@wearingred, a lot of people use the search function here to get accurate info, especially as it pertains to Ivy recruiting so I feel compelled to dispute a couple of things .
A true Likely Letter, issued by admissions, is tantamount to a formal acceptance. A pre-read from admissions is not the same thing. Not even close. Any Ivy coach that is telling a sophomore that he/she has a “soft likely” is playing games. There is no girls lacrosse team (or hockey, or basketball) that is so important to an Ivy League school that they’re going to blatantly violate the Ivy agreement. There may be a rogue coach out there playing games, but there is no way in hell administration is going to be complicit with it.
Also, the idea that a coach can rank how much support he wants to give each recruit is nothing I’ve seen in person, in interviews with coaches or current/former Ivy athletes. Support is a binary thing - you either is or you ain’t. The idea that an Ivy recruit with top academics may be given less support 'because they can get in on their own" is contrary to the examples I know. I can attest to athletes with 35 ACT scores and 2350 SAT getting LLs. If the coach wants the athlete, there is no way he’s going to roll the dice and let them take their chances in a sub-10% general admission pool.
It is true that the Ivy league has placed restrictions on football recruitment that are not shared by most other sports such as limiting the number of recruits and limiting the number of low AI recruits. This does not mean an AD cannot specify a maximum number of fully supported recruits allowed per year and a minimum AI score that a recruitment class is expected to meet for a given sport. For the purposes of this discussion I am assuming that the number of verbal offers is less than the number of slots available prior to senior year (if you look at the recruitment websites in this thread you will see that this is true) and that a 4 year rolling average is used for both the number of recruits and the AI number for the school (I believe this is part of the Ivy league rules).
1.) As long as a coach makes a reasonable number of verbal offers during a player’s sophomore and junior year then the recruitment class size can be easily controlled. For women soccer this appears to be one verbal offer for sophomore class and maybe five for the junior year class.
2.) If a coach specifies a minimum GPA and test scores as a condition for a verbal offer then the Minimum AI can be maintained. The minimum AI for all athletics recruits is based on a 4 year rolling average for that college and is based on the GPA and test scores for all students. This number does not change much year to year and can also be predicted from previous GPA and test scores. If a coach holds one or two slots open for a class to recruit seniors then any minor changes in the AI can be compensated for. The coach can also build a slight cushion in the AI using the 4 year moving average which should be able to compensate for any unforeseen events.
Unsurprisingly, I agree with @varska and @fenwaypark (ok, maybe that part is surprising).
Yep. Very well said, as usual. And if there is a rogue coach out there, he or she isn’t going to be around for very long.
I happen to know a kid like that (well, a 34 ACT and a 23something SAT). In that case, the kid was told that his pre read came back with a note that he was a “good candidate for admissions without the likely letter”. The coach told the kid he would “have to be crazy” to send him through admissions “unprotected.”
Agreed.
I will say that at least two years ago, Yale sent out letters to certain recruits prior to pre reads being done that were quite probably designed to look like a “soft likely”. The letter came on Yale letterhead, talked about how unique the kid was, how hard it was to get in to Yale, and if I remember accurately the tag line was “you are in a select group of exceptional student athletes that we have precleared for support to the admissions office.” It was signed by the football coach. Full disclosure, my son did not receive one of those letters, but I saw a couple (both live and as posted on twitter/recruiting boards). They went out to juniors in the January/February time frame, before the junior day circuit. Honestly, I thought it was kind of shady, because unless you had looked closely through the Ivy common agreement, or had some other knowledge of the process (like from here) it looked a whole lot like a regular offer. Maybe that is the type of thing that @wearingred is referencing?
Either way, that points out the problem with a board like this. When our kids go through this process, we spend a fair amount of effort trying to fill in gaps in a system that is in many ways opaque. Several of us have not only gone through this with our kids, but have been around others over the years who have had similar experiences, and we try to share what small knowledge we have gained. Sometimes though, inferences we make are not borne out by other’s direct experiences, or by the written rules that are available in the public domain. For my part, until Phil Estes or Tony Reno starts posting on this board, I recommend assuming that things will operate in accordance with what written rules exist, and try and take the experiences and advice of all of the posters here (including me) as simply data points.
What I am trying to address is the information posters are being given that is based off of what the rules are regarding Ivy League recruitment. From personal experience, I know that this is not set in stone and that there is a lot of area in the middle.
The coach most definitely has a depth chart which is used when presenting his/her recruits to Admissions. This is used to compile the AI which needs to be met. We asked the coach flat out where our child stood on the depth chart in terms of support. My experience is personal, not what I have been told or read about.
In terms of the Likely Letter, we had feed back from the coach via the AD who was directly working with Admissions. We had an email containing the pre read by the summer before Junior year. By the end of Junior year we had an email containing an attachment which was the exact copy of the Likely Letter that was later sent in the mail.
I cannot speak for all the Ivies, but a female lacrosse recruit at UPenn was asked to take the ACT and met the requested score. She was later asked to take the ACT again, which was being used to raise the AI for the recruit group. My other child who attends a non Ivy but similar school in CA committed in July before her Junior year and had to send quarterly academic updates. She also sent her Junior and Senior class schedule. She took the ACT twice and sent both scores. She did not have to take SAT II’s since the ACT is accepted as subject tests. She had to have her application submitted by August 1 before her Senior year and was given a full acceptance letter by September of her Senior year, long before Early Decision letters were sent out. She signed the NLI in November.
