It is also an NCAA violation (albeit a minor infraction) to discuss a recruit at all until after a NLI is signed.
That is what happened with the kid I mentioned up the thread who was offered before freshman year by Lane Kiffen at USC. Kiffen got fired, and USC took a commitment from an All American QB last year. So the early offer kid is now at West Virginia.
Thank you@ohiodad51 and @Momtothreegirls for your kind words.
My comments were not meant to rain on anyone’s parade, but to prevent an unwitting student or family from becoming a cautionary tale.
Some anecdotal examples:
Lesson: Never close the door on any/all recruiting interest until the Likely Letter is in the mail.
Lesson: Recruiting commitments before a LL is received are non-binding for both parties. In this example, my son was able to be recruited because one “committed recruit” chose another school, and the other couldn’t keep his grades up. I guess the lesson here is to try your best, keep all your options open, and not to listen to all the noise.
In lacrosse (and women’s soccer too) the recruiting for D1 top teams is almost always done by the summer between sophomore and junior year, if not earlier. There is some switching around, but not nearly the amount you’d expect and mostly by the extremely top recruits, not by the large group of really good players who make up the bulk of the recruited class. Almost all the girls I know who committed as sophomores attend the colleges they committed to, boys seem to switch a little more, but again, not half or even close to that; maybe 1 in 10?
I don’t know how they get around the rules on indicating who is a recruit, but it is definitely the schools posting on the recruit lists. Anyone can post- the individual, the club coach, the school- but you can tell it is the school as they will post of group of recruits all at once, and each player receives an ID number, so you’ll see a group of Yale students numbers 111-114, or a group of Syracuse players 420-427. Even the academies list their sophomore/junior recruits. Since they are all from different clubs and different states, the school has to be posting them. Once they verbally commit, the player wears a pink arm band at any tournament and other teams are supposed to respect that, but not all do (or they make mistakes and call anyway). Most will back off if you tell them you’ve committed, others will ‘explain’ that the commitment isn’t really a commitment at all.
Of course all offers are contingent on the student being admitted, but those I know have been admitted. They are not getting financial aid information as sophomores, but maybe they don’t care.
This early recruiting is what the new rule proposal is trying to stop in women’s lacrosse. The kids (parents) panic and all want to commit to the top D1 programs as sophomores, thus the coaches say their programs are full and don’t really look at the current class of juniors. Sure, if you are a superstar the coach may find room on a ‘full’ team, but if you are a superstar this would be known to all the coaches as a sophomore. The rule changes are supported by almost all college coaches, but unless the rule is changed, they have to continue to recruit sophomores because ‘everyone’ does it.
There is no way that any schools, let alone Ivy schools, are consistently and openly flouting the NCAA rules on commenting on recruits. In an environment where Auburn got in trouble for putting icing on cookies given to recruits at a game day visit, I just can’t believe the NCAA is going to throw up its hands and say they can’t control the monster that is lacrosse recruiting. There are any number of sites that track football and basketball recruits by school and class, including ESPN, Rivals, Scout, 247, etc. For football all show commitments in the class of 2017, and many classes that appear complete. All show offers and some commitments in the class of 18. Basketball is worse. So lacrosse is not that unique in that sense.
I know those lists for football and basketball are populated by stringers for the various magazines who follow recruits on twitter and/or interview recruits at camps and practices, because I have spoken to several of the stringers, and because my kid was on some of those lists. I would bet my house payment that laxpower, et al is doing the same thing.
At the end of the day, I just can’t believe that the Ivy League, which turned its back on big time college sports fifty years ago has now decided that they are going to chuck their rules so they can be competitive in women’s lacrosse. I mean, no offense intended, but Tommy Amaker makes north of a million a year to coach basketball at Harvard (reportedly), and they apparently changed the rules to stop him from dumb belling recruits because it looked bad. Do you all really think that the Ivy schools care that much more about soccer?
