I just pulled out my notes and they said 30 Questbridge and 20 underserved kids from the local area. I assumed they meant per year? I googled and that appears to be correct from a school newspaper article.
2 Likes
32 Questbridge students at a SLAC of particular interest to us, out of about 520 total in freshman class. The highly selective SLACs are making this a priority (as they should, imo, but realizing the long shot that is ED is sobering for the non-hooked applicant).
Grinnell (at #236 in men’s soccer) Is wondering what they ever did to deserve this from you! 
Pretty much one of the exceptions that proves the rule, as the saying goes.
Looking at NESCAC, the top 9 men’s soccer teams are in the top 50 nationally according to Massey. For UAA women’s soccer, 7 out of 8 teams made the NCAA tourney this year and are in the top 30 nationally.
1 Like
Oops, missed them!
208 is the halfway mark; the rest of the selective d3s are well above it. The next lowest ranked, after Grinnell, is MIT, around #125, then Carnegie Mellon at #100, then Vassar, at #74.
1 Like
Okay, good to know. Looks like most NESCACs participate in QB or Posse.
1 Like
I can understand how it would be difficult to keep track of things with all the back n forth! Yes, they are a walk on. In fact they were invited to walk on for one of the teams in the top section of the table you sent, but ultimately went with a different sport. They had quite a few walk-on offers over two sports, all from highly selective schools. I wasn’t asking for their benefit (thanks anyway!). I’m mostly trying to wrap my head around how to help others here when there are such diverging and passionately conveyed experiences.
Perhaps, although I think it’s been lost in the chaos that i offered a pretty wide range (20-70%) with the midpoint as an average, and noted many times that popular youth sports like soccer would likely be lower than the rest. I was honestly surprised that the wide range and qualifiers sparked such debate, but I think there are more useful ways forward than repeating or litigating what’s already been said. I’m wondering, for example, if one reason our experiences were so different is the priority wasn’t recruiting. My impression is the coaches generally thought of talented but not recruit level walk-ons as a happy upside they had little reason not to embrace. Some coaches might need walk-ons more than others, and those numbers can be debated, but it’s a different thing when a student who doesn’t need admission help but is a promising athlete is available without cost to recruiting slots. Who cares about walking on this much? The students for whom sports have been a central part of their lives and who genuinely thrive when on a team. I’d like them to know there’s perhaps a less impossible path than they might’ve thought to walk on at selective schools, though of course to largely varying degrees for different schools and sports. I don’t think it needs to be, for instance, “if you want to walk on you need to go to a less selective school.” That’s one approach, but not the only one, from what we experienced.
1 Like
What sport does she play? And at what other schools was she offered walk on spots? Naming the schools she is not attending will still keep her anonymous.
That all said, I am going to bow out of this discussion, as it doesn’t seem to be tremendously helpful.
1 Like
“Happy upside they had little reason not to embrace” very much depends on the sport. In cross country, where facilities don’t limit the number of people who can participate, extra bodies are good, with little downside. Runners whose scores don’t count towards a team’s results can run anyway (if I understand cross country scoring), and if they improve in a few years, all the better. But when there are only a limited number of squash courts for students to practice on, a coach can’t simply take extra 10 extra players on the roster because then there aren’t enough courts to practice on, even if only 9 players compete in matches.
4 Likes
There doesn’t seem to be any clear evidence indicating a one-to-one relationship between attrition rates and replacement by walk-ons. The teams merely seem to get smaller over the course of four years (unless or until they are replenished by more first-years), with the usual caveats about different teams, different sports and different colleges.
5 Likes
Or if you’re USC, the $90,000 question. Sorry couldn’t resist.
2 Likes
The attrition replacements for one incoming cohort don’t need to be spread evenly over 4 years for the earlier estimates to hold. If a team has 5 recruits in an incoming cohort and we assume 1 drops, there’s just a need for 1 walk-on at some point. I (and others) mentioned before I think there’s reason for coaches to prefer first year walk-ons, but clearly there are some later too. The four articles from student NESCAC papers very directly show an effort to encourage walk-ons by already enrolled students. Some people apparently approached those articles as attempts to count all walk-ons; of course that’s not what they were. They were profiles that went in depth on how the walk-on experience was rewarding though hard work in the hopes they would convince more students to try. There were all sorts of mischaracterizations by a few posters of those articles that simply aren’t true if you read the articles (no, the profiled walk-ons at Williams weren’t all recruited athletes in other sports just because they were multi-sport, and that wouldn’t change the fact some are walking on with no prior experience with the sport; no, none of the articles say this is happening because of Covid, etc.) The one NESCAC the thread had hard data for suggested 13% walk-ons in the incoming cohort. If there’s no attrition, then there’s 13% thereafter. If only the walk-ons quit, it can dip. If the recruits quit at a rate comparable to what Ivy recruits do but are replaced to get the total known varsity athlete count, it goes up to 25%. They might quit at a lower rate, but the very same student paper articles show there’s some quitting of recruited athletes at these NESCACS. Whatever the numbers are, there will be big differences across sports, which was said many times.
1 Like
I’m closing this thread. Since the OP has seemingly moved on, and with the number of flags this thread has generated, the conversation is just going in circles and not offering any further insight.
9 Likes