This was MY experience. I know there is a lot of information out there and I am sure each coach has her/her method. The process can be different from school to school depending on the AD, the coach, the coach’s relationship with Admissions and the support of the sport itself within the school.
Last year one of my daughters went through this recruiting process and at an IVY school you have no commitment without having taken the ACT or SAT and scoring rather high. While the coach might be telling you he wants you (and I’m sure he does) he still needs to take all your academic information, including the SAT/ACT scores to the admissions office and get an approval from them.
Also, if you fall below that IVY index, the coach will have to recruit someone with a higher IVY index score than you because he needs to maintain an index score of 200 for your recruiting class. My suggestion is to do the best on the ACT/SAT that you can.
Then if you end up being recruited you will get a “likely letter”. It’s rather scary because it doesn’t say they will definitely take you, but rather that if everything on the application looks okay we will probably say yes.
@Swimkidsdad, I think this is the disconnect. The point I was struggling with was the statement that recruiting classes were “completed” by the end of sophomore year. Sure, I can see that a coach will have both a range of slots available and a target AI (within a point or three lets say) two years out. I just do not believe that the coach will have the specificity necessary to fill out his class that early. I have no trouble believing that a very strong student with excellent athletic skills could be offered conditional support by an Ivy as a sophomore. I think this is especially true for girls, since as someone said up the thread the physical development timeline is different than with boys.
The overarching point @superdomestique and I were trying to make was that a conditional offer should be viewed as exactly that. Conditional, and not at all settled. Until the kid hits the targets set out, they should not, in my opinion, assume themselves “committed”. Is that a semantic quibble? Maybe. I appreciate the point that an honors student from Country Day is going to do well on the ACT. And yes, if a coach told my kid as a sophomore that he would support him if he kept a 3.5 and scored a 30 on the ACT, I would have privately felt confident he would do so (probably because his mother wold have killed him if he let his grades slip, and football would have thus become less of a concern). But it is not always such an easily surmountable hurdle, and that is the point of urging caution.
Generally I agree, although I think you will find that over the last several years the AI has been creeping up steadily at most schools, although it fell slightly at a couple two years ago. Again, these changes shouldn’t effect a specific recruit except at the very bottom, where I doubt most lax and soccer players are being recruited, but I would think make it impossible to fill out a class too far in advance of the last part of junior year.
I weep for the home of Daniel Webster to be so incautious as to leave written proof of open and notorious violations of the Ivy Common Agreement.
I don’t think anyone disputes this happens, particularly in sports with small cohorts of recruits, where a jump in one recruit’s ACT can make a significant difference. It may be frowned upon, but it is not, ipso facto, prohibited. It is called dumbbelling. It is why the band system was put in place for football, and why the men’s basketball rules changed a few years ago.
Mine is too. So is @varska’s and many others. And sure, any list of recruits being supported for a likely letter will contain recruits with varying academic strengths. That is how coaches build a class in this environment. If what you are describing is something akin to the band system in football, where an Ivy coach gets a few recruits with academics maybe pretty far below the type of student usually admitted, and a few recruits who are closer in line with the academic stats of the college as a whole, then I don’t think anyone would disagree. On the other hand, if what you are saying is that a coach can specify varying levels of support based on his or her judgment of how desirable a recruit is, then many of us just disagree. That has been our personal experience, and it is in conformity with the rules as they exist.
@Ohiodad51, just out of curiosity, what was the change in basketball? Was it to something along the lines of the football bands? Or some other way of making it hard to bring in recruits near the AI floor?
I don’t know the specifics about basketball. I know that now men’s basketball and I believe hockey are subject to specific rules outside of the general Ivy rules regrading the AI. Anecdotally, I have heard that one of the drivers of the changes in the rules for basketball was an infamous occasion where Harvard initially announced a recruiting class of six players, one of whom had I believe never started a varsity game but who was an academic stalwart. When rosters were released later that year, this sixth recruit was not listed as a team member. This caused a minor kerfuffle, and now I have been told that the league rules are designed to penalize teams where supported athletes end up not being rostered. But sorry, I do not know the details.
Thanks Ohiodad51, that’s interesting. Related to this, I do recall reading (maybe it was in varska’s book) about how in the past teams would sometimes comb through admitted student files, looking for high school players in their sport that they could count for AI purposes, even if they weren’t actually recruited for the team.
@bluewater2015, I remember that too. In fact, and not to resurrect an argument from a couple months ago, but I think one of the things done to stop that practice was to require the coaches to submit their recruits to admissions in the first instance so that the AI numbers can be calculated for kids the coach actually thinks can help the team.
The “index booster” was a big part of the Ivy recruiting process prior to 2003. It still exists to some extent, but the reduction in the number of spots allowed has minimized it. I got a lot of the info from Chris Lincoln’s book, “Playing the Game”. If you search “Harvard Basketball: Walking the Recruiting Tightrope” you can find the short piece I wrote.