Well, I don’t know if this is what the OP was looking for or not, but it has been interesting. As to the test anxiety issue, all I can say is that extensive preparation and repetition really helps to allay anxiety. My own kid took 8-10 full length SAT before taking the real one. It worked. Better scores are better. What’s the minimum? Who knows? It depends on a lot of things we’ve alluded to. Shoot for a 30 ACT or a 2000-2100 range SAT. Those are the minimum safe scores I’ve heard from so many kids and parents, but I’m just in the hockey and lacrosse world. I bet it’s higher for swimming, running, tennis, golf, crew, fencing and the like. I’m just guessing you’re volleyball, basketball, soccer or maybe field hockey and I know nothing about any of those.
As for the ins and out of Ivy League recruiting, you’ve gotten a lot of different view points. I don’t see things quite the same as Ohiodad or superdomestique but I also entirely agree with everything they say. You really don’t have any kind of certainty until you have the Likely Letter. All the early commitment stuff benefits coaches way, way more than players. All of that is absolutely true. You have to be a very smart consumer.
All of this that we report is anecdata. Superdomestique has the foolish golfer. Here’s my anecdotes: my kid “committed” in Jan of jr. year. All testing done, 3.65 (lowest of anyone in the recruiting class, offset by the having the highest SAT) with loads of AP from well know prep school that sends tons of kids to Ivies where they are successful. Also had an email from coach saying there would be full support for a Likely Letter and that it was all contingent on kid maintaining academic standing, interviewing successfully with admissions and staying of trouble. There was no guarantee. At that time 5 years ago it was the earliest anyone had ever committed to that school. 6 months later we are at a tournament where we see the head coach who introduces us to 3 kids who just finished their soph year who are committing to the school. All of those kids are still on the team. It happened. 3 for 3 from their soph year. I’m sure they weren’t guaranteed anything either. And here’s one last interesting piece. Lacrosse is a spring sport. My kid has 2 teammates on current team who ruptured ACL in Jr year of HS. They committed before the injury and despite the fact that no one could see them play again until senior spring when it was way too late to change horses the coach honored the commitment. That’s awesome. I’m equally sure there are stories of coaches doing the exact opposite and worse. The lesson is some/most people are trustworthy. Lacrosse is a great game. It’s a true community. Everybody knows everybody else and we all generally get along really well. Who here tailgates with parents from the other team before the game? It’s like golf. You can try like crazy to take 5$ off your opponent but the best part is having a beer on the 19th hole.
The Likely Letter is one of the last decent guarantees you’ll ever see. Tomorrow is not a lock for any of us. Trust me, in my line of work I see someone die nearly every day. It can happen to any of us. Everything is contingent. Membership on the team, enrollment in the school, being employed, staying married are all contingent. Senior IvyKid has great written offers from 2 NYC IB firms, but both have been bought/sold in last 10 years. What if it happens again this year? No job I suppose. No guarantees.
Twoinanddone – I don’t think the Ivies ever officially recognize recruits of any kind until admission letters are out and accepted. Other schools might but probably not until NLI signed. The websites posting lax recruiting info aren’t just kids and word of mouth. They verify to the extent they can. When my kid was posted, the club and HS coaches were contacted to confirm. Perhaps college coaches confirm, but I think it’s most likely very off the record. That said, as you know, these websites are pretty accurate. I kept a spread sheet for 4 years tracking these commits off of inside lax, espnu and laxpower. It gave me great peace of mind as I worried about my own kid’s commitment.
Some more anecdata (great word btw @doubtful). My son was the third kid in his class to commit. All were reported on ESPN, 247, etc, Of those original three kids, he is the only one on campus right now. One couldn’t get the necessary test scores. The other had some problem with a summer class he was supposed to take.
In other words, @doubtful could not be more right that nothing is a lock until you have the likely letter, or at least a non conditional commitable offer of support for one with all of your testing done. Until that point at the least, I would not be comfortable.
@superdomestique I don’t understand something you wrote. I thought for an Ivy that the likely letter is issued after the ED application is submitted. So how did your son have more than one likely letter? Was it in the regular round?
