainly don’t claim expertise in recruiting for all sports, and I do believe it is easier in some sports to walk on (track and field, and crew come to mind, but I really don’t know).
What sport did/does your child play? And did they successfully walk on to a team at a selective d3?
You are still wildly overestimating walk ons at selective schools. Some – most? – “elite” schools strive to be elite in many areas. Nescacs, certainly, but also the UAA schools, and some others. If you take a particular sport and see that the team is ranked in the bottom half of all d3s, those are the schools who might be more welcoming of walk ons.
But – how many schools with sub 20% admit rates are ranked in the bottom half? Not many. In fact (again, because I know the sport) there are zero – literally no – “elite” schools in the bottom half of the soccer rankings. Here’s the complete ranking of all 400-odd schools:
I’m pretty sure highly selective LACs only have spots for a handful (I’m guessing 5 or so) QB or Posse applicants. Apart from recruited athletes, the other spots are almost certainly going to applicants who fulfil institutional needs at each college. So most likely not an unhooked ORM applicant, barring something exceptional. What each college deems exceptional is the $64,000 question.
SLACs are not just admitting recruited athletes ED. I admit I don’t know a lot about athletic recruiting. I’m aware that some sports are prioritized over others. But I am pretty sure that institutional needs apart from athletics must be an important factor at many LACs. A fairly recent post from this thread is relevant. NESCAC Schools - #351 by CLJNMOM