Good question and there are devils in the details.
It is bad form to receive more than one LL and the earliest a LL can be sent out is October 1st of senior year only after a compete application has been submitted.
My son only received only one LL. However, he received firm offers of LLs from several schools.
Most coaches offer the LL with the condition that you apply EA or ED and that their school is your first/only choice.
Once my son decided on his first choice, we asked for the LL with the conditions attached. He submitted the application on September 15th and received his LL for EA on October 1st. While EA policy did permit him to continue to consider other schools, as the school had used up a LL (which is a limited resource), we notified all the other interested schools he had made a binding commitment.
It is worth noting/discussing, after our sport’s national championships in late June, our son was contacted by a number of programs. He had been diligent about sending all his academic updates to all the schools leading up to the championships, so many of the coaches had prereads done in July. We made unofficial visits in late July and had offers of LL from most of the schools in early August.
Interestingly, two of the LL offers were “exploding” LL, meaning, that if my son did not take the LL by a certain date, it would be withdrawn and offered to another athlete.
One of these two schools we were considering very seriously (it was the one where the coach originally didn’t want to recruit my son), but it was not his first choice.
Ironically the only preread that hadn’t been fully competed was from our first choice school (adcom officer who was needed to make it absolutely official was out of the office in early August). While the coach assured us everything was going to be okay, we felt we needed to hear the preread was approved by admissions. Ultimately, we turned down the LL offer from the exploding school and wait (less than 24 hours fortunately) for the LL from our first choice to become official. That was a stressful day…
So to summarize, my son did not receive multiple LLs, but we had the good fortune to be offered several. The exploding feature caused a fair amount of stress, however I can understand how/why coaches want to get their teams set, especially given the small universe of academically qualified athletes we have in our sport.
I think the reason I am so familiar with the Ivy athletic recruiting process is that we had coaches and athletic directors from 5 Ivy programs explain the process to us. The process at non-Ivy schools such as Stanford and Duke is different so that may explain some of the confusion some people might be having.
This idea of early Ivy recruiting is complete contrary to what I learned during our process (HS Class of 2015), so I think either this is a new phenomenon, or this is a new way of separating hopeful families from their financial resources (via summer camp tuitions)
I don’t know how early Ivy recruiting happens, but I can tell you it does happen in girls lax and soccer.
And yes, having read through all the posts, I think it definitely is in the colleges’ best interests and not so much the athletic recruits’.
It is not in the school’s interest. If it were, the Ivy rules would not be written to explicitly prohibit what you are suggesting, nor would the coaches’ association be asking the NCAA to change the rules. If it is in any one’s interest it is in the interest of the club coaches because they are apparently serving as the conduit between the families and the schools.
I don’t know if there is anyone here who had a kid who committed in the Ivy as a freshman or sophomore, but if there is, I at least would be really interested in a first hand account of how it works.
We have a dozen 2017 boys and girls (combined) committed for lacrosse. Ivies, Stanford, one of the Academies, and a couple of others. We have had commits as early as freshman year, and I have seen all but one of the early announcements come to fruition.
NESCAC recruiting seems to be summer before Sr year, but this is from an outsider’s perspective, as neither of my boys were anywhere near being recruitable.
I have no reason to doubt you or any of the others who claim they know of, or have seen examples of early (pre July 1st before senior year) athletic Ivy recruiting. People think their is a high correlation between early commitment and ultimate matriculation, however the dataset for some of these sports in not long enough to be statistically significant.
That being said, while I am not Ivy educated (undergrad anyway) when I hear the term non-binding commitment, I think oxymoron, not bragging rights.
While I (and perhaps @ohiodad51) seem to be in the minority on this, it is this distinction that I am trying to make.
While I do not want to cast aspersions on anyone’s alleged good fortune, I merely suggest that short of a LL, these early “recruiting commitments” are non-binding and it is in the student’s interest to keep all options open until the commitments become binding.
Perhaps a study should be done in reverse. Instead of checking to see how many kids on the recruiting websites actually make it to their committed schools, someone should look at each Ivy roster to see what the recruiting websites had predicted for their players…that would be interesting data.
Now that’s early recruiting!
@fenwaypark – good catch! Much better than my typing–and editing!
Ohiodad, maybe I didn’t explain it correctly, but the coaches for women’s lacrosse are asking the NCAA to become more stringent on the recruiting, to not allow any commitments before Junior year, to allow no contact at all, even if the club or high school coach is an intermediary, before Sept 1 of junior year. Everyone has figured out how to get around the NCAA rules, and everyone is committing early, long before July 1 of senior year. If the NCAA tightens the rules, everyone but the parents will be happy because the coaches will be judging a more even playing field of older girls. It is also a fact that more wealthy families can send their 8th and 9th graders to the big recruiting camps, and then the dominoes start to fall - those become the hot recruits, take the top spots by sophomore year. There are 4-5 big recruiting tournaments between June and Nov every year for high school club teams (play by grad year), and D1 coaches are mostly looking at girls heading into sophomore year. The proposed rule is for the coaches not to be able to contact those girls for another entire year, so coaches would be looking at rising juniors, and then sort of finalize their looking at the November tourney.
@doubtful, I signed my daughter up on the recruited list for laxpower and it immediately posted. No one ever checked the info because the list itself says it is unofficial. Until NLI signing, everything is just a gentlemen’s agreement. The first ID number issued to a 2017 girl is for Army, but it’s likely she posted it herself. Plenty of low ID numbers for 2017 recruits for Princeton, Yale, Brown and of course they haven’t received LL or prereads because they are years from college. The 2018 list will go up soon and there will be lots of Ivy players.
I agree that most do end up at the schools listed on the recruiting charts.
@twoinanddone, I get what you are saying. And I read a couple articles about the proposed rule change. I found it illuminating that a number of college coaches mentioned that the idea was to stop kids from focusing on out of school tournaments and prohibiting contact from club coaches. Which led me to conclude that they were trying to head off the clubs, much like the NCAA went to battle with AAU basketball twenty years ago.
At the end of the day, I am just more on @superdomestique’s side of this, that a “commitment” to an Ivy school even before a student has taken the SAT or ACT is worthless. I think it is important to distinguish between conditional and commitable offers lest we confuse people who are coming here for some insight into the Ivy recruiting process.
And I am sorry if this comes across as contrary, but I do not believe that the Ivy schools, which rigorously enforce their admissions makes the decision policy in every other sport, are all of a sudden going to chuck that out the window in order to be nationally competitive in women’s lacrosse.
As @superdomestique said up the thread, it is interesting that “a lot” of the kids showing early commits to Ivy schools end up there. But an interesting stat would also be how many show a Penn or Princeton as sophomores, and where do all those kids end up?
It just occurred to me, if this early recruiting phenomenon is most prevalent in women’s lacrosse and soccer, perhaps there are Title IX forces at work?
Perhaps federal law trumps NCAA regulations and Ivy League rules?
Yes, federal law trumps NCAA and Ivy regulations. But for the life of me, I can’t figure what possible implication Title IX would have in this situation.
We see a fairly even number of male & female recruited athletes at our HS. Perhaps more girls recruited in total because we have strong field hockey & crew teams, but the lacrosse figures are fairly balanced.
I admit I am reaching here, but like you, I can’t understand how this early recruiting phenomenon can occur given the NCAA regulations and Ivy League rules.
As Title IX requires that colleges allocate resources evenly between men’s and women’s athletic programs, perhaps for colleges that are behind (needing to allocate more resources/headcount towards woman’s programs to achieve Title IX equilibrium), they are willing to bend the NCAA/Ivy rules to comply with the federal law.
I admit it is a stretch in reasoning, however college coaches being able to predict freshman and sophomore SAT/ACT scores is a similarly long reach.